Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Anaplan, Sherika Ekpo - A Multidimensional Belonging Strategy

Sherika Ekpo joined Anaplan in 2021 as the company's first Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, after running diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Google for the Research, AI, and Google Health product areas. Her career has stretched across JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and the White House, and that range shows up in how she thinks about belonging. She talks about it as a strategy with multiple layers, not a campaign or a quarterly initiative.

On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, Sherika walks through what she calls a multidimensional belonging strategy: building flexible programming for working caretakers, tying inclusion to performance reviews, and giving employees ownership over the workplace they want. The conversation is a useful map for any People team trying to move past slogans and into something measurable. Below, we've pulled the threads of her thinking together with broader research and patterns we see across AllVoices DEI solutions for People teams at large enterprises.

Why Belonging Is the Hardest Layer of DEI to Build

Diversity is a count. Inclusion is a behavior. Belonging is a feeling. That last category is where a lot of People teams stall, because feelings are harder to design and measure than headcount.

The business case is real. Employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are 18 times more likely to stay with their employer, and a Harvard Business Review analysis found that high belonging correlates with a 56% jump in job performance and 50% lower turnover risk. Gallup data puts the turnover gap at 22% for organizations with strong DEI practices. The pattern across these studies is consistent: belonging is not a soft outcome. It moves the same numbers your CFO already cares about.

Sherika's framing of belonging as multidimensional matters because it pushes past one-off events. She talks about belonging as something that has to live in benefits design, manager behavior, performance reviews, and how the company shows up in moments of crisis. A single employee resource group is not a strategy. A measurable, multi-channel approach is.

The Great Reimagination and What Working Parents Need

One of the through-lines of the conversation is what Sherika calls the Great Reimagination, which she sees as the bigger sibling of the Great Resignation. People did not just quit. They re-evaluated.

What does flexible programming for caretakers actually look like?

Sherika describes Anaplan's approach to caretaker support as flexible by default, not opt-in by exception. That includes child care backup, eldercare resources, predictable hours for hourly workers, and benefits structured for the actual shape of modern families. The point is to remove the negotiation. Caretakers should not have to ask their manager for permission to leave at 3:00 to pick up a kid.

How do you build inclusion into performance reviews?

The answer she lands on is to make inclusion behaviors a stated competency. That means specific, observable actions, like running meetings where every voice is heard, sponsoring underrepresented talent, or correcting bias when you see it. When inclusion shows up in the rubric, it shows up in the calibration room. When it lives in a separate program, it gets cut first under pressure.

What Actually Works in Multidimensional Belonging

Principle 1: Treat belonging as infrastructure, not programming

Programs end. Infrastructure persists. The belonging signal employees pick up the most is whether the company's policies, benefits, and management practices actually accommodate them. SHRM's BEAM framework toolkit for inclusion and diversity has been pushing in the same direction, repositioning inclusion as a performance-driven strategy rather than a stand-alone DEI track.

Principle 2: Listen continuously, not just at engagement-survey time

Annual surveys are too slow to catch belonging signals. Pulse surveys, anonymous channels, and focus groups give you a constant feedback loop. AllVoices customers use the AllVoices employee survey platform to run pulse cycles every two to four weeks, then route patterns to the people who can act on them. Concepts like psychological safety at work stop being abstract once you can see how teams answer the same questions month over month.

Principle 3: Build a safe path for people to raise concerns

Belonging falls apart the moment someone reports a problem and nothing happens. A serious belonging strategy needs a serious investigations function behind it. A DEI hotline for anonymous reporting creates a documented, fair channel for people to surface bias, microaggressions, or exclusion. The follow-through is what turns the channel into a trust signal.

Where Employee Relations Fits in a Belonging Strategy

People teams often treat DEI and Employee Relations as separate functions. They should be coupled. ER teams own the cases that test whether your stated values match your actual behavior, and they hold the data that shows where belonging breaks down across demographics, teams, and managers.

That is why we built centralized case tracking for ER teams with a layer of analytics on top. ER leaders running an AllVoices instance can pull case-volume trends by location, team, or protected class, and fold that data into the same belonging dashboards their CDIOs are reviewing.

How does ER data support a CDIO's strategy?

Two ways. First, it shows the gap between reported climate and lived experience, because people will rate the culture differently than they will describe specific incidents. Second, it shows whether managers are getting better. If a team's case volume rises, then drops after a manager intervention, that is a real signal. SHRM's inclusion, equity, and diversity research has been pointing to manager behavior as the highest-leverage variable, and the case data either confirms or refutes that for your specific organization.

Frequently Asked Questions About Belonging Strategy

What is a belonging strategy in the workplace?

A belonging strategy is a coordinated set of policies, manager behaviors, benefits design, and listening systems that create a sustained sense of acceptance and contribution for every employee. It sits one layer past workplace inclusion, focused on the felt experience rather than the structural one. Sherika Ekpo describes it as multidimensional because no single program can produce belonging, only the combination can.

How do you measure belonging at work?

Most People teams use a combination of pulse-survey items, eNPS scoring, focus groups, and Employee Relations case data. The strongest setups also segment by demographic and team so you can see where belonging is intact and where it is fraying. Pair the qualitative data with quantitative behaviors like attrition, internal-mobility rates, and ERG participation.

What is the difference between inclusion and belonging?

Inclusion is what the organization does. Belonging is what the employee feels. You can run inclusive meetings and still have employees who do not feel they belong, which is why the two need to be measured separately. Belonging is the lagging indicator of an inclusive system actually working over time.

Why does belonging matter for retention?

Employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are roughly 18 times more likely to stay, according to BetterUp research, and Gallup has tied strong DEI practices to a 22% lower turnover rate. Replacing a single employee can cost between half and two times their salary, so belonging functions as one of the highest-ROI retention investments a People team can make.

How do CDIOs and HR leaders work together on belonging?

The cleanest model is shared ownership of the data. CDIOs lead strategy and culture programming. HR and Employee Relations own the cases, the policies, and the day-to-day systems that make belonging real. When both functions read the same dashboards, decisions stop being political and start being evidence-based.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Sherika Ekpo's case for a multidimensional belonging strategy is really an argument against single-track DEI work. People teams that treat inclusion as a project will get project-sized results. The teams that treat it as infrastructure, embedded in benefits, performance, manager behavior, and listening systems, are the ones that move retention, performance, and trust at scale.

The practical move for most People organizations is to start by connecting the data. Pair your engagement-survey results with your ER case data, then segment both by team and demographic. The patterns will tell you where belonging is real, where it is performative, and where managers need direct support.

Book a walkthrough of the AllVoices platform to see how CDIOs and ER teams use the same data to build belonging programs that hold up under pressure.