As corporate America slashes its inclusion budgets, UK bosses are tempted to follow suit, reports the Telegraph.
Chief executives are beginning to realise that they didn’t quite think things through when first setting up their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, according to a co-founder of one of the UK’s most active LGBT charities, Stonewall.
Simon Fanshawe, who was one of six activists to set up the group, has said he is increasingly seeing a shift in attitude over the role diversity schemes should have in corporate Britain.
The report continues:
“It seemed self-evidently right [in the past] but now they’re saying, ‘Actually I’m not convinced that a high-street retailer should take a position on anti-conversion therapy,” he says. “Because what’s that got to do with the price of beans?’”
It is a debate that is being had across boardrooms across the country, as HR chiefs admit among themselves that some of their peers have embarked on passion projects that have little to do with the workplace.
As some of America’s largest companies slash their DEI budgets, UK-based executives are scratching their heads over which way to go next.
Some worry that the advice they have taken on diversity could have misrepresented equality laws, placing little scrutiny on unaccredited external training providers.
Others fear that DEI teams are simply silencing anyone with a different opinion rather than seeking to improve the diversity of their employees.
It was all “DEI, jolly good” to begin with, notes Fanshawe, but few really considered how these programs would work in practice.
The equality consultant believes that a lot of programmes are not effective or have been used as a “platform for activism”.
He thinks the charity he helped set up in 1989 has become part of the problem by demonising anyone who doesn’t agree with its gender policies.
“I’ve always said the problem for Stonewall is not what they campaign on but how they campaign,” says Fanshawe. “I’m fed up with being told by Stonewall that I’m the wrong kind of gay.”
DEI initiatives overall are already slipping down the ladder of importance.
Zoom told staff earlier this year that it had dismantled its DEI team amid layoffs, which reflected a wider trend across the West.
Overall, the number of DEI jobs in America had shrunk 8pc during the first six weeks of 2024, data sourced by Revelio Labs and The Washington Post showed in February.
This stemmed from the likes of Meta, Tesla, Lyft and X all slashing their respective DEI teams by 50pc or more.
Sensing the changes, UK-based chief executives and HR directors are looking for discrete advice. Tanya de Grunwald, who advises companies on HR issues, is putting together a roadmap for boardrooms which feel lost about what to do next.
Her list of issues that need to be addressed is getting longer by the day, she says, from lack of adequate legal training to workshops that never get scrutinised by a third party.
“DEI started with good intentions but it’s clear that not enough guardrails were put in place, making it vulnerable to politicisation,” says de Grunwald, arguing that there needs to be more nuance in the conversation.
Worth reading in full.
At the FSU we’ve identified similar trends at work below boardroom level. Contrary to the popular slogan that expenditure on these training opportunities is ‘just good business’, the FSU’s latest research report reveals that it operates, in effect, as an ‘EDI Tax’.
According to a survey of a representative sample of UK workers undertaken on behalf of the FSU, many ambitious employees and senior managers are now leaving companies because of the excessive time they’re expected to spend on these courses. Ironically, they prove most irksome to those they purport to benefit, i.e., members of the LGBTQ+ community and ethnic minorities.
Given the extent of self-censorship revealed by our research report, The EDI Tax, many UK employees are also thinking twice before contributing to workplace conversations. Genuine diversity of thought is of course required for any organisation to succeed – but in the NHS, where patients’ health is at stake, encouraging a culture of silence to creep-in risks materially affecting the quality of care and treatment on offer.
These research findings are consistent with the report of the Inclusion at Work panel commissioned by the UK’s Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch. Following interviews with 100 people representing 55 organisations, the report noted a “lack of accessible, plain-language, robust data on the efficacy of D&I [Diversity & Inclusion] interventions”, as well as a lack of evidence that these interventions were effective in achieving their purported objectives.
In December 2020, the government’s Behavioural Insights Team came to a similar conclusion in its review of unconscious bias training. The Written Ministerial Statement accompanying that study noted that, “Despite a growing diversity training industry and increased adoption of unconscious bias programmes, a strong body of evidence has emerged that shows that such training has no sustained impact on behaviour and may even be counterproductive”.
