enablement programBuilding Belonging Across Cultures in a Global Data Science Company
9 regional summits — 9 weeks — 78% voluntary workforce attendance
The Situation
A fast-scaling SaaS company of over 2,000 employees across 14+ countries refreshed their Gallup employee engagement survey adding a specific lens on inclusion and wellbeing. The open-text responses came back loud: over 650 written comments. Employee network groups raised similar concerns through their own channels, and a review of HR and employee-relations casework showed the same pattern from a different angle, with small everyday exclusionary behavior accumulating into the more serious incidents that eventually reach HR.
The company had invested in diversity work before. What it hadn't done was connect that data to a company-wide learning experience that made behavior change concrete and gave every region, not just headquarters, equal standing in it.
The Discovery
Before building any content, the design pulled from three separate evidence sources rather than starting from a generic inclusion curriculum:
The 650+ open-text survey comments, coded for recurring patterns rather than read as anecdotal color
Direct input from employee network groups on the challenges specific to their remit
A review of HR and employee-relations casework, showing how everyday exclusion compounds into formal complaints
A call went out asking colleagues to anonymously submit their own stories of inclusion and exclusion at the company. Those stories, not invented case studies, became the spine of every module. Internal framing was explicit that there were no generic examples used and everything was based on real examples within the company.
That diagnostic work reframed the brief. The presenting problem was "we need diversity training." What the data actually showed was a gap between representation (who's in the room) and belonging (whether people in the room feel safe enough to contribute), and that gap was widest for regions furthest from headquarters' time zone and working norms, a pattern later confirmed by attendees themselves during rollout.
💡 Click images to expand.
“The team felt valued and listened to. We have to recognize efforts like this when we behave like a truly inclusive, global company... the facilitators were great, super well prepared and passionate about the topic, great discussions with the team. So, on behalf of the APAC team, our thank you.”
The Solution
Nine regional summits, each run as two consecutive half-days, scheduled across nine weeks to cover UK&I/EMEA (four cohorts), India (two cohorts), APAC, North America, and LATAM, open to anyone regardless of location so no one had to wait for their own region's date. Built around four stages:
Awareness — a physical "Check Your Experience" exercise, where participants lower a finger for each privilege-revealing question they answer yes to, followed by the Belonging Behaviour Spectrum: a red, amber, and green model distinguishing deliberate harmful behavior, unintentional but harmful behavior, and behavior that actively builds inclusion.
Authenticity — using the anonymized employee stories to teach the difference between microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations, and working through Intent vs. Impact to separate defending one's own intentions from addressing the actual harm caused.
Accountability — a trivia-format exercise applying the spectrum to real workplace scenarios, then the Open the Front Door framework (Observe, Think, Feel, Desire) for having the conversation whether you're the one harmed, the one who witnessed it, or the one who caused it.
Application — small-group work translating the concepts into three to five specific green-zone behaviors each participant committed to trying in the following month, scheduled onto an actual calendar.
Facilitators modeled the content itself, opening each summit by naming their own identity, privilege, and working-style preferences before asking participants to do the same. A companion workbook let participants capture reflection privately alongside the live session. A resources hub extended the work past the summits, curating research on why belonging affects business outcomes alongside a working library on allyship, inclusive language, and neurodiversity, sourced partly from attendees themselves. Summits fed into embed sessions run with intact teams over the following three months.
The Results
9 summits delivered across 6 regions in 9 weeks, reaching 78% of the workforce on a fully voluntary basis, with no mandate and no compliance requirement
A 0.03 mean-score increase in the "Do I belong here?" domain of the company's Gallup engagement survey, year over year following the program.
Sample page from the supporting employee workbook. Click to expand.