Inclusion’s Next Decade Belongs to the Builders

The inclusion conversation has moved beyond language. Today it shows up in litigation filings, enforcement actions, and executive exits when leaders misread the moment. 

Some employers once led with bold statements and no proof of outcomes. Many are now restructuring and quietly editing job postings and open roles, hoping new vocabulary will pass for new strategy. I understand the fear underneath that. I also know where it leads: organizations stripping out practices that were working because they could never prove it. Most were never required to. Until now. 

The inability to prove impact is now the exposure. For a generation, this work was justified with conviction and poetry. Conviction does not hold up in court. Poetry does not survive budget review. The work that endures from here is the work an organization can measure, document, and defend: to a regulator, to a board, and to its own people. 

I joined the SHRM Global executive team in January 2026 to focus our inclusion and diversity strategy and thought leadership. On June 16, from the SHRM26 Main Stage in front of 17,000+ people, Board Chair Betty Thompson and Chair Designate Sean Woodruff announced what we were building next. 

Betty framed the stakes: 

"Two years ago, when SHRM assumed leadership of CEO Action for Inclusion and Diversity from PwC, it was a signal. A signal that SHRM intended to own this issue, not observe it. We pledged to shape the conversation rather than just survive it. That was the foundational move. But foundations are not finish lines. And the work ahead belongs to the next chapter of SHRM’s leadership.”

Sean named what comes next: 

“SHRM is building a game changer for diverse, civil, and inclusive workplaces. Today we launch the transformation of CEO Action into the SHRM Center for Inclusion & Diversity (CID). It is a fundamentally different operating model, purpose-built for the legal, regulatory, and cultural realities employers are actually navigating right now. It is a think tank, a research engine, and a practical advisory resource. Its mandate is precise: to help organizations build workplaces that are legally compliant, workplace unifying, and business accretive."

Why This Moment Demands It

Employers are navigating multiple federal enforcement and compliance channels, AI reshaping how work gets done, and a labor market where restructuring and low engagement are now operating risks. The data is not subtle: 

• Engagement is falling. Global employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020 (Gallup). 
• Incivility is expensive. U.S. workplaces see more than 104 million acts of incivility per day, costing employers roughly $2.66 billion daily in lost productivity and absenteeism (SHRM Civility Index). 
• Commitment has held. Eighty percent of organizations remain committed. And while 55% of employees believe their company has publicly stepped back, only 34% say the actual work has shrunk (Catalyst and NYU Law’s Meltzer Center). 

These are not culture footnotes. They are line items with direct consequences for retention, litigation exposure, trust, and performance. Retreat is not a strategy. It is also not the full story. What reads as collapse from the outside is often recalibration on the inside. The question has moved from whether to do this work to how to do it in a way that holds up. 

This is Personal

I spent most of my adult life building measurement infrastructure for this work because I was tired of watching it dismissed as soft. I have twice testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on workplace fairness and advised Fortune 100 CEOs and their teams on I&D strategy and effective measurement.   

Here is what I know: inclusion behaves like any other operating system. Instrument it, and it performs. Leave it to sentiment, and it drifts. In this climate, drift creates legal, operational, and trust exposure. 

Finance is instructive here. It does not earn its authority because senior leaders find EBITDA to be inspiring (even though I actually do). It earns it through a shared rulebook and a common yardstick, applied the same way by everyone and defended on a cadence. 

• GAAP is the rulebook — one basis for reporting, so a board, an auditor, and an investor can read the same statement and trust it means the same thing. Comparable. Auditable. Defensible. 
• EBITDA is the yardstick — a clean read on what the core business actually produces, quarter over quarter and peer against peer. 

The discipline does not live in the metric. It lives in the expectation behind it: a definition no one can quietly bend, reporting on a fixed cadence, and a result every leader is accountable to defend. Inclusion has never lacked conviction. It has lacked the rulebook and the yardstick. That is what the Center is building. 

The Framework

The Center runs on a clear framework: 

• Diversity is the input: The breadth of people, skills, experiences, and perspectives an organization brings in. 
• Civility is the process: How decisions get made, how disagreement is handled, and how respect is extended once people are in the room. 
• Inclusion is the outcome: People contributing fully, trust intact, performance following. 
• Leadership accountability is what makes the framework real: Measured, owned, and defended at the top. 

Every program CID stands behind must clear three tests: 

• Legally Compliant 
• Workplace Unifying
• Business Accretive

All while making the work strong enough to hold in the boardroom, the courtroom, and the breakroom. The Center will advance programs designed to benefit every employee while removing the specific barriers that prevent particular groups from competing and contributing fully. The market reset gives us a chance to rebuild with inclusion designed in from the start: bias removed from process, opportunity widened on merit, measurement and accountability defined at the outset. 

What We Are Building

Original research, measurement standards, and practical tools leaders can use Monday morning are our North Star.  We have already developed the SHRM Workplace Inclusion Lexicon, a risk-calibrated language guide that strengthens alignment between HR, Legal, Compliance, Product, Communications, and Executive Leadership. It helps employers update inclusion language without retreating from inclusion work — replacing high-risk terminology with business-relevant, legally compliant alternatives. 

Our founding research agenda asks the questions executives actually face: 

• Does broader, skills-first leadership selection outperform, by causation and not merely correlation? 
• Can workforce sentiment serve as a leading indicator of financial performance, the way engagement data already does? 
• Can AI-enabled hiring be fair, validated, and defensible? 

These are critical business questions. They deserve real answers. 

A decade from now, inclusion will be run with the same rigor as finance, operations, and risk. It will be benchmarked, measured, audited, and defended as a matter of course. The companies that get there first will hire better, build stronger trust, carry less legal exposure, and outperform the ones still arguing about language. 

The next decade belongs to the builders. The CID is here to build with them. 

Carolynn Johnson is President of the SHRM Center for Inclusion & Diversity. The Center publishes research at SHRM.org/CID.