Employers are backing away from EDI — a monster they cannot tame

If you asked someone in all seriousness at work to “explore micro-aggressions on the intersection of the protected characteristics” they would, as my family euphemism has it, tell you to go to the Foreign Office.
Such unintelligible word salads are not the only reason that EDI, DEI and all the other in-the-know acronyms for equality, diversity and inclusion has fallen into serious disrepute with senior leaders.
In the States over the past few months, Harley Davidson, who gave you the two-wheeled midlife crisis, Jack Daniels, the people whose Postcards from Lynchburg ads accompany your every Tube journey, John Deere tractors, Molson Coors beer and, yes, even the formerly ultra-progressive Microsoft are backing off their investment in diversity.
Because it is simply not delivering value to staff, customers and shareholders.
The question is: how did this happen? Leaders originally pursued diversity because it seemed to be the “right thing to do”. They wanted to tackle discrimination and open up opportunity for more people in their companies. But they mostly devolved the work to their Human Resource functions. Unfortunately, it then took on a life of its own and became a monster they now have great difficulty in taming.
Those most active on the agenda in their staff grabbed the supermarket trolley and set off down the diversity aisle chucking in lanyards, religious festival calendars, staff identity networks, days of action, logos photoshopped to back endless causes, charters, posters, stickers and the rest.
Consequently, diversity became a proforma set of activities, an insistence on certain sorts of language and a record playing the same mixtape over and over, rather than actually focusing on the ability of their company to achieve its particular goals.
It got some conversations started, but it changed practically nothing meaningful for customers, patients, staff or shareholders — other than building up divisions and irritation. Because of this, leaders are now asking whether EDI — equality, diversity and inclusion — in the way it is commonly practised, delivers either value for money or genuine change.
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I’d picked these themes up anecdotally in conversations I’d been having over the last year with senior leaders, in my role as a practical adviser on such matters to companies and organisations.
My guess was it was probably a pretty widespread view. So my company, Diversity by Design, together with the Ben Delo Foundation, decided to find out.
The result of our efforts is a report, Flying Flags and Ticking Boxes — what went wrong with EDI and how leaders can fix it, which we publish today. We spoke to FTSE 100 company chairs and vice-chancellors of universities, chief executives, heads of HR and other senior executives from banks, energy companies, utilities, construction, housing and the NHS.
My hunch turned out to be right. Leaders want EDI to be taken off the political football pitch. They feel it has become caught between an “anti-woke” gang who want to tear the whole edifice down and self-described “progressives”, who want to impose rules on their colleagues in the name of EDI that are dogmatic, and (to many of their teammates) frankly daft. The result of that is that diversity is just losing credibility in the eyes of too many staff.
These leaders are saying they want to “take back control” of work on diversity so that it directly serves the goals of their organisation. They want politicians and commentators of the populist right and the placard-waving left to vacate the space, along with staff groups based on identity who have been diverted into partisan activism. As one leader put it: “EDI is about talent, not politics.”
The trouble partly kicked off when companies responded to campaigns like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. They issued supportive statements under an EDI headline with an easy — but, it turned out, misplaced — confidence. While their staff are quite clear that sexism and racism should be tackled at work, there is an immense range of views about how this should be done. The mindset of these campaigns is basically ideological and they operate from single perspectives which, by definition, do not appeal to all staff. People do not want diversity to be pursued in a way that divides men from women or black from white.
The damage has been jet-fuelled by identity politics and has become even more apparent with the toxicity around the trans debate and the Israel-Hamas war.
Imposing the use of pronouns or gender-neutral loos, for instance, because some of your staff on one side of that profound chasm of views tells you it is “more inclusive”, will inevitably generate antagonism on the other side. And it’s pretty obvious to all but the most activist in your staff that anything but company neutrality about Israel and Hamas is, by definition, going to divide your staff and your customers and stakeholders.
As a result, many leaders have already actively taken a position of company impartiality on issues that are unrelated to their organisation’s core purpose, and they have sought to remove discussion of these kind of divisive topics from formal work platforms and emails.
They want to stick to the knitting.
Senior leaders recognise that there is a broad range of opinions within their companies. They want to steer their organisations in such a way that they don’t alienate staff from each other. For that reason, they are now harbouring anxieties about whether there is any positive value in what has become the automatic diversity initiative which is to set up so-called “staff networks” whose membership is organised around whether they are black, or gay or female. They recognise that people from these groups can face genuine discrimination but that dividing people into camps by their sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or some kind of alphabetical formula is in danger of just causing division and exclusion. They become “grumble hubs” either focused on grievances or on activism.
There is a practical way through this, as our report concludes. The only way EDI brings value to a company is if it is used as an approach to unlock talent to achieve the goals of the business. Then, in order to engage all staff in a collective effort, leaders need to recognise explicitly that there will be a huge range of views among staff and that the last thing they need to do is be forced to agree with each other. Instead leaders need to encourage the expression of views by staff that help to offer alternative perspectives and that counter groupthink. Diversity of thought, regardless of groups or categories, is the real win for businesses. Inclusion does not mean: think like this, speak like this and behave like this. Otherwise we’ll exclude you.
Leaders are finding it difficult to say no to what seem like the current “progressive” causes. One commented to me the other day that “young people are more radical than us about these things”. His example? His teenage daughters. Hardly the right benchmark for dealing with adult members of staff.
It seems pretty ironic that it has to be said, but diversity is about difference, not the wholesale imposition of seemingly more enlightened, but always singular, views.
The message is clear. Work on diversity needs a reset. To amplify this change, leaders need space to discuss how.
Regulators like the FCA and Ofcom, the representative business organisations like the CBI and Institute of Directors, the professional networks like the CIPD, should open up an urgent space for this debate with their members and come to the rescue of practical and effective EDI.
The one-sided narratives for or against EDI — especially on race, sex and gender — should be challenged to decouple it from political activism.
EDI needs to return to the task of creating effective benefits for companies in relation to talent and opportunity, and to prevent the arrival of the wrecking balls from left or right that might otherwise raze it to the ground.
The Report “Flying Flags and Ticking Boxes — what went wrong with EDI and how leaders can fix it” is published by DiversitybyDesign.co.uk