Top DEI Strategies for 2025
Joelle Emerson, CEO of Paradigm, explains how organizations can create sustainable, inclusive cultures by focusing on fair processes and avoiding performative DEI efforts. She explores the DEI backlash and highlights the importance of psychological safety in fostering high-performing teams. Learn how DEI impacts both employee engagement and long-term business success.
In today's episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we welcome Joelle Emerson, CEO and co-founder of Paradigm, a company dedicated to helping organizations build inclusive cultures that unlock the full potential of their workforce.
Joelle dives deep into the complexities of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), exploring how businesses can create long-lasting, sustainable impact through thoughtful, fair processes rather than performative measures.
🎓 In this episode, Joelle discusses:
The current DEI backlash and its implications for businesses.
How organizations can proactively create fair processes and inclusive cultures.
The role of psychological safety in high-performing teams.
The impact of DEI on employee engagement and business success.
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Joelle Emerson 0:00
Progress, especially civil rights progress, tends to be a story of forward movement followed by backlash, and I think it can be really easy to over rotate in response to either of those things. I think sometimes when you do this work and you get so much pushback, you can get a bit jaded and start from the assumption that, like, maybe everyone disagrees with you. I actually think the vast majority of people believe that representative teams are better, that fair processes predict better outcomes, inclusive cultures that treat people well are better. And so I think we do best when we start from remembering that, hey, we actually share a lot of values, and if we listen to each other and engage in meaningful dialog, we can understand more quickly how to actually drive progress so doing more listening, more assumption of shared values, and just remembering that the pendulum swing that is happening now has always happened throughout history, and you can get very caught up in that, or you can really focus on what it takes to build great cultures in the organizations you're working with.
You Joe,
Chris Rainey 1:04
welcome to show. How are you,
Joelle Emerson 1:07
I'm good. Things. Thanks for having me. How are you, I'm
Chris Rainey 1:10
good. The first thing I noticed are your your books behind you in color code.
Joelle Emerson 1:16
They are because, yes, when you're thinking about like a book that you want to find. I always think like, Oh, what is that book about?
You know, Google and how they built the company that has a yellow cover, and that's, I remember my books. And so that's how I find them. All
Chris Rainey 1:30
right? You are that says something. You're super organized. That's a good finger. That's true. Whenever I think about a book, I think about the color of it, and I totally, and I can never find them. So totally, I'm gonna take away from that now, in the future, you've learned one thing today that's good, unfortunately, like, I like the way you got the plants in between as well. It's pretty cool. That's a great Oh yeah, little bit, yeah. It's almost too much of a perfect background. If I'm being honest, how are you first and foremost? How are things?
Joelle Emerson 2:04
Things are good. I mean, it is a very interesting time in the inclusion space. So we're busy. Things are good. I'm good. It's fall. Kids are back to school. Schedules
are normalized, so I'm doing great,
Chris Rainey 2:22
nice before we jump in. Tell her one little bit more about your background and journey, and then a bit about the organization, and then we can jump in.
Joelle Emerson 2:29
Yeah. So my background is I started my career out as a civil rights lawyer. I went to law school knowing that I was really passionate about the law as sort of a tool for bringing about social change. And I did all the things to get my dream job. What I thought was my dream job, which was as a civil rights lawyer and a nonprofit, an organization here in the San Francisco Bay area where I live. And I was mostly doing litigation. So mostly I was suing companies for things like pay and promotion discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation. And it was like everything I had wanted to do, and that I had worked five years to get to law school, and then clerking, and then I'm in my dream job, and I just started to have this sort of sense that everything I was doing was coming in at the end of the life cycle of a problem. I was always coming in after a bunch of things had gone wrong, fighting with companies, and it wasn't really my job to figure out how might we fix things. And I always felt this, even when things went our way, we settled the case, we got what we wanted for our clients. I felt like I was leaving behind these organizations with many other people that worked there that were going to face many of the same barriers as a result of the policies or cultural norms or whatever the infrastructure of the organization that had led to what it was that I was litigating. And so it just felt like, you know, maybe there'd be an opportunity to take a more proactive approach. Maybe instead of, you know, suing companies after things go wrong. Maybe I thought there'd be a way to partner with companies and help them actually build better cultures where these things didn't happen. And so I didn't know exactly how to do that, but I knew that there was great research. This was about 1211, 12 years ago. There was great research being done every day on actually, like, what types of interventions really do work in organizations. So I started to talk to folks that were doing that research ultimately convinced a couple of people to leave their jobs and join me as co founders, and built our company paradigm. And you know what? What we do is we help organizations build best in class, inclusive cultures that really unlock the potential of their workforce by creating environments where people from all backgrounds and across all identities can come together and can do their best work and can really thrive. And so that is what we do. Love
Chris Rainey 4:50
it. Yeah, it must be quite frustrating. One hand, yes, you're you're holding them accountable, but you're not really solving the root cause. Things.
Joelle Emerson 5:00
Exactly. And I still think, you know, I'm still a big believer that civil rights litigation is a very important one, very important tool for social change, but it just didn't align best with my, I think personality and how what motivates me, and so, you know, I think finding actual solutions, and finding solutions at scale to, you know, not just three people, that 30 when
Chris Rainey 5:21
you just said that I was you thinking your purpose can scale in the current statution and have more impact globally. For those companies that have employees literally all over the world, that's kind of how we look at my job, at HR leaders as well, like I get to create content that, you know, it's consumed by HR and CEOs, or HR executives and CEOs around the world that if they make somebody's just even small changes, the ripple effect of that impacts millions of employees and people, people's lives all over the world. And that's kind of why me and Shane get out of bed every day. Do this podcast, do our shows and do the work that we do this. It's
Joelle Emerson 5:58
fantastic. You're spot on. I think oftentimes people think that to build better organizations, you need these big, sweeping changes, big headlines. And to your point, we see the same thing. It's often like, really small changes can have pretty massive ripple effects. And if you can see that impact at scale, yeah, it gets it gets me out of bed, that and, like, gave me a hard time about my gigantic coffee are the two things me thinking that
Chris Rainey 6:23
was what I thought was being really good. You mentioned the beginning, like there's this sort of shift in landscape right now. Dei, that's sort of the from a legislation point of view. There's a lot of being a lot of di backlash. Give us your thoughts of kind of what you're seeing, conversations you're having. Yeah.
Joelle Emerson 6:43
So I think, first of all, I think it's helpful to understand a little bit more about, like, why this backlash is happening. And I think there's a little bit of it's nuanced. There's actually a lot of stuff going on. So I think first understanding that here in the US, there has been a decades long concerted effort from conservative extremist groups that want to kind of dismantle civil rights progress generally and quote unquote, dei Diversity Equity and Inclusion. But really it's the acronym that you know they're attacking is sort of just the latest
Chris Rainey 7:22
battle. Kind of just like, Yeah, it's like, they, all of a sudden, they threw the DI label on it. And I was like,
Joelle Emerson 7:29
Well, you know, I think, I think a lot of us doing this work labeled, and I think we labeled it in an unhelpful way. I think acronyms are not particularly helpful. You know, at paradigm, we didn't originally use that acronym, but it gained prominence in 2020 we started using it because that's what everyone was using. And I think acronyms, any acronym, is sort of unhelpful in any acronym, but in this space, because it doesn't have inherent meaning, it's just three letters strung together, and that sort of enables anyone to cast their definition on it in a way that is sort of hard to dispute, like, if you tell me what dei really is all about, it's hard to dispute that because it's just three letters, right? And so I think we created that acronym, and I think it opened it, I think it opened ourselves up, actually, to some of these, you know, very extremist activists taking up the mantle. It used to be CRT in the US critical race theory. Now it's dei and so, and this is not like a conspiracy theory. These folks are very explicit about their intent. They published, you know, their goals. It's very well documented that they, you know, really, you know, it's the same people attacking Dei, like, would like to dismantle voting rights and a whole, whole bunch of other kind of civil rights, you know, laws and progress in our country, the challenges those extremists have always existed. The question, or the challenge is, why are there attacks now becoming so much more mainstream? Why are people who are very values aligned? I believe that inclusive organizations, or better organizations, getting sort of persuaded by some of these arguments. And I think, I think when we ask that question, I think we need to acknowledge that there are things that those of us advocating for this work probably could have done differently and better over the last few years. I think, you know, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the social justice movement that that really sparked, I think a lot of us, a lot of folks in the DEI space, pushing really hard for change, rightfully so. And in doing that, we may not have always left enough room for conversation, for questions, for nuance. And I think some of the approaches that we that companies took in 2020 and 2021 weren't really designed to bring everyone to the table and help them understand these concepts. And I think the problem is, as righteous as you believe your perspective is, and as righteous as it may be if you don't make space for good faith questions from people who might not agree with you intuitively and might need to be brought along a little bit more to understand what you're talking about. If you don't make space for that, I think it creates a vacuum of information. Right? That then allows for anyone to sort of fill that gap. And so if you've been in an organization that is suddenly doing all this work, you haven't really been told why. You don't really know how it's going to impact you. And then suddenly, and maybe along the way, you've been told they're made to feel guilty or bad. And then these extremist activists come along and say, Well, you're not wrong. The company is wrong, and here's what they're actually trying to do. I think you're going to be really susceptible to that. And so I think there are lessons in here for those of us doing this work about how to do it in ways that don't create that backlash.
Chris Rainey 10:34
Yeah, no, I love it's a very complex and multi layered topic, to your point, a conversation, but as well. But I can see how, during those moments that you described, that it's and quite rightly, companies put their foot on the gas, right. But by doing so caused, you know, some people to say, Whoa, you know. And then now, when they hear those things, they're like, Yeah, that's me. I'm that person. And now all of a sudden, we're seeing a lot of people revert back as well, which
Joelle Emerson 11:07
also tells me that the companies weren't doing things that were sustainable, even for them, like, if you did things in 2021 and all it takes is a little bit of backlash now, and you're like, Okay, we're gonna stop doing everything. I just think companies were doing a lot of things in 2020, and 2021, that didn't make a whole lot of sense and that weren't particularly
Chris Rainey 11:27
sustainable. I keep up appearances and tick the boxes right, like we saw it. You can see the ones like because it's true. Like there's companies that before that, that I spoke to were doing incredible work, and they're still going strong and striving. And you saw others that all of a sudden, everyone's hiring a chief diversity officer. All of a sudden they have, you know, that they're sponsoring all the events, and they're doing that. They're saying all the signals. But then the moment something like this happens, they let go their team. And I've been seeing a lot of that recently, a lot of people have been reaching out to be saying, I've been let go, you know, to take their scale back, our function, our budget, etc. We're all kind of seeing that at the moment. So you but, but do you know what the interesting part about that is your their employees see that? Yeah, and I know people personally that have, like, seen their companies, you know, retract the work that they're doing, and they've left the company. Yeah, on that point, how important is when people are thinking about working for a company? How important is dei for people thinking about entering an organization based on so you're seeing quite
Joelle Emerson 12:31
important and actually growing in importance. There was a study not too long ago that found that 75% as a glass door study, 76% I think, of millennial and younger job seekers proactively look at an organization's diversity and inclusion efforts when choosing their next job. And there are other studies that show that, you know, younger job seekers, at pretty astounding rates, look at things like leadership diversity when choosing their next job. The challenge right now is, and this is sort of the short sighted thinking of a lot of these companies. Is that, I think, right now, in this economy and a lot of industries, it's really sort of an employer's economy, you know, I especially see this in tech and industries that have, like, had just a lot of downsizing and layoffs in general. It can both be true that job seekers and employees really care about this, and that doesn't really matter to companies right now, because you want to go work somewhere else, like good luck to you. And so I think companies are having kind of making this short sighted calculus that their employees priorities don't need to matter to them, and that will only be true for a short period of time, right? The pendulum on the economy swings back and forth. And so what I try to encourage companies to do, just broadly on many topics, is Don't swing your company strategy along with whatever the swinging pendulum is of the time. Like, don't get caught up with the loudest voices in the corners of the internet, regardless of where those voices are on the spectrum, and instead just focus on, like, you know, developing your own narrative of as a company over the next five years, over the next decade, what is it going to take for us to build, you know, a successful organization? What does it look like today to build a future ready company? And if you just look at the changing demographics of the world, even taking away some of those things about how younger generations really value this stuff, which I think is important, just looking at the fact that the world is becoming more diverse. And this is true everywhere in the US. You know, we're seeing, you know, the world, the workforce, becoming far more racially and ethnically diverse, very quickly. Globally, we're seeing, you know, younger generations far more likely to identify as members of the LGBTQ community as neurodivergent. So we just have an increasingly like diverse world coming into employment, and if companies want to be able to compete, on attracting the best talent from all backgrounds, on creating cultures where people who are different from each other can come in and work together and collaborate. If. Effectively, to me, it's just like basic business hygiene to be building the skill sets to do that today. And I think if we talked about it a little bit more in that way, most organizations would see that it kind of doesn't matter what the sort of like, you know, zeitgeist of the moment is, like, I just want to build a good company. And so I do kind of have to think about these
Chris Rainey 15:17
things. Yeah, it's interesting, because during those uncertain times, is probably the time you need to double down and invest even more, right? So where you see the companies withdraw, you see the companies that are sure you make an impact actually double down, because that's, that's the time when these employees and need you most as well. So like, it's been interesting to see that, and you kind of operate from like, it aligns of your it's truly the company living. It's why it's mission, its values. And then, no matter what, you know, where it's at, the economy, whether it's the pandemic, that's your solid foundation, you can operate from, right? If employees feel like they're part of an organization I saw actually on your report that what was it people that felt like the company values dei 150% more engaged or
Joelle Emerson 16:04
engaged? Yeah, wow.
Chris Rainey 16:05
When I read that, I was like, I'm not surprised. I mean, wow, but I'm not surprised as well, yeah, valued, yeah. We
Joelle Emerson 16:14
just talk about those things. I think it just becomes so clear that companies should be prioritizing this, not from a performative standpoint, not to check a box, but as just one of many things that are investments in their long term success. Now you have to couple that with talking about strategies that actually work, because I think some companies probably grow a little bit skeptical of this because they've been doing the things that they think they've been told to do, and those things have cost them money and haven't like, quote, unquote, worked. And so I think it is important to not just talk about why building a diverse workforce and building some of this infrastructure matters, but to also say like and acknowledge like you might have been told to do some things in 2020 that actually like didn't make sense for you. And there, you know, there are a range of initiatives that we can bucket under this label of building more inclusive organizations, or building, as we talk about cultures of belonging, and not all of them. They're not all created equal. So we need to figure out which things are actually going to make sense for
Chris Rainey 17:14
you. Yeah. What is it? What is interesting? Even in my space, I interview chief diverse every day. Churros, as you know, they all have different definitions, even them very at the high especially, yes, and I'm like, well, like, imagine how your employees now feel when there's all these different definitions of things. So when you talk about, you know, creating a culture of belonging, what does that mean to you? What does it mean to create a culture of belonging? Because to many people who aren't in our space, it sounds so vague. You know,
Joelle Emerson 17:47
I think that that is just such a good question. And I think maybe I'll zoom out for a second to also talk about what I think about, like Diversity and Equity and Inclusion. Because I think like, how do we where do we map all of these concepts, and how do they relate to one another? I think is just something that people don't generally agree about. But, you know, I think about belonging. I'll start with that. So you asked about that one as the outcome that you get when organizations do what we often call dei is a shorthand well, and so you know, if you want a culture of belonging, you need representative teams so that when someone comes into your organization and looks around, they think people who look like me can be successful here. In other words, diversity teams that represent lots of different identities. If you want a culture of belonging, you have to build fair processes and practices so that people identities don't predict the success they're likely to have in your organization. You don't want an organization where you can kind of make a bet that, like women are going to cap out right around here if you come into your organization you're black, you're probably going to leave after two years. Like we would actually like to create an organization where your identity doesn't predict what's going to happen to you, your actual your ability predicts that, right? So that's what I think about, is equity. And then to create a culture of belonging, we also need to create policies, norms, practices that allow people to thrive at work, whether that is creating more fair promotion practices or better healthcare benefits or whatever that might be. And so when I think about a culture of belonging, I think about it being the output when you do those things well, and what happens when you do those things well is at an individual level, people feel better. People are more likely to say, if you send them a survey, that they feel like they belong here, and you're less likely to see that who feels positively about that varies across demographic groups. You're more likely to see a consistently high experience of belonging. And so that's kind of an individual level. And when we see that, I look at all of the things that are going into that, and that's what I call, like a culture of belonging. And the reason that belonging is such an important category, and this is something that our team has been doing research on for you know, since 2016 at least, is that it connects to all these other important things, kind of like the. Data point that you set on when people perceive that their company cares about dei they're 150% more engaged. Belonging seems to be this like construct that is very closely aligned with basically all of the other things that a performance based organization should care most about. So engagement, people feel like they belong. They're like 10x more likely to be engaged at work. They're more than twice as likely to feel that they have a sense of purpose in their work, five times more likely to feel psychologically safe at work. And people who research psychological safety, a lot of your listeners, I'm sure, know about this, but that's one of the ways that we get people to speak up with diverging opinions, to point out when something's going wrong, to challenge the norm, to feel, you know, more valued and able to speak up, and then 14 times more confident in the company's decision making. So that's one of that's like a signal of trust in an organization more confident. Yeah, about 14. I think it's like 13.7 Yeah, very, very high, very, very high. So belonging, and the reason we say it's correlated with these things is we don't want to, kind of, it's a little bit nuanced. We don't want to say that, if you get belonging, right, it drives all these things, but it's sort of at the center, if you think of like a hub and spokes of all these things, like, it's sort of like a reinforcing mechanism where belonging creates some of those things, and it's also the outcome of some of those things that's just very closely connected to all of these concepts. And so for organizations that want to unlock innovation, drive performance, create trust, drive high engagements that you reduce, you know, undesired attrition, all these things, we think about belonging as sort of this amazing path to unlocking so much of that. And so that's one of the reasons that we care a lot about belonging. And then you kind of back into what do you get to? What do you need to do to achieve belonging? Well, you do? You need to build representative teams, you need to build fair processes, you need to build policies that support everyone this, like Dei. But I think belonging is this like overarching concept that can just tie all those things together and really glue
Chris Rainey 22:00
that holds it all together.
Unknown Speaker 22:02
I love it. I
Chris Rainey 22:02
was thinking. I was reflecting on my previous company. I was there for 10 years, and I people would always ask you, like, why do you why are you still here? I'd get the recruiters calling me every year offering me more money and new opportunities. But I always say, like, just with my people, like, I feel like I belong here. I didn't use the word belonging, but I remember being like, I've I enjoy working in this environment with these people. You know, these are my people that I want to spend time with. These people I want to work with, create, innovate, go through hard times, even with people. And I think that's why I stayed for so long. It wasn't because money, because I definitely got off a lot more money. Yeah, to lead those companies wasn't because of lack of opportunity. Because, again, I kind of got the same recruiters calling me every year trying to get me to join us. Like, Nah, it's not interested. It's like, I just thought, I'm not interested.
Joelle Emerson 22:54
Could you pinpoint, like, one example of something that you think made you feel that way, like, what made you feel like, these were your people, the people the people that you wanted to work
Chris Rainey 23:03
with. Once a month, we used to do a team lunch where everyone would bring in the food that represent their ethnic background. It's cool, yeah. And we used to do like a buffet, and everyone would share my auntie like, AJ, if you ever listen to this aunt, auntie, AJ, like, she used to make the most amazing samosas. I still remember it, certainly even the feeling of remembering like that moment, and everyone would bring in their food, and we just have a team. You just became a thing. We did it once, and it just became for years, we did this once a month. And even when new people joined the team, they were like, Oh, this is like, cool. And then they get to bring some food to represent them. And talking about Dei, you know, super diverse background of people. So, yeah, you know, different foods and cultures represented, and the conversations and the bonding that happened. So that was one of the things that I think, that I've thought about and thought about that in a forever. But yeah, things, yeah, a beautiful
Joelle Emerson 24:00
example. There are, like, kind of very well researched tactics that, you know, things organizations can do to create a culture of belonging. One category is show that you value difference, and when you show that you value difference, and I think this is, like, a great example of that, you know, you can do that by, you know, celebrating people's different identities, recognizing the different holidays people are celebrating, inviting people to share their culture. It's one thing that can actually help even insulate people a bit from not maybe seeing others who look like them is feeling like, okay, maybe there aren't a million people here who look like me, but my difference is actually a value add. It's one way that you can create cultures of belonging. And I think we can talk about some of the other ways, but I think one of the really interesting things that happens when I ask people that question is there's actually a really wide range of stories people share, you know, examples of just like a thing their man. Manager said or did, or they're more bigger company events, or, you know, a way they just like intuitively felt. But what you can tell when you hear these stories is it's not just about like fitting in, and that's sometimes how people think of the concept of belonging, as you fit in, but the kind of academic definition that we tend to use is like the feeling of being securely, socially connected to others, and that secure part is really important, because you can fit in somewhere, but you're not really being yourself, but you can kind of like, you know, make yourself fit in. And your social connection means like, I feel like I'm connected here, even if we disagree sometimes, or even if I don't like a particular direction that something is going. I actually feel so securely, socially connected that I feel like I can authentic, I can be myself, and I can say that I don't like that thing, and we're going to be okay on the other side of it, like we actually can navigate conflict. We can navigate differences of opinion. And it just becomes obvious when you start to think about it, like, of course, cultures that have people feeling that way would be much healthier. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 25:57
it reminds me of a conversation a few, months back, where I had a new hire, Kedar, he's from India, just moved to the UK join us as a video editor. And then one of our meetings as a whole company, one of the team members said, Chris, you know, I completely disagree with your strategy and your view, and I think this is how we should do it. And we disagreed on that. And I remember, God brought me in a meeting. Was like, I can't believe that they said that to you, you're the CEO, and founded a company that's like, you know? And I was like, What do you mean? I mean, that's great, right? And he's like, no, no. It's like, culturally, where he works in India, you'd never say to the CEO that you're wrong and challenge but we've created that psychological safety in the company, that it's not about because I'm the CEO and founder, that I have the best idea. Then why would I hire all these amazing people? It's a diversity of thought that they all bring to the table, that when we do disagree, I'm like, go and try it anyway. Yeah, and
Joelle Emerson 27:01
maybe you, and maybe sometimes, sometimes you will have the best idea. But how can you know if you have the best idea until you've heard the others, right? You're like, you're never gonna know if your idea is never challenged. That's the best way to strengthen you. That's like, you know, lifting weights for ideas. Like, that's the way to strengthen your own idea. Figure that, like, I you want to hear the best challenge to your idea, and that's going to either tell you your idea was wrong or help you build confidence that it was right. So creating those cultures as a leader, I think, is so important, even if you know sometimes your idea is the right one. Like, what better way to know if that's true or not? Then get a good check. That's
Chris Rainey 27:32
also how you handed it right. Like, if I were to shut that down, that would have told everyone, don't bring up me. Don't do this again. Don't bring up ideas in meetings, because Chris is gonna shut me down in front of the whole team, you know? And I have done, I have made that mistake in the past. Like, Well, why would I last time so and so said something, you just shut it down. Like, yeah, hey, I listened. Learned, yeah.
Joelle Emerson 27:56
I learned that lesson too.
Chris Rainey 27:57
People don't always also want to give their feedback in a public forum, either. So I noticed that I have to give people the space wherever they want to email me their ideas or take me to one side, or, you know, because I came from a sales background where I had these sales huddles, and in the sales world, that kind of worked, because a lot of people were like, Yeah, sure, but when I started this company, I made a mistake to think and everyone wants to share their their ideas and feedback in a public forum in the same way. And I was like, Ah, it's just like, really. And then I went, when I sat down, and actually just asked people that specific question of like, how would you like me to give you feedback? Or, how would you like to give me feedback? And I was like, shocked to know that there's like, five or six different ways people wanted to receive that I was like, Ah, it's
Joelle Emerson 28:43
so true. Your your cultural background, your, you know, the job you came from, your personality, whether you're more extroverted or introverted, all these things shape, you know, how you prefer to share ideas. And I've, I've, even though I know this and I, you know, we research it, I still get it wrong, you know, sometimes. And I, you know, I have to, like, kind of relearn again and again, because there are so many combinations and permutations of how people in what environments people most thrive. But I think one of the there was a internal study that Google did several years back about what leads teams to, what are the what is, what is true about the highest performing teams at Google? And perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that teams with high psychological safety were like the highest performing teams at Google. But it wasn't that they ran their meetings or teams in any one particular way. So it wasn't that they had no interruption or they always allowed everyone to share. One of the things that was true of all these teams is they had clear norms that had been communicated to everyone about how they operated, and so there was less mystery. And so, like, there were some teams that had really open meetings and everyone talked, there were some teams where that didn't happen. And interestingly, there could be differences, and both teams could have high psychological safety, but they had to be a set of shared norms that everyone, like, knew about, and it was like, equipped to navigate. And I thought that was really interesting. So I often think about, like, there's one. Right way to do this. And it's good to remember, like, there are lots of different right ways to run an organization or run a team, but how do we let people know what the way is that we've chosen and how they can be successful within that way? And I think that's like, a really important thing to remember when you're thinking about how to build great, inclusive cultures. Oh
Chris Rainey 30:15
yeah, it's important for us to give sort of the guiding principles, but not to be, like, too controlling over how that happens, then people kind of just feel like macro managed. Then you don't. You definitely want to get innovation and diversity of thought. If you do that, I want to talk about technology Dei. You're operating at the intersection of dei and technology, quite a new emerging space, right? Yeah, as well. And one of the challenges that in all of my conversation with di leaders is that, how do you measure the ROI of Dei? It's like in every single panel we do, every single conference we do, we've got a unit, we've got an event coming up at Merck's global headquarters in a few weeks, hosted by Celeste Warren, their chief diversity officer, and we've got a panel of chief diversity officers talking about this exact topic. You know, how you measure ROI and get business buy in, etc, as well. But talk to us about the technology you mentioned a little bit at the beginning. What prob? What is the problem you're solving? And how are you helping, not just Dei, but also businesses, because really, you're solving a business problem. Yeah. So
Joelle Emerson 31:22
I'll talk a little bit about the technology, and then maybe a little bit specifically about the ROI piece, because I think one of the challenges I run into is when companies say they want to understand the ROI, some of them are like, often we're not having the same conversation. And so I think it's important to be like, What would ROI look like to you? And then we can talk about the ways that we can measure that. But on the technology side, it's very, very cool. You know, it sort of technology is just growing by leaps and bounds in ways that are allowing us to deliver better kind of products to our clients that help them deliver better experiences to their employees. So on the even on the learning side, which, this is not a new space by any stretch, providing, you know, scalable e learning. Our kind of theory of how learning should happen is, you know, companies should not, what shouldn't what you shouldn't do is bring everyone in a room for a four hour training on a topic once per year. What you should do is think about, how do we integrate really timely, relevant content into people's workflows, for example, and how do we do that in ways that are going to be accessible to our entire workforce? So we build micro learnings on a wide range of topics, you know, really whatever our clients are wanting to learn about in the US. A lot of people want to put their leaders on the election, for example, right now, and how to create an inclusive environment in a time of political stress, um, navigating general generational diversity, giving feedback across difference, all of these things. And we use technology to help our clients plug those in to the part of the workflow where someone is right about to go write a performance review. Let's deliver learning right then, and with AI now, we can also make this available in any language for all of your employees around the world in ways that are really seamless, right? So it's, you know, it's very cool. It's just, you know, I might be or a colleague of mine might be talking about giving effective feedback, and then it's just dubbed into any language, and it looks like I'm delivering the content in that language that makes it much more inclusive for people across the world to really be learning in their own language at a time that's relevant to them. And so that's, like, a very cool thing that has been unlocked by technology just in the last few months, really. So that's when you think about, like delivering learning, and when I think about what role learning plays in broader organizational culture, that is really the piece where it's like we can do all the systems and processes and policies, but at the end of the day, your culture is shaped by the people who show up to work, the ways they interact with each other, the decisions they make about each other. And so I think well timed learning can be a really effective intervention for leading those interactions to be better, those decisions to be more fair. At a sort of structural level, when we think about what are companies really like doing for inclusion, like, are they doing the right things? Often, no, we think it's really important that companies be sort of understanding all of their data and using that to make smart decisions about where they should be targeting their efforts, and that tends to be pretty time consuming and effortful and hard. And so we've been operating for a decade until very recently. What we would do is, you know, we would look at companies entire HR data taken from their HRIS. We would spend six months interviewing key stakeholders about all their processes. We know, how do you hire? How do you promote, how do you do compensation? And then we would look at things like we would run surveys and look at like sentiment. We would use all that as this input to figure out where should you be prioritizing. We've now built a software platform. It's our strategy platform where all of that can be done far more efficiently. And now, as we're adding AI to that it's like magical what what you can do, and this is going to get better over the, you know, coming years. We really prioritize this. But like, you know, imagine a world where we are getting all your HR, HRIS data. We know everything you do, in all of your policies, practices, norms, because we do a quick assessment where you tell us that you can upload your. Survey data, anything else, and instead of having an expert data scientist on our team spend 50 hours trying to digest all that, AI can do that very, very quickly, and it can tell you things like, you know, a year ago, women in this part of the business had, you know, lower sentiment on opportunities for growth. Now we're seeing women leave that part of the business at higher rates than men. And in that part of the business you have business you have very unstructured performance review and promotion processes that should be a priority to address here and then, by the way, here's guidance on how you can add structure to those processes. And you want to work with an expert at paradigm to do it. We're happy to help. But like very quickly, an AI can you know tool can take all of those disparate data sets and tell you areas to prioritize, and that's the work we've always done, but it's been, like, very time consuming and complicated, and now it's like getting far more simple. And so that's sort of the journey that we're on with our platform. And we're in the early days still, where you have to It's like delivered via chat bot, and you have to ask the chat bot questions, and over time, we're going to make it easier and easier to surface insights. The challenge is, companies don't know they like this is not like a category of software that exists. So part of our challenge is explaining to companies like, you don't need three people, data scientists and two dei experts in an outside firm to do all this. There actually is software that is capable of it. And so that's like, you know that the conversations that we'll be having over the coming years is convincing organizations that they should save a lot of resources and get a lot more accuracy by actually using software to answer some of these questions.
Chris Rainey 36:32
You know, we like doing the same thing, right? No, it's different.
Joelle Emerson 36:35
You you are doing something different because you are giving people access to from what I understand of our
Chris Rainey 36:41
agent, right? So, like we so we've got our 50,000 hours of content, we've got our partners, we've got all of the different platforms, the hcms, the hrss, the lxps. We're doing something similar. Obviously, I'm not doing it in the DI space, but now we have Atlas copilot, which is plugged into all of the hcms. It's plugged into vizier, so I can pull your people analytics data, you know, it plugs into your LMS, your LXP, and within the agent, you ask a question, and not just a text response, but it takes you to the exact second in the video that then gives you the answer, or the exact the exact line in a report, or the exact second in the podcast, and to your Point, translates it into 97% of the world's languages. But to your point as well, and from next month, we're launching voice like you, so we'll have somebody just to have a conversation. You can hear Chris in Spanish like on the podcast, but we're having the same issue as you. When we're talking to companies, half of my time in the team's time now is spent educating this category. They're like, they don't really know where we sit. They don't really know what we compete against. Like, they don't even know how to sell you're
Joelle Emerson 37:48
like, we compete against apathy. We compete against you, and a whole team of people not knowing what to do. Like, that's a week. It's only me
Chris Rainey 37:54
showing them and saying, Hey, what's your question? Like, during my demo, I wasn't like this, and I'm like, boom, here you go. And they're like, Wow, right? And now they can see we also combined it with kind of other companies, like, you know, the McKinsey's muscle consulting Harvard Business School review, sorry. And we bring in all their data in as well research. So now you've got, like, practitioner insights and perspectives from HR leaders. You've got our roster of experts. Amy Emerson, we've created an we've created an Amy emission agent based on all of her content, and she was on the show a few weeks ago. So now you can just talk to Amy Emerson's co pilot about psychological safety, and everything she's ever published and written about is in there, trained on that surface to content. So I love what you're doing, which is why I really have you on the show and share it with everyone listening right now, because there's nothing really out there. I didn't even know that you'd gone this deep already in the AI side. Yeah, incredible. And I obviously love to hear it, because I'm doing the same thing on the HR side as well. But that's the future. And like you said, it's also accessible now any language globally, we can provide customized learning at scale and meet people where they're at, yeah, as well, which is super cool. I
Joelle Emerson 39:04
think what you're doing, though, that's different and very, very cool to what we're doing is everything that we are giving clients right now. And I'll be curious to see how this goes for you. I think the way you're doing it makes so much sense for your business is like our is trained on our expertise only, and there's limits to that, right? Like we are only training, we are basically trying to create a tool that is like giving clients what they would have gotten over the last decade if they hired us
Chris Rainey 39:32
at scale. So now you can scale your scale.
Joelle Emerson 39:35
I actually think what you're doing that's very cool, and I think why we do the exact same in your boat is you're giving people access to the entire internet of expertise that has ever existed on topics that impact their workforce, and allowing like to have a to be able to ask Amy Edmondson, virtual, Amy Edmondson, any question about her work. We're not doing anything like that. And like, I would want that. Like I. Like, I think that is so fantastic. I have all her books, but, like, I don't remember the particular example she gave about a particular thing. And I think to entire enable entire HR teams, or management teams with access to all of those things. It's a bit it's aligned with what we're doing, but distinct in a way that I think is, like, very, very interesting and cool. Honestly,
Chris Rainey 40:17
it came back from the feedback of our customers. They were like, We love your content, Chris, we love the practitioner insights. We love the training. But we'd also love to combine that with the data and the research of the big companies out there. We'd also love to combine that with the world's top experts that are out there. And the last part is we also create an agent for their own organization, to your point, that plugs into all of their intranet, their LMS, yeah. So now, for the first time ever, you can bring together those four sources in a single click. Yeah, it's unbelievable to compare and contrast. We're about to launch a vendor agent. So we're getting all the biggest HR tech companies uploading all of their all of their information. So now you could be like, what's the difference between this vendor and this vendor? And this is my, my tech stack. So which one should I choose based on that? And this is the problem I'm trying to
Joelle Emerson 41:06
solve. Go and you're getting them all to do that. They're all, I mean, I guess they
Chris Rainey 41:09
have to want to, yeah, they want to be in there. They literally, or one, they're already companies, as you know, that we work with that's obviously sponsors of our shows and everything we do. But they all, yeah, they sounds pretty arrogant, but they have to be in there. If you're not in there, you don't appear as well. So we want to, we want to create like the it's going to be rewards first. We haven't named it yet. HR, marketplace powered by AI, but what's cool in there is that say, if I look at, you know, vizier people, analytics, not when you see all the features and benefits of the product. You can click another button and see like, 20 case studies of me interviewing those VPs of people analytics about how to use invisia. So cool. That's the game changer. Forget, yeah, so now you can actually hear someone that lives and breathes your job. Yeah. Talking about this is the challenges having this is what we did. This how long it took to implement. This is how we led the culture change, you know? And wow.
Joelle Emerson 42:05
Well, if you ever, if you ever want to pivot away from HR, you can just do vendor management across all B to B spaces. I would love to buy every, every product that we purchase. I would like to purchase that
Chris Rainey 42:15
way, yeah. But, um, I love, honestly, I love what you're doing and the report as well. I definitely want to share that with people. Where can people grab a copy of your your recent the report you were referring to?
Joelle Emerson 42:27
Yeah, it's, it'll be on our website today. And we can also share with you, like a QR code or copy directly to send out so you can post it with this. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 42:37
I can talk to you forever, but I know I've got let you go at some point. Parting piece of advice of those both sitting in a seat right now, but also those dei leaders of tomorrow that are going to be stepping in right now at a pretty tough time. What advice would you give to them?
Joelle Emerson 42:51
You know, I think to remember that you know, progress, especially civil rights, progress, especially in North America, especially in the US. You know, tends to be a story of, you know, forward movement followed by backlash. And I think it can be really easy to over rotate in response to either of those things, to over rotate in response to the forward progress you're seeing, or over rotate in response to progress or to backlash. And I think again, focusing on what does it take to build great cultures, and starting with the assumption that most people are aligned on that, I think sometimes when you do this work and you get so much pushback, you can get a bit jaded and start from the assumption that, like, maybe everyone disagrees with you, I actually think the vast majority of people believe that representative teams are better, that fair processes predict better outcomes. You know, people talk a lot about meritocracy. You can't get a meritocracy if you don't have fair processes, right? If you have favoritism and all these other things. Like, most people want fair processes, that inclusive cultures, that treat people well, are better. And so I think we do best when we start from remembering that, hey, we actually share a lot of values, and if we listen to each other and engage in meaningful dialog, we can understand more quickly how to actually drive progress so doing more listening, more assumption of shared values and just remembering that like this, the pendulum swing that is happening now has always happened throughout history, and you can get very caught up in that, or you can really focus on what it takes to build great cultures and the organizations you're working
Chris Rainey 44:21
with love that last question, Where can people learn more about the business? Where's the best place in the go?
Joelle Emerson 44:27
Our website, www, dot paradigm, iq.com, folks can also add me on LinkedIn. I share our latest research there, or insights or things I'm hearing from leaders all the time. And yeah, we'd love to connect with folks amazing.
Chris Rainey 44:42
And as always, everyone, wherever you're listening or watching, all of those links are going to be below, so you've got no excuse, and we're making it really easy for you. So click the link in the description. Check out a report. Make sure you go connect with Joe. Check out paradigm. But thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm glad we had this conversation, and I wish you all the best. Listen to our next speaker, what you're doing is truly we spoke earlier about the ripple effect of the work you're doing, and it's incredible. So keep it
Joelle Emerson 45:06
up. Such a fan of yours, Chris, thanks for having me. You
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Joelle Emerson, CEO and Co-founder of Paradigm.