Inclusion as a Design Challenge: Redesigning Systems for Fair Opportunity with Juliana Luque

People Strategy Leader Juliana Luque on why DEI is a business capability, not a sentiment, and how to measure what actually matters

In an era where the term "DEI" has become politically charged and commercially contested, the most effective organizations are not abandoning the work, they're evolving the language while strengthening the systems that create fair opportunity. But does changing the vocabulary actually change the outcomes?

Today's guest has spent 18+ years testing that hypothesis across continents, industries, and cultures. Juliana Luque is a People Strategy Leader whose career spans EY, AXA Colpatria, and RBC, where she specialized in building inclusive cultures, strengthening leadership capabilities, and designing talent strategies that enable organizations and people to thrive.

Based in Hamburg and working across time zones, Juliana now advises through Good Works Consulting, serves as a subject matter expert for Emeritus delivering executive education with leading global universities, and leads The No-Mad Life Project, supporting globally mobile professionals navigating identity, belonging, and career transitions. In this conversation, Juliana challenges us to move beyond the dictionary definitions and awareness training that have defined DEI for too long.

Interview with Juliana Luque

1. How do you define diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what role do these principles play in overall business strategy?

I want to resist the instinct to give a dictionary definition, because that's exactly where most organizations get stuck. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not synonyms or a checklist. They're three distinct, mutually reinforcing conditions.

Diversity is who is represented. Equity is whether systems and everyday decisions ensure identity doesn't predict opportunity. Inclusion is how people actually experience the workplace day to day, heard, respected, able to contribute fully.

I'd add a fourth word: belonging, which Gallup describes as the alignment between an employee's identity and the organization they work for. You can have diversity without equity, or equity without inclusion. All four have to work together.

Where I differ from how this is often discussed publicly: I refuse to treat DEI as a moral statement or a communications exercise. It's a business capability, with three dimensions any leadership team should be able to articulate.

Legal and governance: in most jurisdictions, employment law prohibits discrimination, so dismantling inclusion infrastructure without strengthening core fairness practices increases legal exposure rather than reducing it.

Organizational performance: engagement, psychological safety, innovation quality, and customer insight all track with how fairly and inclusively people feel treated.

Talent sustainability: as workforces grow more diverse, mobile, and digitally distributed, genuine inclusion becomes the engine of an organization's ability to attract and keep the people it needs.

I'm aware that in today's climate, political and regulatory pressure, particularly stemming from the US, has made many organizations reluctant to name DEI outright, let alone keep pushing to uncover its impact at different levels: workplace culture, individual employees, the organization as a whole.

What's notable is that the retreat is often more visible than it is real. Recent research has found that while a majority of companies signalled a public pullback from DEI, only a minority had actually reduced inclusion work internally. That gap tells me the substance hasn't disappeared, only the language has become more contested. So the need for reframing is real, and I think we have to acknowledge it directly, whether that means moving away from the term "DEI" toward outcome-based language, or continuing to use it as an analytical term even as the corporate world rebrands around it. What matters most is this: whatever you call it, if you can't name three to five concrete outcomes, a specific pay gap closed, representation raised in a specific pipeline, an inclusion score moved, you don't have a strategy. You have a sentiment.

2. Can you share a personal experience that shaped your perspective on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace?

Three parts of my own identity have taught me the most about how exclusion operates in practice. I grew up in a small town in Colombia and later moved to the capital for my studies and early career. That was my first lesson in how something as simple as where you come from can shape assumptions about your ability before you have the opportunity to demonstrate it.

As a woman advancing my career in male-dominated industries, I experienced another version of the same dynamic: the credibility that some people receive by default often has to be earned repeatedly by others.

Later, when I moved to North America for my MBA and joined a research project examining how "visible minority" status is categorized and self-identified across federally regulated industries, I encountered something new: being formally classified by race for the first time in my life. That experience deepened my understanding of how systems define identity and shape people's experiences of belonging.

None of these experiences were dramatic. That is precisely the point. Exclusion rarely appears as explicit hostility. More often, it shows up through everyday defaults: who receives the benefit of the doubt, whose experiences are considered the norm, and which systems were designed with certain people in mind.

Experiencing these dynamics across different identities and countries is why I do not approach DEI as a matter of intentions alone. I see it as a design challenge: identify the defaults that create unequal outcomes, and redesign the systems to create greater opportunity and belonging.

3. What are the biggest challenges your company — and companies broadly — have faced when implementing DEI initiatives, and how have you addressed them?

I see three major challenges.

1. The DEI paradox: the need has not disappeared, but the language has become more complicated.

Organizations are navigating a moment where employees continue to expect fairness, respect, and inclusion, while many leaders feel less comfortable using the term "DEI." The risk is that companies focus on changing the language instead of improving the systems behind it.

The distinction is important. Reframing the work around broader concepts such as belonging, fairness, and talent excellence can be a meaningful evolution if the underlying commitments remain intact. But changing the terminology without changing the decisions, processes, and outcomes becomes a credibility problem. Employees do not evaluate commitment based on what companies call the work. They evaluate it based on whether they experience fairness in hiring, development, advancement, and everyday interactions.

2. Moving from awareness to system change.

For many years, organizations relied heavily on training and awareness programs. While education has a role, it rarely changes outcomes by itself. The organizations making progress are looking deeper at how decisions are made.

They are asking questions such as:

• Are hiring processes structured to reduce bias?

• Are promotion criteria clear and consistently applied?

• Do compensation systems produce equitable outcomes?

• Do leaders have accountability for building inclusive teams?

The biggest shift is moving from trying to change people's beliefs to redesigning the systems where decisions happen.

3. Building accountability beyond HR.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that DEI cannot succeed if it belongs only to HR or a specialized team. Those teams can provide expertise, data, and guidance, but they do not control every decision that shapes opportunity.

Sustainable progress requires shared ownership:

• Executives set direction and establish accountability.

• Business leaders own outcomes within their teams.

• HR provides the data, tools, and expertise to support better decisions.

• Employees provide insights into how systems are experienced in practice.

The organizations that create lasting change treat inclusion as a business capability, not a standalone initiative. The question is no longer whether companies have a DEI program. The question is whether they have built talent systems that consistently create fair opportunities.

That is the standard I encourage organizations to pursue: less focus on the label, more focus on the design of the system and the outcomes it produces.

4. How do you measure the success and impact of DEI efforts across different levels of the organization?

For years, the default answer to this question was training hours delivered, number of employee resource groups, or attendance at awareness events. Those are activity metrics, not outcome metrics, and the research is now fairly blunt about their limits: SHRM's DEI benchmarking research found that organizations it classifies as "DEI leaders" — the most successful third of respondents — are more than twice as likely as laggard organizations to track diversity, equity, and inclusion together rather than in isolation, four times as likely to regularly audit promotion decisions for equity, and four times as likely to audit performance evaluations for equity. In other words, what separates organizations that make real progress from those that stall is not how much they talk about DEI, but whether they systematically examine the decisions and systems where inequity is actually produced, including hiring, pay, and promotion practices.

I encourage organizations to build a small, focused, and honest set of KPIs across four key areas. These measures help leaders understand not only who is represented in the organization, but also whether their systems are fair, how employees experience the workplace, and whether those efforts are leading to better outcomes.

• Representation metrics: Who is in the organization? These metrics show representation across levels, functions, and geographies. They help leaders understand who is present in the workforce and where gaps may exist.

• Process metrics: Are systems designed to support fairness? These measures examine whether organizational practices are equitable by design, not just by intention. Examples include the percentage of roles using structured interviews and the completion rate of pay equity analyses.

• Experience metrics: How do employees experience the workplace? These metrics capture employee perceptions of inclusion, belonging, psychological safety, and trust in leadership. They reveal whether employees feel valued, heard, and able to contribute.

• Outcome metrics: Are efforts creating fairer results over time? These measures assess whether improvements in representation, processes, and employee experience are translating into measurable outcomes. Examples include turnover rates by demographic group, promotion velocity, and trends in discrimination complaints.

The goal is not to measure everything. The next generation of DEI measurement moves beyond representation to understanding how opportunity is created and sustained across hiring, development, advancement, and leadership.

Measurement alone does not create change. The organizations making progress are using data to redesign decisions, challenge assumptions, and hold leaders accountable.

One important caveat is that transparency has not kept pace with measurement. Many organizations have improved their internal tracking, but fewer are willing to share progress publicly or connect accountability to leadership outcomes. The next evolution of DEI is moving from measurement to transparency, accountability, and measurable impact.

5. In what ways has fostering a more diverse and inclusive workplace influenced employee engagement, innovation, or overall business performance?

I think it is important to be precise here. The strongest case for DEI is not that diversity automatically produces better financial results. That claim is often overstated, and when organizations rely on it too heavily, they create unrealistic expectations and weaken the credibility of the work.

What the evidence shows more consistently is the relationship between inclusion, psychological safety, engagement, and performance.

Organizations perform better when people feel respected, able to contribute, and confident that their perspectives are valued. Research from Deloitte and Gallup highlights that inclusive cultures are associated with stronger innovation, higher performance, and greater employee engagement. The mechanism is not diversity alone. It is what diversity enables when organizations create the conditions for people to contribute fully.

There is also growing evidence that different types of diversity create different benefits. Cognitive diversity, for example, can improve problem-solving by bringing different perspectives, experiences, and approaches to complex challenges. The key question is not simply who is represented, but whether organizations are able to use those differences effectively.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that the relationship between executive-team demographic diversity and financial performance is more complex. Some studies show a positive correlation, while others challenge whether the relationship is causal. The research does not support the idea that diversity alone guarantees better financial outcomes.

The more durable business case is this: organizations succeed when they build environments where people can perform at their best. Fair systems, inclusive leadership, and psychological safety influence how people collaborate, innovate, stay, and contribute.

For me, the question is not whether DEI is a financial strategy. It is whether organizations have the systems and leadership practices that allow all available talent to create value. When those systems are strong, better business outcomes are often the result.