Amid DEI Challenges, Organizations Choose to Focus on Inclusion
The term “DEI” has become a flashpoint for fierce political debate, court cases, and claims of discrimination or unfair hiring. But the concept’s individual components—diversity, equity, and inclusion—have proven business benefits.
A wide body of research has found that employees who perceive their organizations are inclusive, diverse, and equitable make better business decisions, feel more engaged at work, and less likely to look for new employment options.
Proponents of DEI practices agree that some DEI programs can be wasteful, misapplied, or uneven, but they warn against throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
“We have to acknowledge that DEI, like any other part of the business, deserves scrutiny, needs to be reviewed frequently, and needs to be focused on continuously improving,” says Allan Schweyer, principal researcher for the Human Capital Center at The Conference Board. “But it overall is a positive impact on the business bottom line.”
Schweyer leads research on how C-suites and workforces approach challenges in today’s business environment. In light of recent executive orders against DEI programs in the United States government and private corporations, The Conference Board polled senior leaders in Q1 2025 about their next steps.
Early results showed that corporate DEI programs were already significantly impacted by the orders, and more than half of organizations are responding by changing their efforts’ names, if not their efforts’ intentions. For example, The Conference Board changed the name of its DEI umbrella to “Opportunity and Access.”
The negative response to DEI programs has been brewing for years. But in a Q3 2024 poll, most senior leaders said that they were “either continuing with the same degree of investment or expanding that investment despite the backlash,” Schweyer says.
Shareholders seemed to hold similar views. Even though 2024 saw the number of anti-DEI proposals from shareholders double, support for adopting them remained minimal at 1.7 percent—the vast majority of shareholders voted those proposals down to keep DEI on the books, Schweyer says. At the end of February 2025, for instance, shareholders nixed a proposal to scrap Apple’s DEI program.
Tectonic changes in government priorities and pressures might change that equation for some organizations, though.
The new Trump administration in the United States is focusing on “illegal DEI,” which remains fairly vague—especially where it pertains to private organizations. But Schweyer says that organizations are looking at DEI efforts along a spectrum of risk, from high-risk diverse hiring goals to low-risk workplace culture efforts like training around inclusion, belonging, and respect.
“What CEOs are telling us is that they want to protect the organization,” he explains. “They want to continue the good work of DEI. If they get locked into some legal battle, that’s going to detract from the good work they could do.”
It’s not just a morals- or values-based case to continue work around diversity, inclusion, belonging, and access. There are strong, proven business cases to support these components. So far, private sector leaders seem to be focusing on inclusion as the pillar of DEI that will carry its momentum forward.
The Business Case for Inclusion
Overall, inclusion means that people feel respected, valued, and safe as their authentic selves at work. This applies to everyone, not just specific demographic groups, Schweyer says.
In inclusive workplaces, remote workers feel just as valued as in-person counterparts, older and younger workers feel heard, and introverts are given as much room to contribute as extroverts.
Inclusive workplace cultures are generally more innovative, with engaged workers who stay with the organization longer. Workers are also making decisions about their employment choices based on workplace culture and diversity.
The Conference Board research in 2024 found that two-thirds of individual contributors (workers at the manager level or below) said DEI had a positive personal impact. Employees also said they find DEI vital for workplace culture—such as improving their sense of belonging (71 percent), enhancing engagement (62 percent), and enhancing collaboration and retention (59 percent).
DEI also plays a role in workers’ employment decisions, especially among certain groups. Forty-nine percent of women and 56 percent of Black survey respondents said they wouldn’t work for a company that didn’t take DEI seriously.
In the face of legal and compliance challenges, though, many organizations are reframing DEI to reflect broader concepts of inclusion, belonging, and engagement. This gets at many of the same business imperatives without having to dig into the cultural nuance behind terms like equity or battle political perceptions around diversity initiatives.
Inclusive decision-making. So, you want to tackle a major business challenge? Take notes from the teams who climbed Mount Everest.
The 1996 Everest climbing season was a deadly one; 12 people died during their climbs, including eight on a single day during a blizzard. Researchers have analyzed how the expeditions that day went so wrong.
Leadership analysis from the Harvard Business School determined that insufficient debate among team members on dangerous expeditions like the 1996 one can diminish critical evaluation of plans, which then go unchallenged, even if the ideas are flawed. Decisions developed with input from a variety of stakeholders—mountain climbers and businesspeople alike—are usually more resilient.
“You need all those individuals to be your eyes, your ears, and be able to feed information forward,” says Rachel Briggs, OBE, cofounder and CEO of The Clarity Factory, which researches effective leadership in the security and risk management profession.
When homogeneous decision-makers look at a problem, they often look through a narrow lens. Inclusive teams make better business decisions because they can evaluate complex situations from multiple viewpoints, according to 2017 research from decision intelligence firm Cloverpop. The researchers determined when a decision was better based on how often the decision-maker changed his or her mind based on the input of others and whether or not the decision was framed with clear goals, adequate information, and multipole alternatives.
While all teams outperformed individual contributors in making effective business decisions, gender-diverse teams outperformed individuals 73 percent of the time, researchers found. Teams with a wide range of ages and geographic locations made better business decisions 87 percent of the time.
2019 research from Gartner found that 75 percent of organizations with frontline decision-making teams that reflect a diverse and inclusive culture will exceed their financial targets. Gender-diverse and inclusive teams outperformed less inclusive teams by 50 percent on average.
Effective decision-making teams leverage differences in age, cognitive diversity, and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as race and gender.
“Diversity doesn’t mean racial or gender exclusively—it means people who look like me,” says Schweyer, who is 60 years old.
Inclusive culture for retention. “Our research and others’ are able to tie inclusion to engagement and satisfaction, which is then tied to retention,” Schweyer says. “Even if you just include the money that’s saved by not losing people, that’s a business bottom line, right? So, if by having an inclusive culture where people feel like they’re being heard, where they feel like they belong and they’re respected, and that causes attribution to drop from 10 percent to 8 percent, at a big company that’s millions of dollars every year.”
Employees who perceived they worked at a more inclusive workplace reported healthier work boundaries and lower burnout levels. They were less likely to say they were looking for other jobs, according to research from the Center for Creative Leadership.
Innovate together. Different perspectives bring about fresh ideas and solutions, research shows. In a complex operating environment like security, this is even more essential.
In 2023, Briggs and Paul Sizemore published a study with ASIS International about diversity and inclusion in corporate security. They found that the industry had integrated in people of diverse identities and perspectives, but there was plenty of room to grow.
“The next five to 10 years are going to be marked by and characterized by disruptive innovation with in the security industry,” Briggs told Security Management in 2023. “It will be the security departments that can disruptively innovate that will really win the corporate security game…. If you don’t have a diverse team, you don’t stand a chance of being able to think as differently as you need to think to come up with a new set of solutions that can cope with what is arguably one of the most difficult security environments that we’ve seen in my lifetime and arguably for many generations.”
In 2025, the business world is contending with volatility, geopolitical stressors, emerging threats, and technological innovation, which leads to an urgent need to innovate, Briggs says.
Bringing in different voices to help with that innovation goes beyond hiring. Security can seek input from other departments that might have little security experience but deep knowledge about business priorities or different geographies. Or security leaders can purposefully set up teams and task forces based on interpersonal dynamics so that each group can think critically and challenge itself.
“For security leaders today, innovation has to be the game,” Briggs says. “And you don’t achieve that unless you have a mixed team but also, importantly, you foster inclusion and belonging, which means that all of those people with their different talents are able to have their say and contribute fully.”
This goes to the heart of the issue. Especially in today’s complex operating environment, she says, security cannot innovate alone.
Claire Meyer is editor-in-chief of Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or via email at [email protected].
