It’s a troubling time for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The backlash is real. Skepticism is growing. Yet—the smartest organizations aren’t retreating from DEI. They’re rethinking it. They’re asking hard questions:

• What’s genuinely working?
• What’s been more performative theatre?
• Where do we go from here?

Part of the answer is increasingly clear: Stop relying on top-down compliance programs. Start building inclusivity inside teams—where culture actually lives.

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Why Some DEI Strategies Failed

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Millions, if not billions, have been poured into DEI over the past decade. Progress? Often frustratingly slow. One major culprit: relying on surface-level interventions instead of systemic action. The research is damning in some areas:

• A 2019 meta-analysis in Annual Review of Psychology found unconscious bias training had limited long-term behavior impact.
  
  
• Studies from Harvard (Why Diversity Programs Fail) show that mandatory diversity training often sparks defensiveness, not engagement.
  
  
• A 2023 McKinsey report ("Rethinking DEI in a Polarized World") reveals that employees distrust corporate DEI messaging when they don’t experience inclusion daily.
  
  

The problem is that a compliance-driven DEI reinforces “us vs. them” thinking, making differences hyper-visible without building shared understanding or daily action.

You can't force people to care. You must equip teams to act. The playbook—train, tick a box, move on—doesn’t build inclusive cultures. It can build resentment and fatigue.

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Teams Are the Real Levers of Change

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Inclusion doesn’t happen because HQ mandates it. It happens inside the team—or it doesn't happen at all. Teams are the daily arena where:

• Trust is built—or eroded.
• Ideas are heard—or shut down.
• Workloads are shared—or unfairly distributed.

Research from BetterUp Labs (2024) finds that teams with strong inclusion habits outperform peers by 27% on measures of innovation and resilience. 

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What Happens Without Inclusion? (Spoiler: It's Not Good.)

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Diversity without inclusion is a revolving door. You can hire diverse talent all you want. But if people don’t feel safe, valued, or empowered? 

• Engagement plummets.
• Turnover spikes.
• Innovation dries up.

Teams that convert diversity into belonging tap into richer ideas, greater resilience, and faster adaptation to change. According to a 2024 LinkedIn report, 76% of employees who left a job for "culture reasons" in the last year said they would have stayed if they’d felt included.

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How Inclusive Teams Behave: Norms That Matter

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The reality is that inclusion isn't about jargon. It’s fundamental to how a team operates, every single day. At Google, “Project Aristotle” found that psychological safety—the belief that you won’t be punished for speaking up—is the single biggest predictor of team success. Psychological safety is inclusion in action.

Teams need to be given the context - as a group - how inclusion can help them perform and make work a more engaging place to be. But education is only the start. They need to embed powerful, observable norms, habits and rituals that make inclusion real. Here are a few to start. 

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1. Normalize Diverse Perspectives; Challenge ideas, disagree productively, and know you’ll be respected, not punished. Micro-moment to imagine: A team member says, “I don’t see it that way,” and the manager responds, “Say more—I want to understand.”
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2. Build Feedback and Support Loops; Candid feedback is shared regularly. Strengths are recognized. Struggles surfaced without shame. Micro-moment to imagine: Peer-to-peer shoutouts during weekly standups—not just leadership praise.
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3. Make Decision-Making Transparent. Criteria for decisions are visible. Promotions, assignments, and rewards aren’t mysteries. Micro-moment to imagine: A hiring panel openly discusses why a candidate was selected, aligning choices with clear values.

Teams need an extensive playbook of these techniques that they can integrate into how they work every day. That’s how inclusion will thrive. They need to hold each other accountable for progress and support each other in experimenting with new techniques. 

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It’s Not Easy. It’s Worth It.

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Leading a homogeneous team is often easier. Fewer arguments. Faster decisions.
But it’s fragile. Homogeneous teams miss blind spots. They make riskier choices. They struggle when external conditions change.

Diverse teams make better decisions—but only if leaders manage the complexity. Diversity without strong leadership? Division and disengagement. Diversity with strong team norms? Breakthroughs and belonging.

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Case Studies: Teams Are Where Inclusion Happens

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There are many examples of organisations that have made a success of integrating inclusive practices into how teams operate. 

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Respect at Lion: Building a Culture of Inclusion

Lion Co., a major beverage and food company based in Australia and New Zealand, made inclusion a team-driven priority through its "Respect at Lion" initiative. Instead of relying on top-down policies, they empowered managers to own the culture within their teams. Regular conversations about respect and belonging were built into everyday routines. The result? Higher trust, stronger team cohesion—and better business outcomes.

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The Promise and Peril of Diversity Training

Research by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev ("The Promise and Peril of Diversity Training," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020) highlights a crucial lesson: structural changes—like mentorship programs and transparent career paths—are far more effective than standalone bias trainings. Especially when these solutions are embedded in daily team habits, they create lasting inclusion instead of one-off awareness.

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Atlassian’s “Team Anywhere” Experiment

Facing a shift to hybrid work, tech company Atlassian launched "Team Anywhere," focusing not on office mandates but on building team-based rituals of inclusion. Teams introduced small but powerful practices like rotating meeting chairs and keeping open decision logs. The impact was striking: teams that embraced these inclusive habits scored 24% higher in engagement than those sticking to traditional setups.

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How Schneider Electric Built “Inclusion Nudges” Into Teams

Global energy leader Schneider Electric moved beyond one-off DEI workshops by using "inclusion nudges"—small, actionable prompts like rotating who leads meetings or setting team norms for balanced speaking time. These everyday changes made inclusion part of the team's fabric. Internal surveys showed a 19% rise in employees agreeing with the statement, "I feel heard in my team," over just one year.

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Start Where It Matters Most: Invest in Teams

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If you want a truly inclusive organization, don’t start with a press release or a top down training. Start with your teams.

• Train managers in inclusive leadership and teams how to work together
• Build feedback-rich, trust-driven team cultures.
• Hold teams accountable for how they work, not just what they deliver.

Mentorship programs, promotion transparency, and bias interruption tactics help—but the heartbeat of inclusion is still this: the Tuesday morning team meeting, not the corporate memo. Inclusion isn’t a campaign. It’s a habit. And it starts right inside your team.

Full References List

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• ‍The Limits of Unconscious Bias Training Kulik & Roberson, Annual Review of Psychology (2019) Meta-analysis showing unconscious bias training has limited long-term impact. (Paywalled)
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• Why Diversity Programs Fail Dobbin & Kalev, Harvard Business Review (2016). Mandatory diversity training often sparks backlash instead of engagement.
  https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
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• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly (1999) Foundational study linking psychological safety to team learning.
  https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Performance/Edmondson%20Psychological%20safety.pdf 
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• The Diversity and Inclusion Revolution: Eight Powerful Truths Deloitte Insights (2018)
  Shows how inclusive leadership strengthens teams and business performance.
  https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/deloitte-review/issue-22/diversity-and-inclusion-at-work-eight-powerful-truths.html
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• Respect at Lion: Building a Culture of Inclusion Diversity Council Australia (DCA) and Lion Co. Case study on team-driven DEI at Lion Beverage.
  https://www.dca.org.au/resources/case-studies/lion-case-study-respect-lion
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• Diversity Training; Dobbin & Kalev, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020) Mentoring and transparent systems outperform bias training.
  https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/dobbin_kalev_economist_5-21-21.pdf
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• Managing Diversity for Success Wharton People Analytics Report (2019) Research linking structured DEI practices and real outcomes. Link: https://peopleanalytics.wharton.upenn.edu/resources
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• Rethinking DEI in a Polarized World McKinsey & Company (2023)  Fresh insights on why employees distrust top-down DEI and how team-led action works better.
  https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/people%20and%20organizational%20performance/our%20insights/the%20state%20of%20organizations%202023/the-state-of-organizations-2023.pdf
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• Team Anywhere Playbook Atlassian Research (2023) How decentralized teams built stronger inclusion through everyday habits.
  https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/build-diversity-on-your-team
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• Inclusion Nudges Guidebook Schneider Electric Internal DEI Initiative (2023)(Paywalled)
  https://inclusion-nudges.org/