> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.peoplealliance.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 7 DEI initiatives for People Ops that actually move the needle in 2026 - URL: https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/7-dei-initiatives-for-people-ops/ - Published: 2026-08-26T12:21:05.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-26T12:21:05.000Z - Description: As a People Ops leader, your job isn't to win an argument about whether DEI is politically popular this quarter, but to build a workplace where talented people, whoever they are, can do their best work and see a real path forward. - Author: Teresa Garanhel - Tags: Diversity, Equality, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB), Articles ## **Why DEI still belongs on your people ops roadmap in 2026** 80% of employees and business leaders say [their organizations remain committed to DEI](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/06/16/is-dei-dead-not-according-to-new-catalyst-data-on-workplace-inclusion/?ref=peoplealliance.com) and continue to support workplace inclusion efforts, despite the current political climate. That's not a fringe opinion inside HR circles; that's close to consensus. There's also a hard commercial case sitting right underneath the cultural one. 81% of organizational leaders in a [Catalyst study](https://www.catalyst.org/about/newsroom/2025/dei-scaleback-risks-study?ref=peoplealliance.com) say DEI programs lead to stronger customer loyalty, and 77% link DEI to financial performance. In addition, 76% of employees (and 86% of Gen Z) are more likely to stay with a company that supports DEI. If your organization sells to consumers at all, that's revenue you're leaving on the table by going quiet. And then there's the legal exposure angle, which tends to get leadership's attention faster than anything else. 68% of C-suite leaders and 65% of legal leaders believe that “moving away from DEI” would actually increase their organization's legal risk. In other words, retreating isn't the safe option some executives assume it is. None of this means you should keep every legacy program exactly as it was in 2021\. It means you should be deliberate about where the real value sits. [Positive workplace culture: Why it matters & how to get it rightWant to fix turnover, burnout, and bad vibes? Start here. Uncover the key elements of a positive workplace culture, why it matters, and how leading companies build environments where people thrive.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-495b665a-2102-4540-b855-c090beb2c8ce.png)People AllianceSabrinthia Donnelly![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/culture-in-the-workplace-meta-fe01dd71-b3fb-469a-ae5f-64b2f5031676.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/positive-workplace-culture/) ## **1\. Manager-led inclusion training instead of one-off compliance seminars** > "Sometimes with good intent, when we create additional programs, all we're doing is creating another barrier that someone from an underrepresented group has to go through to get onto the main program." – **Asif Sadiq, Executive VP & Chief Inclusion Officer at Warner Bros.** The single biggest shift in effective [DEI initiatives](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/positive-workplace-culture/) for people ops has been moving training out of a once-a-year webinar and into the hands of frontline managers, where it actually changes daily behavior. Traditional DEI training built entirely around what not to say tends to breed caution rather than genuine [connection](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-align-remote-teams-in-a-virtual-world/). People stop talking about differences altogether rather than risk saying the wrong thing, which is the opposite of what you want. The more effective model treats managers as the primary delivery mechanism for [inclusion](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/diversity-recruiting-best-practices/), coaching them on everyday moments: how they run a meeting, how they assign stretch projects, how they give feedback across [cultural](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/companies-with-strong-employee-engagement-activities/) or generational lines. This matters because manager quality has become the single strongest predictor of whether someone stays or leaves. Nearly [70% of workers say they'd quit over a bad manager](https://thehill.com/lobbying/4881941-seven-in-10-us-workers-say-they-would-leave-a-job-if-they-had-a-bad-manager/?ref=peoplealliance.com), and researchers now frame most turnover as preventable and rooted in management practice rather than pay or perks. If your DEI strategy doesn't run through your manager population, it's missing the group with the most daily influence over how included people actually feel. Practically, this looks like short, recurring [coaching](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/top-10-developmental-goals-examples-for-leaders/) modules embedded into existing manager check-ins rather than a standalone annual course. Pair it with real scenarios pulled from your own [engagement](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/25-fun-employee-engagement-activities-and-ideas/) survey comments, and you'll get far more traction than a generic vendor deck. [7 ways to grow people leaders (not just people managers)Here are seven ways to grow people leaders (not just people managers) and transform your company from a culture of “checklists” to one of true leadership![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-b7bbf14c-cfc8-469c-a0a8-119e61fa3c63.png)People AllianceSabrinthia Donnelly![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--6--2-f94e816a-e682-4f3e-80c4-0449913c5339.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/7-ways-to-grow-people-leaders-not-just-people-managers/) ## **2\. Pay equity audits that actually lead to remediation** > "The moment you start talking about biases, people start defending themselves \[...\]. If we say, let's talk about being consciously inclusive \[...\] everyone's on board with that, and it challenges the biases." – **Asif Sadiq, Executive VP & Chief Inclusion Officer at Warner Bros.** An audit that sits in a spreadsheet nobody acts on isn't a DEI initiative, it's a liability [document](https://www.peoplealliance.com/verbal-warning-template-framework/) waiting to be discovered in litigation. The initiatives that earn credibility with both employees and legal counsel are the ones where the audit is paired with a funded remediation plan. This is one of the areas where legal and people ops interests are most aligned right now. Given how many legal leaders view DEI as a risk-mitigation tool rather than a values statement, a rigorous, [well-documented](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-write-up-an-employee/) pay equity process gives you a defensible position if you're ever challenged, while also closing gaps that erode trust internally. Run the audit at least annually, segment by role level and function rather than just company-wide averages, and set a hard internal deadline for correcting identified gaps. [Communicate](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/internal-communication-strategy/) the process, even if you don't publish every number. Employees trust action they can see far more than a statement they can't verify. [Crafting a winning compensation philosophy (with examples)Building a compensation philosophy from scratch or revamping an existing one? It’s a big lift, that’s for sure, and employees aren’t just looking at the paycheck. In this guide, we’ll help you break the process into manageable steps so that you can create an impressive compensation philosophy.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-72f47176-6afd-4921-98ef-70c56f32bc95.png)People AllianceSabrinthia Donnelly![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/compensation-philosophy-ec078a3c-1396-45f4-89c4-1f928d52845f.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/crafting-a-winning-compensation-philosophy-with-real-examples/) ## **3\. Employee resource groups with a real budget and a seat at the table** Employee resource groups, or ERGs, remain one of the most requested but least resourced DEI initiatives for people ops. Only about [26% of US workers say their employer even offers an ERG or affinity group](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/?ref=peoplealliance.com) and[ ](https://www.imocha.io/blog/dei-statistics?ref=peoplealliance.com)only 6% say they’re members of one. But where ERGs work well, they're not just social clubs; they're consulted on [hiring practices](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/diversity-recruiting-best-practices/), product decisions, and [benefits](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-build-a-total-rewards-strategy-in-8-steps/) design, and their leaders get protected time and a modest operating budget rather than being expected to run everything after hours for free. If you're rebuilding or launching ERGs this year, give each group an executive sponsor who reports progress upward, a small discretionary budget, and a clear channel to influence at least one tangible business decision per year. That's what separates a genuine initiative from a logo on the intranet homepage. ### **Successful case study – TruStage** Financial services company TruStage offers a useful blueprint for what this looks like in practice. Speaking at a recent People Operations Summit, Angela Russell, the company's former Chief Diversity Officer (and now founder and principal at The Undercurrent), walked through how TruStage built out its ERG ecosystem over a ten-year period. The company now funds twelve separate ERGs, with each group receiving between $2,000 and $3,000 a year to run its own programming. That's a modest number on paper, but it's real money attached to a real mandate, which is precisely the signal that separates a funded initiative from a symbolic one. What stands out most about TruStage's approach is the range of groups they've chosen to fund. Alongside more conventional identity-based ERGs, the company runs a caregiving ERG, supporting employees looking after aging parents or children with special needs, and a survivors-of-domestic-abuse ERG, which is a rare group for any corporate ERG program to have. Russell explained that both groups have gone well beyond peer support: the caregiving ERG has directly shaped how TruStage designs its benefits, and the domestic abuse survivors group has informed how the company shows up for employees who may be in an unsafe situation. That's the pattern worth replicating. These groups weren't set up to check a diversity box; they were given enough standing to actually influence policy. TruStage also made a small but telling structural change: it renamed its "employee resource groups" to "engagement resource groups" specifically so that contract and hourly workers, who are technically not employees, could participate without creating labor-classification confusion. It's a detail easy to overlook, but it solves a real equity gap most ERG programs never address, since contractors, frontline, and hourly staff are so often excluded from the [community-building](https://www.peoplealliance.com/join-the-pa-slack-community/) and career benefits that come with ERG membership. During the Q&A portion of her talk, Russell noted that many of these workers were already engaging with the programs informally before the rename, "in a way that made HR scared and didn't know about," which is exactly the kind of gap a formal rename and manager sign-off process was designed to close. The other lesson from TruStage's experience is about timing and durability. Russell was direct about the fact that the program's resilience through a difficult political and legal environment wasn't a fast maneuver, it was the payoff of a decade of consistent investment. As she put it in her talk, ERGs "were a game changer during the pandemic in terms of keeping folks connected," and that track record is precisely why leadership stood behind the program when it came under pressure later. [5 companies with strong employee engagement activities (+ examples)You don’t need to be Hilton or Adobe to run great employee engagement activities. What you need is intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to listen to your people and act on what you hear.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-c3a17302-7611-49c9-ae30-472e87ad4753.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--27--f1f80ea6-4d26-493a-8fc1-534394361a22.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/companies-with-strong-employee-engagement-activities/) ## **4\. Structured, bias-resistant hiring processes** Hiring is where good intentions most often collide with inconsistent execution. Structured interviewing, meaning standardized questions, shared scoring rubrics, and [diverse](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/diversity-recruiting-best-practices/) interview panels, remains one of the most evidence-backed DEI initiatives for people ops because it reduces the influence of gut-feel decisions that tend to favor whoever looks most like the existing team. This one also happens to matter enormously to candidates themselves, as seen in a [Catalyst study](https://www.catalyst.org/en-us/insights/2026/new-path-inclusion?ref=peoplealliance.com): “Most employees want to support (69%) and work at (74%) organizations that uphold a commitment to inclusion.” If your hiring process feels inconsistent or opaque, you're not just risking a bias claim, you're losing candidates to competitors who can demonstrate a fairer process. Start small if you need to: standardize your interview scorecards for your highest-volume roles first, train [interviewers](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-run-stay-interviews-well/) on what a strong versus weak answer actually looks like, and track pass-through rates by demographic group at each stage of your funnel so you can see exactly where candidates are dropping off. Mawulom Nenonene, Mawulom Nenonene, Fractional Head of People and Recruiting who's built hiring systems from the ground up at multiple companies, put the core problem plainly on the *People Powered Strategy* podcast: > "Humans, at times, we have our own biases, and it's hard to mitigate those. We're fallible." That's not a knock on any individual hiring manager, it's the reason a process has to exist in the first place. > "I've seen environments, which were approaching on microcultures with aspects of toxicity, where light was brought in and perceived unfairness was provided structure and change, and really turned into high performance teams." His approach to auditing a hiring system before touching anything is worth borrowing wholesale. He spends the first 30 days simply mapping what already exists, asking blunt questions most People Ops teams never write down: > "Are there structured interviews? Are we simply winging it? Or do we have a rule break? Do we have clear understanding of what a yes is, what a no is?” Only after that audit does he spend the next 10 days building a prioritized [roadmap](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/hr-leaders-can-build-an-ai-roadmap/), which he described as: > "Well-defined scorecards, structured interviews, cross functional alignment, having a clear understanding of what success looks like, interviewer training and overall rule breaks to ensure that we're mitigating bias as much as possible." He also makes a strong case for piloting before rolling anything out company-wide: > "We build out a new role launch process... we roll it out with one engineering role, and we reduce the time to hire by X percentage. That's a story. That's something that you can then bring to the rest of your team as justification for why we should switch from the way things have been to the way things could be.” That's a useful reminder that structured hiring isn't just a fairness initiative, it's also a speed and consistency upgrade you can prove with data before asking every hiring manager in the building to change how they work. ## **5\. Manager accountability built into performance reviews** None of the initiatives above will stick if manager performance reviews don't reflect them. If a manager can get a glowing annual review while running an exclusionary team, your DEI strategy is optional in practice, whatever your policy documents say. Build inclusion behaviors directly into your manager competency framework: how equitably they distribute opportunities, how their direct reports rate [psychological safety](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/positive-workplace-culture/) on team-level survey breakdowns, and whether promotion and pay recommendations coming out of their team show any demographic skew. Weigh these alongside the usual output metrics, not as a separate, easily ignored appendix. This is also where you protect the organization legally. If a pattern of bias ever surfaces in litigation, a documented history of holding managers accountable for inclusive behavior is a far stronger defense than a values statement on your careers page. [How to write a performance reviewA good performance review can clarify why a high performer feels stuck, why a manager’s team is disengaged, or why a previously strong employee is struggling.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-ca45e617-c4c8-4851-9d46-2a67f9cbb810.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Performance-reviews-afa02084-cf4c-4979-aab3-45d3929f775e.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-write-a-performance-review/) ## **6\. Transparent DEI reporting, even when the numbers aren't flattering** Plenty of organizations publish a glossy DEI report once a year full of soft language and flattering photography. Employees have gotten good at spotting the difference between that and genuine transparency, and the gap is costing trust. Roughly [39% of US workers now say their employer has rolled back DEI practices](https://www.hrc.org/resources/corporate-equality-index?ref=peoplealliance.com) in some form, and among employees at organizations that scaled back or ended DEI initiatives, more than half report experiencing stigma or bias at work as a direct result. Publishing honest representation numbers, including the gaps in senior [leadership](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/7-ways-to-grow-people-leaders-not-just-people-managers/), alongside a specific plan to close them, builds far more credibility than a polished narrative with no hard data attached. It also gives your recruiting team something concrete to point to when candidates ask hard questions in [interviews](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/good-interview-questions-to-ask-a-candidate/), which they increasingly do. You don't need to publish everything externally if your legal team has concerns. But internally, at minimum, employees should be able to see the trend lines for their own function and level. ## **7\. Skills-based promotion and mobility frameworks** > “What is our internal mobility supply? How do we leverage the human capital that we worked so hard to get to? We try to retain at the utmost possible levels and keep investing in our people, because the biggest ROI that we can achieve is by maintaining our workforce and our current people.” – **Shane Osmus, Global Head of Workforce Management and People Analytics, FIS Global** This might be one of the most stubborn gaps in workplace equity: internal mobility. Hiring diversely at entry level solves only part of the problem if your internal promotion process still relies heavily on informal [relationships](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it-understanding-employee-engagement-through-the-lens-of-relationships/) and subjective manager judgment. Skills-based frameworks define clear, observable criteria for what qualifies someone for the next level, independent of tenure or who happens to know whom. A growing share of HR leaders, roughly 79% [according to recent research](https://www.talentlms.com/research/learning-development-report-2026?ref=peoplealliance.com), say their organization is now adopting a skills-based approach across hiring, training, and career development, which suggests this shift has real momentum behind it rather than being a niche experiment. Pair the framework with an internal [talent](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/talent-acquisition-best-practices-for-people-leaders/) marketplace where open roles and stretch projects are visible to everyone, not just whispered about in hallway conversations. This is one of the most direct ways to translate diverse hiring at the entry level into diverse representation at the top, which remains the gap every other initiative on this list is ultimately trying to close. > “The future is not about rigid roles. It's about skills and capabilities... Internal mobility systems that move talent where it's needed. How many people have a bunch of blockers in the system that are not going anywhere?... it stymies that internal mobility.” – **Preet Hansra Michelson, Chief People Officer at TMS** ## **TL;DR** The organizations getting this right in 2026 aren't necessarily the ones spending the most, they're the ones being the most deliberate. They've moved past symbolic gestures and into initiatives with clear owners, real budgets, and measurable outcomes. As a People Ops leader, your job isn't to win an argument about whether DEI is politically popular this quarter, but to build a workplace where talented people, whoever they are, can do their best work and see a real path forward. --- [**Become an Insider member**](https://www.peoplealliance.com/insider-membership-plan/) **(at no cost) to get access to exclusive content and templates designed to make your day-to-day 1,000x easier.** [Free People Alliance membership: Join the communityJoin 1,000s of HR and people leaders for free. Access expert insights, templates, events & career advice. 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