Racial Equity & Inclusion Director at Ben & Jerry’s, Karen Driscoll - Root Cause Analysis & Equitable Community

When Karen Driscoll joined us on Reimagining Company Culture, she was Racial Equity and Inclusion Director at Ben & Jerry's. Karen sat at the intersection of a brand known for activism and the harder, less visible work of redesigning internal systems. Her job was to apply root cause analysis to the company itself, and to share decision-making power with Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color rather than build programs around them.

Karen's argument was that the easy work in racial equity is the public statement and the day of action. The hard work is auditing the systems that produce inequitable outcomes year after year. Compensation logic. Promotion criteria. Hiring funnels. Manager assignment. Investigation outcomes. Almost every system in a company has been engineered, intentionally or not, in a way that produces uneven results across racial lines. Equity work is the discipline of finding those defaults and rewriting them.

Why Internal Systems Are the Real Site of Racial Equity Work

Most companies measure their racial equity progress at the boundary. Hiring numbers. Brand campaigns. Charitable giving. The systems inside the company rarely get audited with the same rigor. That gap is where representation collapses on the way up the org chart and where complaints disappear without resolution.

The data is unambiguous. McKinsey's Diversity Matters Even More research found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams were 39 percent more likely to outperform on profitability than companies in the bottom quartile. The companies seeing those gains are the ones running root cause analysis on their internal systems, not the ones running off-site retreats.

What Root Cause Analysis on Internal Systems Looks Like

Where Do Inequitable Outcomes Usually Get Engineered?

Three places. The hiring funnel, where requirements and sourcing channels can shut out candidates of color before any human evaluates them. The promotion process, where subjective criteria allow unconscious bias to compound over years. And the case management process, where complaints from employees of color are often handled with less rigor, less follow-through, and less documentation than complaints from majority groups.

How Do You Measure Whether the Fix Worked?

Compare outcomes before and after, by race, with statistical significance. The companies running this well audit hiring outcomes by source channel, promotion rates by manager, and case outcomes by complainant demographics. The audits are uncomfortable. They are also the only way to know whether a fix moved the system or only the optics. Equity is a measurement discipline before it is a values statement.

What Actually Works for Building an Equitable Community

Share Power, Not Just Programs

Karen was direct about this on the show. Allocating budget without sharing decision-making is a sophisticated form of paternalism. The companies making real progress are creating governance structures where employees of color have meaningful authority over the policies that affect them. ERGs with a binding voice in policy. Pay equity committees with veto power. Investigation review panels that include diverse voices.

Build Anti-Bias Into the Manager Operating Model

Bias training as a one-time event does almost nothing. Bias work that is woven into the manager operating model produces measurable change. That looks like calibration sessions on performance reviews to spot rating bias, structured interview protocols to remove assessment bias, and explicit decision criteria for high-visibility work assignments. Psychological safety rises when employees see managers held accountable for these processes.

Make the Speak-Up System Trustworthy for Everyone

Many speak-up channels are trustworthy on paper and untrustworthy in practice for employees of color. The fix is structural. Anonymous intake, multilingual support, written acknowledgement of every report, and aggregate data on case outcomes broken down by demographic group. The anonymous reporting tool only works when employees of color can see, in the data, that their complaints get the same response as anyone else's.

Where Employee Relations Fits in Racial Equity Work

Most companies underestimate how much of their racial equity reputation depends on a small number of cases. A handful of high-profile mishandlings can undo years of public commitments. The ER function is where racial equity becomes operational, and the ER data is the truest test of whether the broader strategy is producing change.

The EEOC enforcement statistics show that retaliation is the most common charge type, accounting for more than half of all charges filed in recent years. The companies running connected case management are the ones spotting retaliation patterns early enough to intervene rather than reading about them in a charge filing later.

How Does Connected Case Management Show Up in Racial Equity Outcomes?

It shows up in three numbers. Time-to-resolution by complainant demographic. Case outcome distribution by demographic. And the rate at which complainants are repeat reporters. If any of those three break by race, the company has a measurable equity problem in the ER function regardless of what the broader DEI report claims.

Frequently Asked Questions About Workplace Racial Equity

What is the most common mistake companies make on racial equity?

Investing in external campaigns and statements while leaving internal systems untouched. The brand commitment loses credibility within months when employees see no change in pay, promotion, or case handling. The order matters. Internal systems first, public commitments after.

How do you audit pay equity for racial gaps?

Hire an external firm with statistical expertise to run a pay regression analysis controlling for role, tenure, performance, and location. Repeat annually. Publish the methodology and the high-level findings internally. The companies that do this consistently see fewer surprises and stronger trust over time.

What does it take for ERGs to produce real outcomes?

An executive sponsor with formal authority, a budget that survives the fiscal year, a measurable charter that aligns to business priorities, and a binding voice in at least one policy area. ERGs without those four things produce community but not change.

How do you respond to a microaggression complaint?

With a documented intake, a trained investigator, and a process that does not require the complainant to repeat the story to multiple people. Microaggression cases get mishandled when they are routed to inexperienced managers or buried in email. Microaggression patterns are early signals of larger cultural problems and should be tracked as such.

How does AllVoices support racial equity work?

Through structured intake, anonymous reporting, multilingual support, and case data that can be analyzed by demographic to spot pattern problems. Compliance teams and DEI leaders need the same data to do their jobs well.

The structural shift Karen described has only gotten more important. Companies are pulling back on visible DEI campaigns, but the underlying work of internal equity has not gotten less urgent. The People leaders still making progress are the ones quietly running the audits, fixing the broken hiring funnels, and rewriting the criteria that produce uneven outcomes. The headline programs draw attention. The internal work draws results.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Karen's argument from that conversation has aged into a structural blueprint. Racial equity progress comes from auditing internal systems with the same rigor a CFO applies to financial controls, sharing decision-making power rather than only budget, and treating the speak-up and case workflow as core to the strategy rather than adjacent to it.

The companies still making progress on racial equity are the ones doing the unglamorous internal work. The companies losing ground are the ones that mistook public commitment for systemic change. Inclusion survives leadership change when the systems behind it survive leadership change. The job for People leaders is to build those systems and run the audits that prove they are working.

See how AllVoices supports racial equity work with structured intake and analytics.