DEI Is Dead. Long Live Culture

by Pamela Coleman

May 2026

While some organizations publicly denounced their DEI initiatives over the past year, Gravity Research reports that 80% of corporations are rebranding these programs, replacing the term "equity" with terms such as "belonging" or "opportunity". Regardless of where organizations stand on DEI or what they call it, the underlying question of culture is at the heart of all inclusion approaches: who are we, and how do we work together to drive our success?

When corporate initiatives are trendy and do not tie directly to a cultural throughline, they become performative, and employees lose trust in their legitimacy. Opportunity programs, for example, require leadership commitment to them as cultural initiatives. I once worked with a newly hired operational leader who refused to offer opportunities to the internal team, which conflicted with our long-established policy of building internal talent. Instead, each time a role became available, this leader insisted on hiring former colleagues. His team’s engagement declined because these actions signaled that internal growth no longer mattered.

Opportunity must be a principle that works for everyone, not just those in a VP’s network. If a leadership team commits to being an organization that improves prospects for everyone, it must embed this perspective in policies across the employee lifecycle, and every leader must get on board.

The backlash against DEI prompted both Google and Meta to launch rebranding campaigns that effectively neutralized their DEI focus. If organizational culture had been at the heart of these programs, there would have been less need to revamp them. Programs that are genuine outcroppings of formal cultural frameworks become woven into how an organization operates, establishing their authenticity.

Who are you, and how are you building a workplace that reflects it? All corporate initiatives aim to improve performance, or the resource investment is hard to justify. Linking inclusion or opportunity programs back to culture reduces the perception that these programs are performative and helps employees understand how to integrate the initiatives into their day-to-day work with colleagues.

For example, a workplace that claims to be highly inclusive must conduct project management post-mortems to gather feedback from everyone involved, not just the top brass. I have restructured the lessons-learned activity to capture post-implementation insights from those closest to the action. The feedback surprised leaders because they had been evaluating only project timelines and cost reduction, not the impact on the team. An organization’s commitment to inclusion needs to be visible in how it operates.

Who are you aiming to be? The answer to this question determines how you design policies and programs and reinforces your cultural throughline. Please email me at pamela@cultural-coherence.com for further discussion.