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When we sat down with Joy Pastor, Vice President of Operations and Diversity at TalentBurst, for this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the conversation centered on accountability. Joy has spent her career building inclusive environments and helping leaders learn to recognize and overcome their own biases so they can act as effective allies. Her main argument was that equity does not stick when it lives in one person's job description. It sticks when ownership is distributed across the leadership team and audited regularly.
That focus on ownership made her advice usefully concrete. She talked about creating an ownership mentality, auditing the employee experience, and the question of whether DEIB should sit as its own function or be embedded across the organization. There is no clean answer to that last question and Joy's framing helped explain why.
Why an Ownership Mentality Around Equity Outperforms Mandates
Equity strategies that depend on a single executive sponsor tend to wobble when that sponsor moves on. Strategies that distribute ownership across the leadership team are more durable. SHRM research has consistently shown that equity outcomes track most closely with manager behavior, which means the meaningful unit of accountability is the manager and the team, not the central function.
Building that ownership requires giving managers the data, the training, and the consequences they need to take their own equity outcomes seriously. Ownership grows when leaders see how their team's representation, retention, and promotion data compare to peers and when those numbers show up in the conversations that determine compensation and advancement.
How to Audit the Employee Experience
What does an employee experience audit include?
An audit includes a systematic review of every stage in the employee lifecycle and an assessment of how the experience differs across demographic groups, tenure bands, and locations. It pulls data from employee onboarding surveys, performance reviews, promotion decisions, exit interviews, and ER cases. The output is a heat map of where the experience is strong and where it is breaking.
Who should run the audit?
Audits work best when they are run by a cross-functional group that includes the People team, DEIB, and a senior business leader. That mix prevents the audit from being seen as a People-only project and ensures the recommendations get integrated into the operating model rather than parked in a slide deck.
What Actually Works When You Build Distributed Ownership
Principle 1: Equip leaders with the data they need
Ownership requires visibility. Leaders cannot own outcomes they cannot see. Strong programs publish team-level dashboards that show representation, retention, promotion, and inclusion sentiment by manager and team. Data and insights tooling that aggregates this picture in real time saves the People team months of manual reporting.
Principle 2: Tie ownership to the existing operating cadence
If equity reviews happen in a separate forum, they get treated as separate. If they show up in quarterly business reviews and talent reviews alongside financial and operational data, they get treated with the same seriousness. The integration matters more than the elegance of the dashboard.
Principle 3: Combine quantitative and qualitative signal
Audits that only look at numbers miss the lived experience. Audits that only look at stories miss the patterns. The strongest programs combine both, using pulse surveys, ER pattern data, and listening sessions to build a complete picture.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into an Audit Practice
An audit only produces change if there is an operating function that can act on what it finds. Employee relations is that function. ER takes the patterns the audit reveals and translates them into specific interventions at the team or manager level. Without ER, the audit produces good slides and not good outcomes.
How ER closes the loop on equity ownership
The audit finds the gap. ER closes the gap. That happens through a combination of manager coaching, formal interventions where needed, and pattern reporting that gives leaders ongoing visibility into whether their interventions are actually working. With that loop, ownership becomes operational rather than ceremonial.
How Audits Translate Into Real Operational Change
From audit findings to manager-level interventions
The audit produces a heat map. The next step is translating that map into specific manager-level interventions. That might include targeted coaching for managers whose teams show retention gaps, calibration sessions for performance ratings, or revisions to promotion criteria. Without that translation step, audits become reports that sit on a shelf.
Avoiding audit fatigue
The risk of running audits too often is that the organization stops engaging with the findings. The risk of running them too rarely is that issues compound between cycles. The middle ground combines a deep annual audit with lightweight quarterly snapshots. Each one does part of the job without overwhelming the operating model.
Strong audit programs also publish their findings internally so employees see leadership engaging with the data. That transparency builds trust and signals that the audit is part of how the company actually operates rather than an exercise that produces no follow-through. Without that visibility, even strong audit work loses its credibility over time.
Frequently Asked Questions About DEIB Ownership and Auditing
Should DEIB be a separate function or embedded?
The honest answer is both. A small central DEIB team is needed to set strategy, build infrastructure, and provide expertise. Ownership of outcomes belongs distributed across the leadership team. Companies that pick only one model usually run into trouble. Pure central ownership lacks accountability. Pure embedded ownership lacks expertise and consistency.
What is an ownership mentality around equity?
An ownership mentality is the assumption that equity outcomes in a leader's organization are that leader's responsibility, not someone else's. It includes paying attention to representation, retention, promotion, and lived experience as part of the leader's regular operating practice.
How often should companies audit the employee experience?
An annual deep audit is a useful baseline. Companies with mature programs supplement that with quarterly snapshots driven by pulse data and ER patterns. The cadence matters because patterns only become visible when leaders look at the data consistently.
How do you handle bias awareness without making it performative?
Real bias awareness is paired with structural changes. Calibrated promotion processes. Clear feedback rubrics. Training that connects to specific decisions managers will make in the next quarter. Without those structural elements, awareness training tends to produce a one-day boost and no lasting change.
What is the role of employee feedback in an audit?
Employee feedback is one of the primary inputs into an audit. Survey data tells you the temperature, focus groups give you the texture, and ER cases give you the friction points. Together they describe the lived experience the audit is trying to assess.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Joy Pastor's framing of equity ownership matches what high-functioning programs actually do. The work cannot live with one leader, and it cannot be done without expert support. The companies that get this right build a small central team that sets strategy and provides infrastructure while distributing ownership of outcomes across every leader who manages people.
HR leaders should invest in three things. Build the audit practice that gives the company a clear picture of where the experience is breaking. Distribute ownership through dashboards and accountability tied to the regular operating cadence. Wire in the employee relations function that turns audit findings into actual interventions. Together those moves are what allow equity work to compound across years rather than fade with leadership change.
See how AllVoices supports the audit and listening infrastructure behind durable equity ownership.
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