.avif)
On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Laura Robblee, Chief Human Resources Officer at Zuora. Before joining Zuora, Laura led people teams at GoPro, Lithium Technologies, and Electronic Arts, with a stint as an executive coach in between. The throughline of her career is a stubborn belief that performance and inclusion are the same conversation, not two competing priorities.
The conversation covered the Great Reshuffle, what meaningful engagement actually looks like inside a hybrid workforce, and how People teams can honor moments like Black History Month without slipping into performative gestures. Laura was clear about one thing: a high-performance culture that excludes anyone is not actually high-performance. It is just a louder version of average.
Why Inclusive High-Performance Cultures Matter Right Now
The labor market hasn't returned to a quiet equilibrium. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, voluntary quits remain a meaningful share of workforce separations, and recent Gallup reporting shows engagement in the U.S. has slipped to a multi-year low. People teams who try to push performance without first solving for inclusion end up with the same problem dressed in different clothes: high-performing employees leave, mid-performing employees disengage, and low-performing employees stick around because they have nowhere better to go.
Laura's framing flips the order. Inclusion is the operating condition. Performance is the outcome. When people feel seen, they raise their hand. When they feel safe, they tell you what is broken. When they feel valued, they take ownership. None of that shows up on a quarterly review form, but all of it shows up on the P&L six quarters later.
Building this kind of workplace culture takes more than a values poster in the breakroom. It takes process design, manager accountability, and feedback channels that work even when the news is bad. That is the work Laura was describing.
What the Great Reshuffle Taught People Leaders
How is the Great Reshuffle different from the Great Resignation?
The Great Resignation framing focused on people leaving. The Great Reshuffle is about where they went, what they were chasing, and why they did not come back. Laura's read is that workers used the moment to renegotiate three things at once: flexibility, growth, and meaning. Companies that only solved for one of those things kept losing people.
What do employees want most from their employer right now?
Compensation still matters. Flexibility still matters. But the differentiator Laura keeps seeing is honesty. Employees can tell when leadership is performing concern versus actually adjusting the work. The companies that retained their people during the reshuffle were the ones that took feedback seriously and turned it into visible change inside ninety days.
What Actually Works When Building Inclusive Cultures
Treat inclusion as a system, not a campaign
Most DEI programs die because they live in a single function. Laura argues for embedding inclusive design into every people process: hiring, performance, promotion, exit interviews, manager training, and the way meetings are run. When inclusion is a system, it does not depend on the energy of a single executive sponsor. AllVoices' DEI solution is designed to support exactly that kind of embedded approach.
Measure the right things and share what you find
Vanity metrics like representation at the all-hands are easy. Operational metrics like promotion velocity by demographic, manager span by tenure, and pay equity by job family are harder. They are also the ones that change behavior. Laura's team uses both employee survey tools and pulse surveys to keep a finger on the pulse without overwhelming managers with data they cannot act on.
Create real channels for hard feedback
Inclusion lives or dies on whether people can tell you the truth. That requires more than an open-door policy. It requires anonymous reporting, fast triage, and visible follow-through. Without those three, the open door is just decoration.
Where Employee Relations Fits in High-Performance Culture
Culture work and employee relations work are the same work, viewed from different ends. Culture sets the conditions. Employee relations responds when those conditions break down. According to the EEOC's enforcement guidance on workplace harassment, an effective complaint process is one of the foundations of a defensible workplace. That same process is what lets a high-performance culture survive a hard moment instead of cracking under one.
Modern People teams build that foundation with a centralized intake channel, structured triage, and consistent investigations. That is the daily work behind the culture story. AllVoices' HR case management platform and workplace investigations workflow exist for exactly that reason.
How does ER work change in a high-performance culture?
It gets faster, more visible, and more proactive. ER teams see issues earlier because employees trust the channel. Patterns get caught at the team level, not the legal-discovery level. And the data feeds back into culture investments, so the next round of policy changes is informed by what is actually happening, not what someone hopes is happening.
Frequently Asked Questions About Inclusive High-Performance Cultures
Can a company really be inclusive and high-performance at the same time?
Yes, but only if leadership treats them as the same goal. Companies that pit inclusion against performance end up with neither. The research on psychological safety from Harvard Business Review shows that inclusion is a precondition for high performance, not a tax on it.
How do you measure inclusion without falling into vanity metrics?
Track operational outcomes: promotion velocity, internal mobility, turnover by group, manager training completion, and case volume by team. Pair that with sentiment data from employee engagement surveys to see how the numbers connect to lived experience.
What is the role of managers in building inclusive cultures?
Managers are the culture. They decide who gets stretch assignments, whose voice gets amplified in meetings, and who hears tough feedback in time to grow. Equipping them with training, scripts, and escalation paths is the highest-impact investment a People team can make.
How does anonymous reporting support a high-performance culture?
It catches issues that would otherwise stay buried. Employee feedback only works if the riskiest feedback can reach you. Anonymous channels lower the cost of speaking up, which is especially important for employees from underrepresented groups who often carry more risk when they raise concerns.
What is the biggest mistake CHROs make when chasing high performance?
Chasing it directly. High performance is what you get after you fix engagement, manager capability, and the feedback loop. Companies that try to skip those steps end up with burned-out top performers and a slow leak of mid-performers heading for the exits.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Inclusive high-performance is not a slogan. It is a set of operational choices made every quarter: how you hire, how you promote, how you handle a complaint at 9pm on a Friday. Laura's career is a study in what it looks like when those choices are made consistently and out loud.
For People leaders trying to build the same thing, the path is unglamorous. Pick three culture investments, fund them properly, measure them honestly, and tie them to performance outcomes that matter to the business. Repeat for ten quarters. The companies that do this end up with cultures that hold under pressure, and the ones that don't keep losing the people they cannot afford to lose.
See how AllVoices helps People teams turn culture intent into operational reality.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)