On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Vanessa Paige, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Manager at Hungry Harvest, the rescued produce delivery company on a mission to fight food waste and eradicate hunger. Vanessa spearheaded the development of Hungry Harvest's first DEIB initiative in 2019. Before her DEIB role she ran the Philadelphia market for Hungry Harvest, where she grew the business by more than 60 percent and earned the SustainPHL Business Innovation of the Year Award.
Vanessa argued that the question most companies skip when starting DEIB work is whether the company is ready to be challenged by what the program will surface. The training, the policy work, and the ERG launches are the visible parts. The invisible part is whether leadership is prepared to act on what employees actually say when given a real channel. She pushed back on the assumption that DEIB is mostly a programs question. Programs matter, but the readiness of the organization to hear hard things and respond is what determines whether the programs produce outcomes.
That conversation matters because most companies are now in their second or third iteration of DEIB work, and the gap between what was promised in year one and what was delivered by year three is the largest source of internal cynicism most HR teams are working against.
Why DEIB Programs Stall in Year Two
The pattern repeats across companies. A first-year DEIB program produces a strategy doc, an ERG launch, and a training rollout. The second year produces fewer announcements and harder questions. By the third year, employees who were excited at launch are the loudest critics, and leadership is quietly retrenching.
The data on what good DEIB work delivers is consistent. McKinsey research finds that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity are 36 percent more likely to outperform peers on profitability. BetterUp research on workplace belonging shows employees with high belonging take 75 percent fewer sick days and have 50 percent lower turnover. The case for the work is settled. What is not settled is the design discipline that keeps programs alive past year one.
Companies that move past the year-two stall do three things. They build leadership readiness alongside program work. They tie inclusion data to the operating model. And they create intake mechanisms for the concerns that surveys do not surface.
What Real Leadership Readiness Looks Like
How do you assess whether leadership is ready for a real DEIB program?
Ask whether they will publish the inclusion data internally even when it is unflattering. Ask whether they will hold managers accountable for cohort retention and promotion gaps the same way they hold them accountable for revenue. Ask whether they will fund the program through a budget cycle when revenue is soft. The answers tell you whether the program is real or theatrical.
What does it look like when leadership is not ready?
The DEIB lead becomes the person who manages the gap between what was promised and what is happening. The role becomes mostly defensive. Program announcements continue, but the operational changes do not. Employees notice within two cycles, and the rebuild work that follows is harder than the original work would have been.
What Actually Works: A Framework for DEIB That Lasts
Design principle one: build leadership readiness alongside program work
Coach the executive team on what to do with hard data before the data arrives. Run scenarios. Practice the responses. The single biggest predictor of program durability is whether the executive team has rehearsed how to handle the moments when the program produces uncomfortable findings.
Design principle two: tie inclusion data to existing business rhythms
Inclusion lives in promotion calibration, hiring scorecards, compensation reviews, and engagement surveys. Programs that exist outside those cycles get cut in the first downturn. Programs that live inside them get harder to remove because they are part of how the business already runs.
Design principle three: build intake for the concerns surveys cannot surface
Use a confidential DEI hotline to capture inclusion concerns that fall short of formal complaints, and pair it with quarterly employee surveys for the trended data executives need. The combination catches the experiences that scale-only data misses.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Strong diversity, equity, and inclusion programs use ER infrastructure to surface the patterns that announce-and-train cycles miss. The cluster of complaints about a manager whose feedback patterns track demographics. The pattern of underrepresented employees leaving in the first 18 months. The concerns about ERG funding decisions. Sweetgreen has built employee voice infrastructure that shows what this integration looks like in a frontline-heavy workforce.
How does ER infrastructure support DEIB outcomes?
By making patterns visible early. The case data shows where the system is producing different experiences across cohorts before retention metrics confirm it years later. That visibility informs diversity decisions, refines inclusion measures, and improves employee onboarding design with evidence rather than intuition.
Frequently Asked Questions About Building DEIB Programs
What is the right team size for a starting DEIB program?
One full-time leader for every 1,500 to 2,000 employees, plus dedicated time from a small set of executive sponsors. Programs run by a single person across larger workforces produce burnout and patchy execution. The programs that scale resource the work properly from the start.
Where should DEIB sit in the org chart?
Reporting to the CEO or CHRO, with budget authority and a formal seat in promotion calibration and compensation review meetings. Programs that sit too far down the org chart cannot influence the decisions that move the metrics.
How do you keep DEIB momentum past year one?
Tie wins to operational metrics, publish the dashboards quarterly, and rotate the program's focus areas slowly enough that each one produces visible results. Programs that change priorities every quarter produce announcement fatigue.
What role do ERGs play in evolving inclusive cultures?
They are infrastructure. ERGs that are funded, sponsored, and connected to business outcomes produce engagement and retention impact that compound. ERGs treated as social clubs produce social club results.
What is the single biggest predictor of program durability?
Whether the executive team is willing to publish hard data internally and act on it. Programs that surface uncomfortable findings and produce visible response build credibility. Programs that surface findings and produce silence lose it.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Vanessa's framing puts the right pressure on the question most DEIB conversations skip. Programs are easy to launch and hard to sustain. The companies producing real outcomes are the ones that built leadership readiness in parallel with program work, then instrumented the results so the work survives every budget cycle that follows.
That work looks quieter than the campaigns that get press attention. It also produces the only outcomes that actually compound: representation, retention, promotion velocity, and a workforce that trusts the company to keep doing the work.
That is what evolving inclusive cultures actually requires.
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