In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we spoke with Trinidad Hermida, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Niantic. Trinidad has spent her career at the intersection of corporate structure and creative practice, and she is refreshingly direct about what most HR teams get wrong when they try to fold creativity into their operating model. She does not treat creativity as a perk or a brainstorming ritual. She treats it as an everyday muscle that lets People leaders solve the problems compliance alone cannot solve.
What we kept returning to in the conversation was her point that diversity and inclusion work stagnates when it gets locked into templates and status reports. The best DEI leaders borrow from artists and educators, not from checklists. That reframing shows up in how Trinidad builds programs, how she coaches managers, and how she measures whether any of it is actually working.
Why Creative Thinking Belongs Inside HR
HR has spent the last decade getting more rigorous, which is good. What often disappears in that rigor is the ability to sit with ambiguity, run a small experiment, and change the plan mid-quarter. Creative practice keeps that muscle active. It gives HR leaders permission to try a pilot, learn from what flopped, and redesign without waiting for a board presentation.
Employee engagement data underscores why this matters. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reports ongoing declines in engagement, and most of the gap is not driven by pay or perks. It is driven by whether employees believe their manager listens and whether their day-to-day work feels designed for them. Solving that is a design problem, not a policy problem.
Teams that build room for creative problem-solving inside HR also tend to build stronger employee relations practices, because they treat each case as a unique situation rather than a template to be filled out.
One practical frame Trinidad pushes is to treat HR programs like drafts, not deliverables. A draft is allowed to change, allowed to fail, allowed to improve. Teams that work this way keep moving, because there is no mythical version 1.0 to wait for. They ship something small, watch how it lands, and adjust.
This matters especially in culture work. Most culture initiatives die not because the idea was bad, but because the organization expected a polished rollout before learning anything. A creative practice gives you room to learn out loud, which is faster and cheaper than launching the wrong program at scale.
How Creativity Shows Up in Day-to-Day HR Work
What does a creative HR practice actually look like?
It looks like a People team that prototypes an onboarding change with one cohort before rolling it out, that writes short internal memos instead of long decks, and that builds space for employees to shape programs instead of just consuming them. Creative HR is not about being whimsical. It is about being experimental.
How do you keep creativity from undermining compliance?
Separate the two layers. Compliance work, from compliance-team operating rhythms to regulatory training, needs predictable process. Program work, including culture, engagement, and manager development, benefits from more iterative design. Make the boundary explicit and the two stop stepping on each other.
What Actually Works for Leaders Bringing Creativity Into Culture
Principle 1: Start with a small, visible experiment
Pick one program with a clear owner and a two-month timeline. Measure one thing. Publish what you learn, including what did not work. Small wins create permission for bigger ones.
Principle 2: Invite employees into design, not just feedback
Feedback after the fact rarely changes the program. Involving a small group of employees in the design stage, especially from underrepresented groups, produces a better program and better buy-in. Use structured channels like pulse surveys to stay in touch between design cycles.
Principle 3: Measure what matters to the people doing the work
Participation and satisfaction are fine leading indicators. The real test is whether the work feels different in the quarterly reviews, in stay interviews, and in exit data. If none of those move, the creative program was decorative.
Another point Trinidad raised is how much creative HR work depends on building trust with line managers. If managers believe the People team is going to pressure them into a canned workshop, they disengage. If the People team shows up with a short diagnostic, a small experiment, and a clear ask, the conversation changes. Managers become collaborators rather than reluctant sponsors.
That posture is also what keeps creative HR honest. Line managers can spot a gimmick from a mile away. When the People team treats them like partners and shows the data behind the ask, creative work earns the airtime it needs to actually land.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Creative HR practice does not replace the discipline of handling reports, investigations, and sensitive issues. It complements them. Employee Relations teams that are organized around strong HR case management have the data they need to run creative experiments with confidence. They can see which issue types keep recurring, which managers need coaching, and which programs are actually changing behavior.
ER drill-down: using patterns to guide culture bets
Look at your last twelve months of ER cases, grouped by theme. Almost every organization has two or three clusters that repeat: manager communication, peer conflict, scheduling disputes. Your culture investments should map to those clusters. Running a creativity workshop that ignores what your own case data is telling you is a missed opportunity, and often an expensive one.
Frequently Asked Questions About Creativity in HR
Is creative HR practice only for companies with big budgets?
No. Most creative HR moves cost a facilitator's time and a willingness to change the plan. The expensive version is running the same unsuccessful program for three years because no one felt enabled to change it.
How do you sell creative HR work to a skeptical CFO?
Tie it to measurable outcomes the CFO already cares about. Retention, time to hire, absenteeism, and claim rates all respond to better culture work. Show the baseline, run the experiment, and show the delta.
Can a small HR team do this without a dedicated DEI lead?
Yes. The mindset travels. Even a two-person HR team can run a short manager listening tour, prototype a new onboarding conversation, and share what they learned. Scale matters less than discipline.
How often should you refresh culture programs?
Review every six months, refresh something every twelve. Programs that sit still for three years quietly rot, even if the participation numbers look fine on paper.
What is the biggest creativity killer inside HR?
Fear of being wrong publicly. Teams that cannot talk honestly about a program that flopped will never try the next one. Build in a ritual for sharing what did not work.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Trinidad's point, boiled down, is that HR leaders who refuse to bring creative practice into their work end up managing the same problems with the same tools for years. The teams making real progress borrow from design, education, and art without losing the operational rigor that keeps their compliance and investigation work defensible.
That balance, creative on the program side and rigorous on the case side, is increasingly how the best People organizations are structured. It also matches how Catalyst's inclusion research describes high-performing inclusion programs: iterative, employee-shaped, and tied to observable workplace outcomes.
HR is not going to out-engineer its way to a better culture. It has to design it, test it, and rebuild it as the workforce changes. That takes creativity, and it takes people who are comfortable starting before the plan is perfect.
See how AllVoices helps People teams build on the case data they already have.
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