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Valerie Jackson, Chief Diversity Officer at Zuora, came to diversity work after a career as a capital markets lawyer and international policy advisor. Her background informs how she thinks about inclusion: as a discipline of structured decisions and verified outcomes rather than statements of intent. The conversation focused on how HR leaders mitigate bias and build the kind of trust that makes the company more honest with itself.
Bias in workplaces is rarely the cartoon villain version. Most bias is quiet. It shows up in who gets the stretch assignment, whose ideas get amplified in a meeting, and whose career conversations get postponed. The cumulative effect on careers is large even when the individual moments are small.
HR leaders should think about bias mitigation as a structural problem to solve rather than a moral problem to lecture about. The companies that get this right design the decisions to reduce the surface area for bias rather than relying on individual self awareness.
Why structure beats willpower in bias work
Self awareness helps. It is not enough. People miss their own biases by definition. SHRM research on mitigating unconscious bias reinforces that structured decision processes outperform individual mindfulness in producing equitable outcomes.
The HR work is to design the structures. Hiring rubrics, calibration sessions, promotion processes, and performance reviews all benefit from explicit criteria, structured input, and demographic auditing. AllVoices supports the listening half of the work through a DEI solution and an employee survey product that helps HR see whether the structure is producing the outcomes the policy claims.
Structured decisions also make bias visible when it does occur. A calibration session that documents reasoning gives reviewers something to examine if the outcomes diverge by demographic. An unstructured one leaves nothing to audit. Documentation is part of the discipline.
Building trust alongside the structure
Why does trust matter for bias work?
Bias mitigation produces uncomfortable conversations. Without trust, employees disengage from the conversations and the work slows. With trust, employees stay in the room long enough for the practice to do its work. Inclusion requires both.
Trust is built through consistency. Same standards applied to leaders and individual contributors. Same response process applied to senior level concerns and junior level ones. Same publication of findings whether they flatter the company or not.
How do you handle moments when trust breaks?
Acknowledge specifically what happened, name what the company will do about it, and follow through visibly within a defined window. Vague apologies extend damage. Specific acknowledgments accelerate repair.
The hardest cases involve senior leaders. The fastest way to lose employee trust is to apply different standards to executives. HBR research on whether employees can speak freely shows that the consistency of accountability is one of the strongest predictors of whether employees will raise issues at all.
What actually works
Use structured interviews and rubrics
Unstructured interviews favor candidates who match the interviewer's pattern recognition. Structured ones reduce that effect by scoring every candidate against the same criteria with similar questions. Unconscious bias shows up most in unstructured conversations.
The rubric also produces audit trails. A company that cannot show how candidates were scored cannot defend the outcomes when they are challenged. Documentation is the evidence the structure worked.
Calibrate performance reviews across managers
Calibration sessions where managers compare ratings with peers produce more equitable outcomes than reviews completed in isolation. The discussion forces specificity and surfaces the assumptions that drive divergent ratings. Performance review calibration is one of the least exciting and most consequential equity practices a company can implement.
The session has rules. Specific examples, not adjectives. Behavior, not personality. Outcome plus context, not outcome alone. With those rules, calibration becomes a learning event for managers rather than a defensive one.
Audit decisions by demographic and publish findings
The audits matter most when their findings get published, even partially. According to EEOC research on harassment in the workplace, transparency is one of the strongest signals an employer can send that it takes outcomes seriously.
The audits do not need to be perfect to be useful. Imperfect data, openly shared with a plan to improve, builds more trust than polished data hidden from the workforce. Pay equity reviews are the most common starting point.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Bias related concerns often surface as ER cases. AllVoices supports that work through an employee relations function that gives HR a structured workspace and an anonymous reporting tool that lowers the cost for employees to share what they would not say in a meeting.
Pattern recognition across cases
One concern about a manager is data. Five concerns about the same behavior are a pattern. ER teams that read across cases catch systemic bias issues sooner. The blog on where DEI goes next covers what that practice looks like.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mitigating Bias
Does training alone work?
No. Training produces awareness. Structure produces outcomes. The two together work better than either alone.
How do we know if our bias mitigation is working?
Audit the outcomes. Promotion rates, attrition rates, and performance ratings by demographic give the cleanest signals. The audits are uncomfortable. They are also necessary.
What if our managers resist structured processes?
Coach once, support twice, then act. Manager development is most credible when paired with manager accountability. The two together signal that the standard applies to everyone.
How does this work with hybrid teams?
The same principles apply with extra attention to who gets airtime in synchronous meetings and how async contributions get recognized. Hybrid teams can amplify bias if the structure does not adapt.
What is the biggest mistake?
Treating bias as a moral failing to lecture about rather than a structural problem to solve. The lecture produces guilt. The structure produces results.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Valerie Jackson is right that bias mitigation lives in structured decisions and trust building practice. The companies that take this seriously design the systems and audit the outcomes rather than depending on goodwill.
The mandate for HR leaders is to put the structure in place, calibrate the manager layer, and publish what the audits find. Done consistently, the company produces the equitable outcomes its values promise.
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