DEI: Accountability with care

Sandi Wassmer, CEO of Onvero explains why openness and trust are your real performance advantages.

Cultures that lack openness, trust and accountability are not simply uncomfortable to work in; they are detrimental to your organisation’s success. They drain energy, stifle innovation, waste the diverse talent you have worked so hard to attract, and drive your best people out the door.

The cost of low trust cultures

When authenticity, openness, and trust aren’t present, people go into self‑protection mode. They stop asking questions, stop sharing concerns, and certainly stop challenging the status quo. Instead of focusing on doing their best work, they are watching their backs, second-guessing how things will land, and trying not to get it wrong.

This shows up as:

• Decisions being escalated upwards that could easily be made closer to the work;
• Over engineered email trails written for cover, not clarity; and
• Meetings where people nod along in public and disagree in private.  

Where accountability is inconsistent or absent, the cost goes up again. If poor behaviour and underperformance are quietly tolerated, psychological safety is nowhere to be found. One person’s unchecked arrogance, rudeness, or bullying can stop an entire team from achieving success.

In such an environment, the message is clear – it doesn’t matter how you behave, as long as you deliver. This erodes standards, damages wellbeing, and sabotages your culture from the inside out.

The risk of ignoring psychological safety

In psychologically unsafe environments, people learn that it isn’t safe to make mistakes or speak up when they have concerns. They know exactly which topics are taboo and which leaders punish the messenger. So, issues are downplayed, sugar‑coated, or simply never raised at all.

Risks do not disappear because no one talks about them. They just surface later, when they are more difficult, costly, public, and painful to fix.

Innovation suffers in the same way. Without some degree of interpersonal risk, there can be no creativity, collaboration, or fresh ideas. Suggesting a new idea means being willing to be wrong, to be challenged, or to challenge others. In low-trust cultures, people keep their best thinking to themselves, as the personal cost of speaking up feels too high.

The result is an enormous waste of talent and potential. If only a narrow range of voices feel safe to contribute, you are paying for diversity you are not actually using.

How diversity and inclusion amplify culture

Diversity is often misunderstood as a compliance exercise, confined to tick‑boxes, targets, and reporting. True diversity is far wider than any single human characteristic. It’s about having a workforce that reflects the society you operate in and the communities and customers you serve. It’s also about diversity of thinking, approaches, perspectives, professional disciplines, ways of working, seniority, backgrounds, and experiences.

In cultures that lack openness, trust, and accountability, this richness is squandered. People who are already more likely to have faced discrimination or marginalisation learn very quickly whether it’s genuinely safe for them to be seen and heard. If the environment isn’t fair, equitable, and inclusive, they will either adapt by hiding who they truly are, or they will just leave.

Inclusion is a subset of culture and lives in the day‑to‑day experience of your people, across the entire employee lifecycle. It determines whether people feel seen, heard, valued, respected, and part of something bigger than themselves.

If openness and trust are absent, inclusion cannot thrive. People may be “in the room” but not really in the conversation. 

Accountability with care: the cultural sweet spot

A great culture isn’t one where everyone is always nice and no one disagrees, where leaders are endlessly positive, but never clear, or where giving people voice means that every single opinion is acted upon. It’s one where accountability sits alongside care.

This is where:

• Standards, productivity and performance remain high;
• People have reasonable workloads, the right resources, and realistic deadlines; and 
• Mistakes are used for learning and growth, not as opportunities for blame and shame.

In this environment, people are treated as individual human beings; they are given the autonomy they need to own their roles, balanced with the guidance, support and resources they need to thrive. It’s where:

• Giving constructive and celebratory feedback in support of continuous improvement is a behavioural norm;
• Development and progression opportunities are available to everyone, and
• People can navigate change and challenge without having to compromise their values or their wellbeing.

This is where you get the best return on your investment in people. Engagement rises, risk is spotted earlier, innovation increases, and your reputation as an employer of choice grows.

Building a culture of openness, trust and accountability

The good news is that none of this is accidental. Cultures where openness, trust, and accountability flourish are built intentionally, skillfully, and consistently, one interaction at a time. HR has an enormous part to play, but building a great culture must be led from the top.

So, how do you do it? Let’s get practical…

1. Make culture a leadership responsibility, not an HR initiative

Ownership of culture sits firmly with senior leaders. It cannot be delegated to HR.

Work with your executive team to:

• Position culture as the heartbeat of the organisation, not a side project;
• Make expectations around openness, trust, inclusion, and accountability explicit; and
• Build these expectations into leadership objectives, feedback, and performance reviews.  

HR can guide, support and challenge, but the ownership must sit with leaders at every level.

2. Bring values and behaviours to life

Organisational values sitting in a drawer or on a website are unhelpful. They must be woven into everyday language, decisions and behaviours. It’s essential to:

• Involve as many people as possible in defining or refreshing your values and the behaviours that bring them to life;
• Be clear about the behaviours that are absolutely unacceptable; and
• Integrate values and behaviours into recruitment, onboarding, promotion, recognition, and performance management.  

When people see that behaviour really matters, and that there are consistent consequences when it doesn’t align, trust increases.

3. Build psychological safety on purpose

Psychological safety is the shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks at work – to ask questions, raise concerns, make mistakes and challenge the way things are done. It’s the foundation of openness and trust.

Leaders and managers will need to learn to:

• Show vulnerability – owning their mistakes, asking for help, and saying “I don’t know” when they don’t have all the answers; 
• Be consultative – taking an empowering and supportive approach rather than command and control; and
• Have high-quality conversations – be curious, respectful, open, and honest.  

Alongside this, reinforce that psychological safety and accountability are not opposites. They must coexist for teams to be high‑performing.

 4. Treat diversity and inclusion as central to culture

Stop treating diversity and inclusion as something that only applies to certain groups. Inclusion is for every single one of your employees.

• Make sure your employer brand is an honest reflection of your culture, not a fantasy aspiration;
• Review your processes across the employee lifecycle for fairness, accessibility, and equity; and
• Encourage leaders to stop trying to be experts in every characteristic and instead ask people what they need to thrive.

When people see that they can be themselves, be treated fairly, and have a voice that matters, openness and trust grow. When they see that different ways of thinking and working are genuinely valued, accountability becomes shared and understood as a vital component of learning, growth, and ultimately success.