We have all witnessed the backlash and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in recent years. I could write a book about how deeply I disagree with these concerns, but today is not the day for that post. Instead, I want to talk about a set of programs that, in many cases, were immune from the cuts happening in DEI in many companies – employee resource groups or ERGs.
As some companies cut chief diversity officer roles, retired public representation goals, withdrew from external indices, and scrubbed language off their websites, a strange thing happened. Most left their ERGs in tact. I chalk this up to the fact that most companies downsizing DEI really just downsized the D and E. Inclusion, and the importance of employee engagement largely remained apolitical.
An HR Brew analysis of 52 companies that changed DEI course in 2024/25 found only 11 made changes to their ERGs. Gravity Research found the same pattern: most ERGs are still running, with adjustments to how membership is described rather than whether the group exists at all. So let’s talk about ERGs: why they stayed above the fray and how innovation in these areas can strengthen the social impact pillar of your internal corporate responsibility work.
Why ERGs Stayed Above the Fray
- They were never top-down. Having a DEI department is a decision an executive made. An ERG is something employees built. You can eliminate a function. You cannot eliminate the desire to find people who share your situation, and if you try, the group reconvenes in a group chat without a budget.
- They are generally inexpensive. ERG budgets are small next to the rest of the DEI apparatus. Cutting them saves almost nothing and costs a great deal in trust. That math held even at companies making deep cuts everywhere else.
- They sit outside what the Trump administration targeted. EEOC guidance focused on quotas, disparate treatment in hiring and promotion, and limiting access to training, mentorship, or sponsorship on the basis of protected traits. Closed-membership affinity groups drew scrutiny. Groups organized around a shared experience and open to anyone did not carry the same exposure.
- They produce clear evidence of employee engagement, which has a specific return on investment. An ERG that can point to both engagement numbers and retention number, numbers that do not move with the political weather.
- They live in the culture, not the org chart. A department has a leader, a budget line, and a public commitment attached to it. That makes it visible and therefore targetable. A network of volunteers is diffuse. Networks are harder to delete than boxes on a PowerPoint.
One caution before anyone declares victory. Some companies did consolidate every group into a single umbrella organization, some cut ERG funding to zero while keeping the groups on paper, and federal agencies suspended theirs outright. Survived is not the same as resourced. An ERG running on unpaid volunteer labor with no executive sponsor is not a program. It is a slow shutdown with a longer timeline.
The New Era of ERG Design
The standard roster of ERGs in corporate America became increasingly similar over the years. Most companies started with groups for women, Black employees, Latino and Hispanic employees, Asian employees, LGBTQ+ employees, veterans, employees with disabilities, and young professionals. Those groups still matter. In some companies, they are the only place where certain conversations happen at all, and the case for keeping them has gotten stronger, not weaker.
What has changed is that a second category has grown up alongside them. These groups organize around what people are dealing with rather than only who they are. A few we are seeing more of:
Parenting groups. The scope runs from lactation space and backup childcare all the way to helping employees move a kid onto a college campus. The through line is that parenting produces predictable, expensive workplace friction at every life stage, and nobody had been assigned to it.
Green teams. Employees driving sustainability action in their own building and neighborhood. Waste audits, native plantings, care for a nearby preservation area, the trees in the parking lot. These groups tend to generate real operating data, and they give a corporate sustainability strategy a local execution arm it usually lacks.
Biking and walking groups (or commuting). Corporate wellness has a long habit of defaulting to the all-office 5K, which quietly sorts people by physical ability and makes opting out feel like a statement. Moving movement into a self-selecting ERG changes the dynamic. Nobody has to decline anything.
Three others worth considering:
Caregivers, not only parents. Roughly one in five workers is caring for an aging or ill adult. Almost none of it is visible to the employer. A caregiver ERG does concrete work: navigating eldercare options, comparing home care agencies, getting through Medicare enrollment season, planning around a hospital discharge, supporting each other through the death of a parent. It also hits mid-career and senior employees hardest, which is the population most expensive to replace.
AI practice groups. In most companies right now, employees are teaching each other to use AI tools in unofficial channels. That is already an ERG. It just has no charter, no sponsor, and no line back to the business. Formalize it and you get workflow sharing, internal demos, tool piloting, and a channel where IT and legal can hear what people are doing before they find out the hard way. It also functions as a quiet equity measure. The employees who fall behind on AI are usually the ones without access to informal networks, and a formal group gives them the network they were never invited to.
Frontline and shift worker groups. In manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, and retail, ERG programming typically happens on a video call at noon on a Tuesday, which excludes most of the workforce by design. A frontline ERG inverts that. It meets at shift change, communicates on the break room board and by text, and takes as its charter surfacing the operating problems corporate never sees. The output is safety, scheduling, and retention intelligence, which is precisely what those businesses are short on.
Other ERGs gaining ground: financial wellness and life-stage money groups, first-time homebuyers, employees approaching retirement, neurodiversity groups, new hire and relocation groups, and volunteerism groups.
Rebuilding the Strategy
If you are reopening your ERG charter this year, consider these five moves in your strategy.
- Write the charter around what the group does, not who belongs to it. Open membership, stated plainly, published where people can find it.
- Give every group a business question to own. The green team gets waste and energy data. The parenting group gets a benefits redesign recommendation. The frontline group gets near-miss reporting. A group with a question performs differently than a group with a calendar.
- Pay for the labor. Chairing an ERG is work. Stipend it, credit it against workload, or weight it in performance review. Anything else is a tax on the people you say you value most.
- Set a floor. Minimum budget, a named executive sponsor, and meeting time during working hours. Groups without all three are decorative.
- Measure something and report it. Participation, retention differential, ideas shipped, dollars saved. Evidence is what kept these groups standing in the first place.