Rodrigo Caetano Teixeira leads Diversity and Inclusion in EMEA and APAC at Uber, and his career has been shaped by moving between continents, languages, and cultures. On Reimagining Company Culture, he sits down with us to talk about what it really takes to design inclusion programs that respect the layered identities people carry to work each day. Few HR conversations feel as honest about the gap between published values and lived experience as this one. Rodrigo brings the perspective of someone who has built belonging across regions where language, religion, sexuality, race, gender, and class all intersect differently.
His central insight is that intersectionality is not a slogan. It is a working method, and most companies are still treating it like a campaign.
Why Intersectionality Matters in Practice
Most diversity programs treat identity as a checklist. Rodrigo's view is that real inclusion starts when leaders stop asking 'are we hiring more women' and start asking 'which women, in which roles, with which managers, in which countries, with what level of psychological safety.' That shift turns abstract DEI into operational work.
The data backs him up. According to the 2024 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 54 Black women and 65 Latinas reach the same milestone, and women of color hold just 7% of C-suite roles. Numbers like that only emerge when companies measure across overlapping identities rather than reporting in single buckets.
When HR teams begin tracking representation, promotion velocity, and retention by intersectional segments, the patterns get specific. A company can look diverse at the top line while losing women of color at twice the rate of any other group three layers below the C-suite.
Designing for Cross-Region Collaboration
Rodrigo's portfolio spans dozens of countries, and one piece of advice that comes up repeatedly is to resist exporting one region's playbook into another. Uber's approach to inclusion in Brazil cannot be copy-pasted into Singapore.
He recommends three working norms: localize the language of inclusion, measure outcomes consistently, and let regional teams own programs while the global function owns standards. That balance keeps initiatives credible and prevents the headquarters-knows-best problem that hollowed out so many DEI efforts in 2020 and 2021.
This is where an integrated DEI strategy earns its keep. The work moves from event planning to program design, and the metrics shift from attendance to behavior change.
What Actually Works
Set goals that survive contact with reality
Rodrigo cautions against vanity metrics. Goals should connect to hiring, promotion, retention, and pay equity at the intersectional level, and they should be reviewed quarterly, not annually. Companies that publish targets without owners almost always miss them. Tracking pay equity alongside representation prevents the most common backslide.
Train managers, not just employees
Most DEI training reaches employees who already care. The biggest opportunity is the manager population, and most companies underinvest there. Unconscious bias training paired with practical role-play moves the needle faster than another all-hands.
Treat ERGs as infrastructure, not extras
Rodrigo's teams use Catalyst's research on Employee Resource Groups that frame employee resource groups as a strategic asset. Catalyst's findings show that structured ERGs strengthen retention, accelerate marketplace insight, and offer one of the most reliable channels for employee voice when they have budget, leadership sponsorship, and clear KPIs.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Inclusion work depends on a credible reporting environment. If employees do not believe they can flag problems safely, the prettiest DEI report in the world is worthless. Tools like a DEI hotline and anonymous reporting are not separate from inclusion strategy. They are the operating system underneath it.
Rodrigo emphasizes that the volume and pattern of issues raised actually matters more than the absolute count. A spike in reports often signals trust, not trouble.
How ER systems support DEI
When concerns are documented, HR case management lets people teams spot trends across teams, geographies, and identity groups. That data feeds back into program design and gives executive sponsors something concrete to act on.
Why This Conversation Matters Right Now
The HR field has been through three waves in the last few years: an emergency pivot to distributed work, a wave of public commitments around inclusion, and a slow correction as leaders started measuring which of those commitments actually moved retention and engagement. Conversations like this one matter because they sit on the other side of that correction. The question is no longer whether to invest in culture. The question is which culture investments produce durable results, and which ones look impressive in a press release but quietly fade.
That shift puts pressure on people leaders to be specific. Generic advice about belonging or psychological safety does not survive a budget review. The HR teams that are pulling ahead are the ones that connect cultural commitments to operating systems, instrument the resulting work, and report on outcomes in the same business-critical language the CFO uses for revenue. According to SHRM's reporting on retention strategies, the cost of underinvesting in culture shows up directly in voluntary attrition, and the math gets harder every year.
This is also where employee relations operations becomes a more visible part of the modern People organization. Employee relations is no longer a quiet compliance function; it is the data layer that tells leaders whether their stated values are being lived inside the organization, and it is increasingly the place where cultural drift first becomes visible. Companies that treat ER as part of the culture stack, rather than a separate compliance silo, get better signal earlier and can course-correct before retention numbers turn.
A Practical Playbook for HR Leaders
Translating a great podcast conversation into actual change inside your organization takes a stepwise plan, not a rallying cry. The most consistent leaders we work with run a 90-day discovery loop, a 90-day pilot, and a 90-day expansion that together compress what would otherwise be a multi-year cultural shift into a single calendar year. The discipline is not novel; the willingness to follow it through is.
Discovery is mostly listening. That means structured conversations with managers, frontline employees, and recent leavers, paired with quantitative pulls from your HRIS, ATS, and case-management system. The goal is to triangulate the real story of how the company makes decisions, who feels heard, and where opportunity quietly evaporates. Most HR teams find that the data they already have, surfaced honestly, points to two or three high-impact interventions they had not previously prioritized.
Pilots are deliberately small. Pick one team, one geography, or one stage of the employee journey and instrument it well. Set a clear hypothesis, a measurable target, and a review cadence shorter than a quarter. The teams that pilot this way produce stories the rest of the organization actually wants to copy. The teams that announce company-wide programs without piloting almost always lose momentum somewhere around month four.
Expansion is the patient work. The organizations that scale change well treat the pilot lessons as the operating manual and resist the urge to rebrand the work. Manager training, listening infrastructure, and case-management discipline travel with the program; without those layers, even successful pilots fail to take root in the rest of the company. The leaders who invest in the unglamorous machinery alongside the visible programs are the ones whose work survives the next reorganization.
The throughline across every successful version of this playbook is the same: change is treated as a system, not a moment. Hiring, performance, recognition, manager development, and reporting infrastructure all have to move together for the new culture to take root. The companies that try to redesign one piece in isolation usually find that the surrounding systems quietly pull the program back to baseline within a year. The companies that move the whole stack at once, even imperfectly, usually compound their gains for the next several years.
One last note for HR leaders worried about whether the moment is right to invest. The cost of waiting always looks smaller than the cost of acting until the data comes in, and by then the talent has already left. Companies that delayed manager training a few years ago ended up paying multiples of that price as their first-line leaders left and took institutional knowledge with them. The teams that invested early are the ones now writing case studies. The discipline is to move at the cadence of the workforce, not the cadence of the budget cycle, and the People leaders who hold that line tend to outlast the ones who do not.
Frequently Asked Questions About Intersectional DEI
What is intersectionality in an HR context?
Intersectionality describes how overlapping identities including race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and age create distinct workplace experiences. An HR program that ignores intersectionality often misses the people most affected by inequity.
How do I measure intersectional outcomes?
Pull representation, promotion, attrition, and pay data segmented by at least two identity dimensions where local privacy law permits. Compare the trends to overall company averages and look for groups whose experience consistently lags.
Where should a small HR team start?
Start with one promotion cycle and one retention cohort. Run an intersectional cut, share the results with leaders, and pick one bottleneck to address before expanding scope.
How do you adapt DEI programs across regions?
Hold the standards consistent globally and let local teams choose tactics. A program rooted in regional cultural reality almost always outperforms a translated headquarters template.
What role do managers play in intersectional inclusion?
Managers are the system. They make hiring, promotion, feedback, and assignment decisions every day. Investing in their skills compounds faster than any single program.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Rodrigo's career arc shows that inclusion is daily craft, not annual campaign. The companies pulling ahead treat intersectional data as an operating signal, design programs around managers, and pair their inclusion strategy with reporting infrastructure people actually trust.
Inclusion built that way survives leadership changes, market downturns, and shifting political winds. It also produces the cultures that retain the talent every other company is fighting to recruit.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams turn employee voice into actionable inclusion data.
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