On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Cordero Davis, an international diversity and inclusion practitioner. Cordero has spent the past eight years across Silicon Valley and Asia building inclusive culture for technology brands including Airbnb, Facebook, Indeed, and Visa Headquarters. He has worked across more than 40 countries and 200 offices globally, and has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is a proud HBCU graduate and serves on the board of the City of Oakland and Forbes the Culture.
Cordero argued that most inclusion work in tech assumes the headquarters perspective is universal, when in fact the headquarters perspective is one regional perspective dressed up as a global one. The programs that translate across regions are the ones designed with regional input from the start. He pushed back on the assumption that inclusion is a values question with a single answer. Inclusion is a context question, in his view, and the work changes shape as it moves from San Francisco to Singapore to Shanghai. The companies producing global outcomes accept that complexity and design for it.
That conversation matters because every tech company building globally is now confronting the limits of headquarters-designed inclusion programs, and the next generation of inclusion work has to be designed differently from the start.
Why Headquarters-Designed Inclusion Programs Underperform Globally
The pattern is consistent across the industry. A San Francisco or Seattle headquarters designs an inclusion program around the categories most visible at headquarters, deploys it globally, and watches engagement on the program drop the further from headquarters the team sits. Within two years, regional teams have either built their own version of the work or quietly stopped engaging with the headquarters program.
The data on what inclusion produces is consistent across regions, but the path to it is not. McKinsey research on diversity and performance finds that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity outperform peers on profitability by 36 percent. BetterUp research on belonging shows that high belonging produces 56 percent higher job performance and 50 percent lower turnover. The outcomes hold globally. The categories that produce them vary regionally.
Companies that build inclusion programs that translate do three things. They include regional leadership in program design from day one. They define inclusion in operational terms that travel across cultures. And they instrument the work with regional cohort views that show whether the program is producing different outcomes in different geographies.
What Truly Global Inclusion Work Looks Like
Why does headquarters-designed inclusion fall flat regionally?
Because the visible identity dimensions vary by region. The categories most central in San Francisco are not the categories most central in Mumbai or Sao Paulo. Programs designed around the headquarters categories miss the regional realities, and regional employees calibrate accordingly. Inclusion that lands locally is inclusion that names the local categories.
How do you design inclusion programs that respect regional context?
By co-designing with regional leadership. Hold the operating principles constant: equitable access, fair feedback, transparent promotion, confidential intake. Let the regional categories vary. The combination produces programs that share a backbone but adapt to context.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Global Inclusion
Design principle one: separate operating principles from regional categories
Operating principles are global. Regional categories are local. Hold the operating principles constant: confidential intake, structured calibration, published metrics, executive accountability. Let the regional teams adapt the categories that fit their workforce, regulatory environment, and cultural context.
Design principle two: instrument regional outcomes alongside global ones
Use employee surveys with regional cohort views to track whether the program is producing different outcomes by geography. Pair survey data with case data from a confidential DEI hotline that adapts intake categories to regional context. The combination produces a global view that respects regional reality.
Design principle three: build regional leadership readiness alongside program rollout
Train regional leaders to handle inclusion data with the same discipline as the headquarters team. The program is only as strong as the regional manager who has to act on the findings. Without regional leadership readiness, the strongest program design produces uneven outcomes by geography.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Strong inclusion programs in technology companies use ER infrastructure as the early-warning system for regional drift. The pattern of complaints concentrated in one office. The cluster of feedback about a regional manager. The cohort of underrepresented engineers leaving from one geography. ER tooling turns those signals into program design improvements before retention metrics confirm them years later.
How does ER infrastructure support global inclusion work?
By providing structured visibility into regional patterns that headquarters-only data does not catch. The case data informs inclusion program design across geographies, refines diversity measures by region, and improves talent management decisions with evidence that reflects how employees actually experience the company in their region.
Frequently Asked Questions About Global Inclusion in Tech
How do you balance global consistency with regional adaptation?
Hold the operating principles constant and let the categories vary. The principles travel. The categories adapt. Companies that try to enforce identical categories globally produce programs that work in headquarters and feel imposed everywhere else.
What is the role of regional employee resource groups?
Central. Global ERGs anchored at headquarters often miss regional members. Regional chapters or independent regional ERGs produce participation that headquarters-only models cannot. Resource them with the same discipline as the headquarters groups.
How do you handle regions where conversation about identity is restricted?
Use the operating principles as the program backbone. Confidential intake. Fair calibration. Transparent metrics. Those work in every region. The category-specific work can adapt or wait for regional readiness. For more on inclusion design in technical organizations specifically, see our piece on diversity and inclusion in dev teams.
How long does global inclusion program rollout take?
Two to three years to reach mature operation across regions. The first year is design and pilot. The second is regional adaptation. The third is when the program produces consistent outcomes across geographies. Compressing the timeline produces uneven results.
What is the single biggest predictor of program success globally?
Regional leadership ownership. Programs that are seen as headquarters projects rarely succeed regionally. Programs that have regional executive sponsors who treat inclusion as part of their operating model produce outcomes the headquarters team can be proud of.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Cordero's framing is the most useful corrective for any global tech company that has watched a headquarters-designed inclusion program produce uneven outcomes by region. The fix is not a stronger program. The fix is co-designed work, regional leadership readiness, and operating principles that travel even when categories do not.
The companies that build that infrastructure produce inclusion outcomes the rest of the industry talks about. The companies that keep designing from headquarters produce announcements that look impressive and results that look thin.
Inclusion that translates is inclusion that was designed to translate from the start.
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