On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Dan Spaulding, Chief People Officer of Zillow Group. Dan leads people operations across HR, recruiting, equity and belonging, learning and development, and facilities for thousands of Zillow employees. Before Zillow he ran U.S. stores and operations HR for Starbucks, supporting more than 8,000 stores and 140,000 employees, with earlier leadership roles at Life Technologies and Dell.
Dan argued that empowerment is one of the most overused words in HR and one of the least operationalized. Most companies use it to describe the feeling they want employees to have. The companies that actually create that feeling, in his view, do it through specific decisions about authority, information, and recognition. He pushed on the post-COVID question of how to differentiate culture in a market where every employer is making the same headline promises about flexibility and well-being. The answer, he said, is in the operating details that show up after the offer letter is signed.
That conversation matters because most people teams are spending the next year recalibrating the basic shape of work, and the companies that get the operating details right will hold the talent advantage they built during the pandemic.
Why Empowerment Programs Underdeliver
The standard empowerment program looks the same at most companies. A new tool, a manager training, a values refresh, a town hall. Each piece is sensible. The reason the combination underdelivers is that it skips the harder operational question: which decisions can employees actually make without escalation, and how is that authority refreshed as roles grow.
The data on what disengagement costs is brutal. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace finds that disengagement costs the global economy roughly 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity. Companies with strong cultures see 4 times higher revenue growth and 40 percent lower turnover. The case for investment is settled. What is not settled is how to convert investment into employee experience.
Companies that move past empowerment-as-vibes do three things. They publish decision rights at every level so employees know what is theirs to call. They share business context that other companies hoard. And they recognize the work that does not show up in formal performance reviews but holds the company together.
Measuring DEI Strategy in a Way That Holds
What metrics actually prove a DEI strategy is working?
The most durable signals are retention by demographic cohort, time-to-promotion gaps, and inclusion items on the engagement survey trended over time. McKinsey research shows that the financial relationship between diversity and performance is strongest where representation translates into actual decision-making power. Hiring metrics signal intent. Retention and promotion metrics prove follow-through.
What does Zillow's approach to people operations look like in practice?
Dan described an operating model where equity and belonging is not a separate program but a thread running through every people process. The hiring scorecard, the promotion calibration, the succession review, the engagement survey. The team that Zillow built around employee voice shows what that integration looks like at scale, and how it changes the data leaders see every quarter.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Empowerment
Design principle one: publish decision rights
The fastest empowerment win in any company is a one-page document, per role, that lists the decisions an employee can make without checking, the decisions they should consult on, and the decisions they need to escalate. The act of writing it down forces the conversation that empowerment programs usually skip.
Design principle two: instrument the experience, not just the engagement score
Engagement scores are useful for trends and weak for action. Pair them with employee surveys and pulse surveys that target the moments empowerment lives or dies in: one-on-one quality, decision speed, recognition frequency. Granular data is what lets managers act on what they hear.
Design principle three: share more business context than feels comfortable
Empowerment without context is delegation. Companies that share unit economics, win-loss data, and strategic dilemmas with their employees consistently produce better decisions at the edge. The risk of oversharing is small. The cost of undersharing is years of slow decisions made by people who did not have the picture they needed.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Strong employee engagement programs have a quiet partner: the employee relations function that protects the conditions empowerment depends on. When employees feel safe raising concerns, they keep contributing the discretionary effort empowerment is supposed to unlock. When they do not, the empowerment program drains.
How does ER infrastructure support empowerment?
It gives employees a confidential channel to flag the moments where authority is not being respected, where recognition is not happening, or where the operating model has drifted from the stated values. Patterns in those signals are leading indicators of employee engagement shifts and employee retention risk that exit interviews catch too late.
Frequently Asked Questions About Empowering Employees
What is the difference between empowerment and autonomy?
Autonomy is the absence of supervision. Empowerment is the presence of authority paired with the context and recognition needed to use it well. Autonomy without empowerment produces isolation. Empowerment without autonomy produces frustration.
How do you balance empowerment with consistency?
Define the rails clearly. Decisions that require consistency, like compensation philosophy, performance ratings, and customer commitments, sit inside guardrails everyone respects. Decisions inside the rails belong to the team closest to the work. Most companies overcontrol the inside of the rails and undercontrol the rails themselves.
What does empowerment look like in remote and hybrid teams?
Decision rights matter more, not less. In an office, ambiguity got resolved by walking down the hall. In remote and hybrid modes, ambiguity gets resolved by Slack pings that interrupt focus or by employees making no decision at all. Written decision rights compensate for the loss of proximity. See our work on engagement survey questions for the relational items that matter most in this mode.
How do you tell if your DEI strategy is real or performative?
Look at the calendars and the calibrations. If executives spend real time on DEI, and if calibration meetings include cohort views and conversation about gaps, the strategy is real. If DEI shows up only in marketing copy and the all-hands deck, it is performative.
What is the future of work in a single sentence?
Distributed by default, deliberate about gathering, measured on outcomes rather than presence, and held together by the operating discipline that makes empowerment more than a slogan.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Dan's central point is that the words HR teams reach for first are the ones that need the most operational backbone. Empowerment is one of those words. Engagement is another. Belonging is a third. Each of them is a lived experience that has to be built into the operating model, not announced into it.
The companies that pull ahead in the next two years are the ones investing in the unglamorous infrastructure: decision rights documents, manager development, listening tools, and ER systems that catch what surveys miss. That infrastructure is what turns the words into the experience.
The companies that skip it will keep running campaigns and watching their best people leave for the ones that did the work.
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