Jevan Soo Lenox brings a useful blend of consulting rigor and operating-leader pragmatism to his thinking on workplace inclusivity and trust. He has been Chief People and Culture Officer at Stitch Fix, served in senior People Operations roles, and started his career as a McKinsey consultant working across tech, retail, and consumer companies in the U.S. and abroad. His conversation on Reimagining Company Culture explored what it actually takes to build inclusive cultures where employees trust the company enough to give it their best work.
His perspective is anchored in the experience of leading people at scale through periods of growth and complexity. Stitch Fix is a public company with thousands of employees and a customer base in the millions. The cultural and operational pressure on a CHRO at that scale is different from earlier-stage work, and Jevan's framing reflected those pressures. Trust at scale requires infrastructure, not just intent.
Why Trust Is the Base Layer
The research on workplace trust is strong. HBR research on diverse teams and psychological safety shows that diversity benefits show up only when teams have the safety to share dissenting ideas. SHRM's analysis of psychological safety notes that 89 percent of employees say it is essential to their work experience. Without trust, the most well-intentioned inclusion programs cannot produce inclusive teams. With trust, even modest programs produce real change.
Jevan's argument was that trust is built or destroyed by ordinary operating decisions, not by inclusion programs. The decisions about who gets stretch assignments, how feedback is delivered, how complaints get handled, and whether employees see leaders behave consistently with stated values. Inclusion programs are useful, but they cannot rescue a company whose operating decisions consistently undermine trust.
How Inclusivity and Trust Reinforce Each Other
What does inclusive culture look like in practice?
Jevan described a few specific markers. Meetings where multiple people contribute, not just the loudest. Calibration discussions that explicitly check for bias before promotions. Hiring rubrics that produce more consistent decisions. Feedback delivered with the same standard across demographic groups. Each is small. The aggregate is what makes employees experience the company as inclusive.
How do you build trust with employees who have been disappointed before?
Through repeated, visible follow-through. Trust is built over time and lost in moments. Companies that say they will change something and then actually change it gradually rebuild credibility with employees who have learned to be cautious. Companies that announce changes and quietly let them slide make it harder.
What Actually Works in Building Inclusive Trust
Principle 1: Make inclusion a leadership behavior, not a workshop
Most inclusion training is not what changes behavior. The companies that move further define specific inclusive behaviors managers are expected to demonstrate, train them on those behaviors, and hold them accountable. Workshop-based inclusion programs without behavioral expectations rarely move outcomes.
Principle 2: Use channels that surface concerns honestly
Employees do not raise concerns through channels they do not trust. AllVoices' anonymous reporting and AI Co-Pilot tools give employees structured ways to share what they are experiencing without political risk, which is often the difference between problems being addressed early or growing into crises.
Principle 3: Track implicit bias outcomes, not just bias awareness
Bias awareness training is necessary but insufficient. The harder work is looking at outcomes (hiring decisions, promotion rates, performance ratings) for patterns that suggest bias is shaping outcomes. Outcome data tells leaders whether the inclusion work is producing inclusion.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Inclusive trust sits at the intersection of DEI and employee relations. The companies that build trust at scale treat ER as a real strategic capability, not a compliance afterthought. Employee feedback, ER patterns, and engagement signals all feed the same picture of how trust is or is not flowing across the organization.
How HR uses trust signals at scale
The mature pattern is to track trust at multiple altitudes. Company-level engagement scores. Function-level inclusion metrics. Team-level pulse data. ER case themes by demographic and tenure. The combination is what tells senior leaders whether the inclusive culture they say they have is actually the inclusive culture employees experience.
Frequently Asked Questions About Promoting Inclusivity and Employee Trust
How do you measure trust without making employees feel surveilled?
Use anonymous surveys. Track aggregate patterns rather than individual data. Be transparent about what is being measured and why. The companies that do this well treat employee trust data with the same care they treat customer trust data.
What is the most common inclusion failure in growing companies?
Inconsistency across managers. Inclusion programs at the company level cannot fix wide variation in how individual managers actually run their teams. Investing in manager development is what closes the variance.
Should DEI work be aligned with broader business strategy?
Yes. DEI work that is disconnected from business strategy struggles to maintain executive support and resourcing. Aligned with strategy, it tends to survive leadership transitions and budget cycles.
How do you handle inclusion in remote and hybrid teams?
More deliberately. Distance amplifies exclusion patterns that office work could mask. Remote-first companies have to design inclusion practices into how meetings, feedback, and stretch assignments flow, because the implicit signals are not there to compensate.
How do leaders rebuild trust after a public misstep?
Acknowledge clearly, change visibly, and follow through over time. Trust loss is fast. Trust rebuilding is slow. The companies that rebuild successfully are usually the ones willing to be specific about what went wrong, what is changing, and what employees should expect to see different.
How do you handle ER concerns that touch on senior leaders?
With clear escalation paths and protected investigation processes. ER work involving senior leaders is among the highest-risk situations any HR team handles. The companies that get this right design escalation paths in advance, ensure investigations are protected from retaliation, and document outcomes clearly. The companies that do not tend to lose credibility with their workforces the first time a senior-leader concern surfaces.
What is the role of board-level oversight in trust and inclusion?
Important and often underused. Boards that engage with workforce data, ER themes, and inclusion outcomes provide governance that is hard to get from inside the executive team alone. The companies that integrate board attention with operational work tend to produce more durable inclusion outcomes than companies that treat board engagement as ceremonial.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Jevan's experience leading people work through significant scale and complexity makes a useful argument. Inclusivity and trust are not separable from each other. Inclusion programs that do not produce trust do not produce inclusion. Trust built without inclusive practices favors only some employees and erodes among the rest. The companies that get this right design their entire operating model so that trust and inclusion reinforce each other day after day.
The deeper truth is that inclusive trust is a competitive advantage. The companies that build it attract better talent, retain it longer, and produce better decisions because more perspectives genuinely shape the work. The companies that fail to build it end up with workforces that are diverse on paper and uniform in practice, which is the worst of both worlds.
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