In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Michele Giordano, Vice President of Digital Crisis Services at The Trevor Project. Michele has spent her career working with mission-driven organizations that depend on trust between their employees and the people they serve, and she brings a deeply practical view on what equity looks like when the stakes are real.
The thread through her work is that equity in a workplace is not about what the company says in a policy document. It is about whether the people doing the hardest jobs feel supported enough to keep doing them. That framing reshapes how HR leaders should think about everything from case management to manager coaching to benefits design.
What an Equitable Workplace Actually Looks Like
An equitable workplace is one where the same effort produces the same outcome regardless of identity. That shows up in promotion rates, pay, access to growth opportunities, and the way concerns get handled inside the ER function. It does not mean everyone has the same experience. It means the experience maps to contribution, not to who the person is.
The gap between stated equity goals and lived experience is where most organizations fail. McKinsey's Diversity Matters Even More research shows that top-quartile companies on executive diversity outperform their peers on financial metrics, but the performance gap has widened because bottom-quartile companies have fallen further behind. That is another way of saying equity work compounds. Teams that invest consistently extend their lead. Teams that treat equity as a one-quarter priority fall further behind.
Michele also emphasized that equity is not a destination. Organizations can make real progress and still find gaps open up as the business changes. New teams, new acquisitions, and new leaders all introduce risk. A serious equity practice treats measurement as continuous rather than periodic, because the workforce changes continuously.
That mindset shift matters. Teams that expect to finish equity work tend to drift within eighteen months of declaring victory. Teams that treat it as an operating habit hold their gains longer, because they have the infrastructure to catch regressions before they become structural.
How Equity Shows Up in Day-to-Day Operations
How do you know if your workplace is equitable?
Look at four data points together: promotion rates by group, voluntary turnover by group, pay equity adjusted for role and tenure, and ER case rates by team and manager. Any one of these in isolation can mislead. Together they tell a reliable story.
What is the most common equity blind spot?
Access to informal opportunity. Formal processes like promotion calibration are usually the second-order problem. The bigger issue is who gets the stretch assignment, who gets included in the informal strategy discussion, and whose work is shown to senior leaders. That layer is hard to measure, which is why it often does not get addressed.
What Actually Works When Building Equity
Principle 1: Put equity data in the executive review
Board-level and executive-level reviews that do not include equity data signal that equity is optional. Adding two or three core metrics to the standard review takes modest effort and changes the conversation permanently.
Principle 2: Invest in manager coaching over company-wide training
Most equity gaps live at the team level. The most reliable investment is coaching managers to notice and respond to differences in access to opportunity, workload, and voice. A coached manager produces more equity lift than a company-wide training cycle.
Principle 3: Treat ER as an equity lens
Case patterns are some of the clearest equity signals an organization has. Teams using structured case management and a defined ER operating model have the data to see where the equity work needs to happen first.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Employee Relations sits directly in the middle of equity work. Complaints, investigations, and accommodation requests all test whether the organization is living its stated values. The teams that can pull case data by demographic segment, manager, or location are the ones that can act on patterns rather than respond to individual cases in isolation.
ER drill-down: reading equity signals in the case queue
Three patterns matter most. First, whether certain groups open cases at disproportionate rates. Second, whether specific managers show up across multiple reports. Third, whether time to resolution differs by demographic segment. All three are worth monthly review, and all three often reveal equity gaps that pulse surveys miss.
ER leaders who bring these patterns to the executive team create an accountability loop. Executives who see the patterns, commit to action, and then check progress quarterly are the ones who actually move the numbers.
Equity work also interacts with the broader ecosystem of protected class law and compliance. HR leaders who build their equity program on top of strong compliance foundations end up with a more defensible position when regulators or plaintiffs come asking questions. The two functions reinforce each other when they are designed to.
Frequently Asked Questions About Equitable Workplaces
Is equity the same as equality?
No. Equality treats everyone the same. Equity accounts for the fact that different employees start in different positions and need different support to reach the same outcome. Equal treatment can produce unequal results.
How do you measure pay equity without over-simplifying?
Control for role, tenure, location, and performance. Run the analysis quarterly, publish the method, and act on the results. The method is less important than the consistency and the willingness to correct.
What is the role of ERGs in equity work?ERGs are a valuable complement, not a replacement. They create community and surface issues, but they cannot carry equity accountability alone. Pair ERG input with manager accountability and executive ownership for durable change.How long does it take to move pay equity gaps?
Structural gaps take two to three years of disciplined work. Most organizations see improvement faster on adjusted gaps, which reflect hiring and promotion decisions made recently, and slower on raw gaps, which reflect decades of cumulative decisions.
Does equity work conflict with performance culture?No. Equity work strengthens performance culture by reducing the friction caused by unfair or inconsistent treatment. The organizations that pit equity against performance usually end up with less of both.
One more pattern worth flagging. Organizations that make equity gains often underestimate the internal communication work required to protect those gains. Employees notice when the numbers move, and they expect leaders to explain the change. A CHRO who can speak clearly about what changed, why, and what is coming next turns equity progress into a trust-building moment rather than a data point that gets lost in the noise.
Research from Catalyst on intersectional equity in the workplace makes a parallel point. Equity programs that account for overlapping identities produce better outcomes than programs designed for a single axis at a time, which is why modern equity practice increasingly runs through a multi-dimensional lens.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Michele's work at The Trevor Project is a reminder that equity is most visible in the moments that matter. When someone in crisis reaches out for help, when an employee reports a concern, when a promotion decision gets made. The durable investment is in the systems that produce fair outcomes in those moments, not in the programs that describe fairness in the abstract.
That means HR leaders who want to move equity forward should spend more time on the case data, the calibration conversations, and the manager coaching than on the programmatic layer that gets most of the attention. Programs have their place, but they are not what changes outcomes.
The organizations that are winning on equity are the ones that treat it as an operating discipline. They have data, they have ownership, they have accountability, and they have patience for the two- to three-year arc it takes to see compounding results. That is the work.
See how AllVoices gives HR teams the case data and operating rhythm to move equity forward.
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