Data-Driven DEI: Policies That Attract and Retain

Holly Danko has spent more than a decade in HR, and she has firm opinions about the gap between culture and perks. As Chief People Officer at Unison, a company in the residential real estate industry that helps homeowners access their equity without taking on additional debt or monthly payments, she has spent about four years building the kind of workplace people actually want to join and stay in. In the ninth episode of Season 3 of CultureClub X, host Nicole Patrick sat down with her to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the modern workplace.

The conversation rests on Holly's core belief: culture is not something that happens to a company by accident, and DEI is not a box you tick once a year. Both have to be intentional, strategic, and backed by data. Holly has had her thoughts on DEI featured in Forbes, Quora, and on several podcasts, and throughout the episode she keeps returning to one practical test for whether a culture is real: are you willing to hold people accountable to it?

The central question is deceptively simple. How do people leaders build a culture and a DEI strategy that genuinely attracts and retains talent, rather than one that just looks good on a careers page? Holly's answers move from the executive team down to the individual performance review, and back out to the tools leaders use to listen.

Why culture has to be intentional from the top

For Holly, the starting point is a mindset shift. Culture should never be a byproduct of how a company happens to operate. It deserves the same deliberate planning as any other part of the business, with a strategic plan of its own.

She argues that the work begins with the founder, the CEO, and the executive team deciding what kind of culture they want, then developing the vision, mission, and values and aligning the entire people strategy behind them. A high growth startup will land somewhere very different from a large established company, and that is the point: there is no default setting to inherit.

Leadership cannot delegate this. Holly is clear that the leader has to live culture and exemplify it every single day, while the people and HR teams instill it through onboarding, policies, procedures, and the way the company recognizes and rewards its team. In her framing it is a team effort, built on a plan and the discipline to work through that plan.

How do you scale culture without a copy paste framework

There is no company culture that can be lifted wholesale from another organization. Holly acknowledges that proven frameworks exist, pointing to McKinsey's 7S model and the iceberg model, but she insists they only work once they are customized for a specific company and its people.

More important than any framework is a distinction she wants every leader to internalize. Perks are not culture. A ping pong table and free snacks are pleasant, but they are not the thing itself. For Holly, culture is really about how you make decisions, how you treat people, and how you hold employees accountable to performance, and that is the foundation everything else sits on.

What holding people accountable to culture actually looks like

The most concrete idea in the episode, and the one Nicole singled out as the first time a guest had raised it, is building culture into performance reviews. Holly wants managers to ask, right in the performance conversation, whether an employee is living the company values and how they are instilling them across the company.

When people know they are being measured on values, the message lands: this matters, and it is not something the company says it likes and then sweeps under the rug for the rest of the year. Accountability, though, is the end of a long road. You cannot simply announce a set of values and start grading people. It takes an education process and an entire system to reach that point.

Why a DEI strategy is table stakes, not a nice to have

Holly does not hedge on DEI. A lack of DEI initiatives, or even a strategy, is in her view truly detrimental to a company, and never more visibly than today. The data on diverse workforces is abundant, she notes, covering profitability, diversity of thought, and reaching different customers, but the strongest reason is simpler: it is the right thing to do.

The talent market makes the stakes concrete. Holly says candidates now interview her, asking about the DEI strategy, whether there is a DEI committee, and what the executive team and board look like. People want to work somewhere they feel respected, heard, and able to be their true self, a shift she has watched accelerate through the pandemic and the move to working from home. Without a strategy, a company cannot attract talent, and it certainly cannot retain it.

She closes the point on education. Leaders cannot assume everyone already knows what to do, so teaching through outside speakers, community groups, and volunteering, alongside creating a safe space, is essential to making inclusion real.

How people leaders can keep listening despite the workload

Employees want to be heard and not feel like a cog in the machine, and Holly meets that with a deliberately data centric approach to people strategy. Surveys are the minimum. She tracks engagement and eNPS style metrics, but she is adamant that the qualitative data can matter just as much as the quantitative.

At Unison, that listening runs from quarterly company surveys to an end of year people check in, where the people team divides and conquers to hold one on ones with team members and feeds what they learn into yearly planning. Holly treats collecting employee sentiment and engagement as table stakes, the same phrase she uses for DEI. And budget is no excuse: a Google form or an Excel spreadsheet will do when a team cannot afford a dedicated tool. With so many people working from home, the water cooler conversations are gone, and leaders have to embrace technology to get that feedback.

Are policies or culture the real driver of retention

Asked what leaders should focus on to avoid DEI related attrition, Holly gives an answer she admits could be controversial: policies are the least important thing. Anti discrimination and anti retaliation rules are a legal baseline every company should already have, so they are, again, table stakes.

What actually retains people is culture: an inclusive environment where employees feel respected, enjoy their work, and see different mindsets embraced. Differences, she says, are what bring new innovation and ideas to a company and its product. When Nicole raises authenticity and the dreaded check the box exercise, Holly does not hold back, calling it one of her pet peeve phrases.

Employees can tell the difference. A check the box initiative, far from retaining people, turns out to be a great way to lose them.

Who owns culture when HR are only the custodians

Nicole asks whether HR are the custodians of engagement and culture rather than the owners, and Holly agrees precisely. Custodians, yes; owners, no. Her role as Chief People Officer is to hold everyone accountable and to have the difficult conversations when the culture slips, but ownership has to sit with the whole company.

Culture initiatives fail, she warns, when they are treated as an HR initiative. It has to run from the top down and from the bottom up, with every manager, every leader, and every team member owning it and living it every single day. Leadership and HR educate the team on what the culture is and how it should be lived; everyone else has to carry it.

What continuous listening means for the modern workplace

The thread running through the whole conversation is listening. Holly's culture is intentional, her DEI is strategic, and her accountability is real precisely because she keeps collecting signal from her people and acting on it. The pandemic and remote work have only raised the stakes, pushing continuous listening further into the spotlight.

That is where an employee listening platform earns its place. When the informal cues of an office disappear, a structured pulse survey gives leaders a reliable way to hear sentiment, spot where culture and DEI are slipping, and turn comments into action. For Holly, the goal is never the survey itself. It is a workplace where people feel respected, heard, and able to be their true self, and the data is simply how leaders keep proving they mean it.