Dr. Kristen Liesch is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Tidal Equality and a Forbes-recognized DEI trailblazer. On Reimagining Company Culture, she joins us to challenge the assumption that equity is built through training. Her work is grounded in the position that culture follows systems. Train every employee on inclusion all you want, if the hiring system, the performance system, and the promotion system still produce inequity, the training was theatre. Kristen builds tools for redesigning the systems themselves.
Her work flips the usual DEI sequence on its head: change the system, then watch the culture change.
Why Training-First DEI Plateaued
Companies poured billions into DEI training between 2018 and 2022 and saw modest movement at the top of the funnel and almost none in promotion velocity for women of color. the 2024 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org confirms that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 54 Black women and 65 Latinas reach the same milestone.
Kristen's framing: training reaches individuals, but inequity is produced by systems. Until those systems are redesigned, individuals do their best inside structures that quietly undo their effort.
That is why structured assessments of pay equity, promotion rates, and attrition patterns matter more than another inclusion module.
Where To Start Redesigning
Audit the systems that allocate opportunity
Hiring, performance reviews, succession planning, and stretch assignment lists are where opportunity lives. Each one can be analyzed for bias, redesigned, and measured. Unconscious bias interventions belong inside these systems, not as standalone trainings.
Set targets that include both numbers and processes
Representation goals without process goals are vanity. Process goals without representation goals miss the point. Companies need both.
Make leaders accountable on the same cadence as revenue
Equity targets reviewed annually fail. Targets reviewed quarterly with the same rigor as revenue forecasts shift behavior.
Designing for Outcome, Not Optics
Kristen's tools push HR teams to design backwards from desired outcomes. If the goal is equitable representation in mid-management, the design starts at promotion and works backwards through performance, manager training, and broader DEI strategy.
This approach also reduces the implicit bias risk in performance reviews because it forces teams to specify what success looks like before scoring people against it.
Where Employee Relations Fits
System redesign is meaningless without a credible reporting environment. A DEI hotline and case management surface the failures of even well-designed systems and feed the data back into the next iteration.
Kristen treats the reporting infrastructure as a feedback loop, not just a compliance tool. It is how the system learns about itself.
Why This Conversation Matters Right Now
The HR field has been through three waves in the last few years: an emergency pivot to distributed work, a wave of public commitments around inclusion, and a slow correction as leaders started measuring which of those commitments actually moved retention and engagement. Conversations like this one matter because they sit on the other side of that correction. The question is no longer whether to invest in culture. The question is which culture investments produce durable results, and which ones look impressive in a press release but quietly fade.
That shift puts pressure on people leaders to be specific. Generic advice about belonging or psychological safety does not survive a budget review. The HR teams that are pulling ahead are the ones that connect cultural commitments to operating systems, instrument the resulting work, and report on outcomes in the same business-critical language the CFO uses for revenue. According to SHRM's reporting on retention strategies, the cost of underinvesting in culture shows up directly in voluntary attrition, and the math gets harder every year.
This is also where employee relations operations becomes a more visible part of the modern People organization. Employee relations is no longer a quiet compliance function; it is the data layer that tells leaders whether their stated values are being lived inside the organization, and it is increasingly the place where cultural drift first becomes visible. Companies that treat ER as part of the culture stack, rather than a separate compliance silo, get better signal earlier and can course-correct before retention numbers turn.
A Practical Playbook for HR Leaders
Translating a great podcast conversation into actual change inside your organization takes a stepwise plan, not a rallying cry. The most consistent leaders we work with run a 90-day discovery loop, a 90-day pilot, and a 90-day expansion that together compress what would otherwise be a multi-year cultural shift into a single calendar year. The discipline is not novel; the willingness to follow it through is.
Discovery is mostly listening. That means structured conversations with managers, frontline employees, and recent leavers, paired with quantitative pulls from your HRIS, ATS, and case-management system. The goal is to triangulate the real story of how the company makes decisions, who feels heard, and where opportunity quietly evaporates. Most HR teams find that the data they already have, surfaced honestly, points to two or three high-impact interventions they had not previously prioritized.
Pilots are deliberately small. Pick one team, one geography, or one stage of the employee journey and instrument it well. Set a clear hypothesis, a measurable target, and a review cadence shorter than a quarter.
Expansion is the patient work. The organizations that scale change well treat the pilot lessons as the operating manual and resist the urge to rebrand the work. Manager training, listening infrastructure, and case-management discipline travel with the program; without those layers, even successful pilots fail to take root in the rest of the company. The leaders who invest in the unglamorous machinery alongside the visible programs are the ones whose work survives the next reorganization.
The throughline across every successful version of this playbook is the same: change is treated as a system, not a moment. Hiring, performance, recognition, manager development, and reporting infrastructure all have to move together for the new culture to take root. The companies that try to redesign one piece in isolation usually find that the surrounding systems quietly pull the program back to baseline within a year.
One last note for HR leaders worried about whether the moment is right to invest. The cost of waiting always looks smaller than the cost of acting until the data comes in, and by then the talent has already left. Companies that delayed manager training a few years ago ended up paying multiples of that price as their first-line leaders left and took institutional knowledge with them. The discipline is to move at the cadence of the workforce, not the cadence of the budget cycle, and the People leaders who hold that line tend to outlast the ones who do not.
Frequently Asked Questions About Systemic DEI
Is training useless?
No, but training without system redesign produces short-lived behavior change. The two have to move together.
How long does system redesign take?
Twelve to 24 months for the first cycle. The companies that stick with it see compounding returns by year three.
Who should own the work?
It belongs to People, Operations, and Finance jointly. DEI as a stand-alone function rarely has the authority to change the systems that matter most.
What metrics matter most?
Promotion velocity, voluntary attrition, and pay equity by intersection. Representation alone is a lagging indicator.
How do you avoid backlash?
Frame the work as fairness for everyone and measure outcomes openly. Hidden programs invite suspicion; transparent ones invite participation.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Kristen's argument is that DEI is a systems-design problem disguised as a training problem. The companies that figure this out treat hiring, performance, and promotion as products to be redesigned, instrument the results, and hold leaders accountable on the same cadence as revenue. The cultures change because the systems changed first.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams instrument the systems where equity actually lives.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)