5 Signs your inclusion efforts are stuck in HR

Take a deep breath.

Think about the promises your organisation has made over the years about inclusion. Think about the strategies, the policies, the workshops.

If any at all.

Now ask yourself: Has it really changed how people feel in your organisation or at what level they deliver? Or are the same issues still showing up in reports, engagement surveys, and boardroom discussions?

This is where many CEOs, HR leaders and DEI professionals find themselves today. Despite good intentions, progress is slow. Maybe you can relate.

The truth is simple: inclusion cannot live in HR alone, as it is often the case. It must be a leadership discipline. When it is not, the results are predictable.

Initiatives do not take root. Employees leave early, innovation stalls, and culture change becomes a slogan rather than reality.

Here is a diagnostic checklist with five signs that your organisation’s inclusion efforts are stuck in HR.

Sign 1: Policies exist but leadership behaviours do not

Symptoms leaders will recognise:

• You have written policies about equal treatment and harassment prevention, but employees say they do not trust reporting systems.
• Your code of conduct hangs on the wall, yet in meetings the same voices dominate and leaders rarely challenge groupthink.
• Managers attend training, but do not embrace a change in behaviour, adjust how they allocate projects, or give feedback.

Consequences if ignored:
People quickly learn that policies are symbolic if leaders do not model them. This erodes trust in leadership and engagement drops.

Talented employees, particularly women and international staff, disengage or leave.

Over time, the organisation gains a reputation for being “good on paper” but weak in practice, making attraction and retention more difficult. We promise you the rumor will spread.

A recent McKinsey report highlights the gap between entry-level and senior positions. In private equity, women make up 48 percent of junior roles but only 20 percent of managing directors.

Promotion rates for women remain significantly lower than for men, despite policies that emphasise fairness (The State of Diversity in Global Private Markets 2023).

This tendency is often mirrored in ethnic minorities too. The message is clear: policies without lived leadership behaviours do not shift outcomes.

Sign 2: Headcounts are measured, culture is not

Symptoms leaders will recognise:

• Your board slides highlight the number of women hired last year but say nothing about whether women stay or advance.
• HR tracks recruitment pipelines, but no one measures whether different groups get the same access to sponsors and stretch assignments.
• Surveys show overall engagement scores, but do not reveal belonging gaps between groups.

Consequences if ignored:
 You may celebrate hiring milestones while losing the very talent you wanted to retain. Attrition rises among underrepresented groups, creating a revolving door effect.

Recruitment costs soar, institutional knowledge drains, and employees begin to question leadership credibility. Worse, leaders make decisions blindfolded, thinking the numbers look good while culture is deteriorating beneath the surface.

The Women in the Workplace 2024 report also by McKinsey in cooperation with LeanIn. shows why headcounts alone mislead. Women enter at near parity with men, but leave at higher rates because they do not see advancement opportunities.

Senior women, especially women of colour, are leaving organisations at unprecedented levels — a trend called “the Great Breakup.”

Without culture measures like psychological safety, promotion equity, and sponsorship access, organisations miss the root cause.

Sign 3: One-off training with no follow-up

Symptoms leaders will recognise:

• Managers attend a single unconscious bias session arranged by HR, tick the box, and go back to business as usual.
• There is no structured follow-up, no reinforcement in leadership meetings, no common language, and no link to performance management.
• Employees privately say the training was “interesting” but did not change how projects, promotions, or feedback are handled.

Consequences if ignored:
One-off training breeds cynicism. Employees see leaders attend workshops but behave the same way afterwards. This signals that leadership is not serious, and employees stop engaging.

Worse, the organisation risks reputational damage: externally, you claim to prioritise inclusion, but internally people know it is a tick-box exercise. Over time, you waste hours and resources without addressing structural barriers.

The Danish telecom company Nuuday took a different approach. Instead of relying on isolated training, they embedded cognitive diversity into leadership practice.

Over ten months, the share of women in leadership rose from under 20 percent to nearly 25 percent. At the same time, employee satisfaction and eNPS increased.

This shows that when leaders are engaged consistently, training shifts from awareness to measurable outcomes.

Sign 4: Inclusion is not linked to business strategy

Symptoms leaders will recognise:

• Inclusion initiatives run as side projects in HR, while the C-suite focuses on quarterly results.
• Inclusion goals are framed in moral terms only, not in relation to client outcomes, innovation, employee retention, or risk management.
• When financial pressure increases, inclusion activities are the first to be cut.

Consequences if ignored:
 If inclusion is not integrated into the business strategy, progress crawls.

Leaders may support initiatives verbally, but without financial or operational linkages, they are deprioritised.

The cost is real: higher attrition, lower engagement, reduced innovation, and increased reputational and regulatory risk. By treating inclusion as an add-on, you undermine competitiveness.

McKinsey warns in The State of Diversity in Global Private Markets 2023 that at the current pace, it will take more than 60 years to reach gender parity at senior levels in Europe. 

In private equity, churn rates highlight the cost. Women leave leadership roles at a rate of 27 percent, compared with 16 percent overall.

Sign 5: HR owns it, the C-suite observes it

Symptoms leaders will recognise:

• HR runs the programmes, creates dashboards, and organises events. Executives act as sponsors but do not own outcomes.
• Line managers see inclusion as “HR’s job” rather than part of their leadership role.
• Cultural issues appear in engagement surveys, but the executive team does not discuss them as seriously as financial metrics.

Consequences if ignored:
 When HR carries the weight, initiatives stall. Employees see the lack of executive ownership and disengage. The organisation risks sanctions, poor employer branding, and talent loss. Investors and customers increasingly look at culture and governance; without executive accountability, the company looks outdated and vulnerable.

According to McKinsey and the experience of Living Institute, companies succeeding in working successfully with People, Leadership and Culture in their business models outperform competitors in innovation, retention, and engagement.

If that is not persuasive enough, EU regulation requires listed companies to reach gender balance on boards by the end of June, 2026. This is no longer a missed opportunity, but a governance issue.

What to do next

If these five signs feel familiar, your organisation’s inclusion efforts are stuck in HR. The way forward depends on where you sit.

If you are in a leadership or C-suite role, the most important shift is to stop treating inclusion as something delegated. It cannot be outsourced to HR. It has to be owned where strategy is set and where the tone of culture is decided.

That means making People, Leadership and Culture a standing point on the executive agenda and reviewing culture indicators with the same rigour as financial KPIs.

Churn of high-potential employees, fairness in promotion decisions, and levels of psychological safety should be data points you demand and act upon.

Most of all, it means modelling the behaviors you want others to live by. Employees will always notice the gap between what leaders say and what leaders do.

Not in the C-suite?

If you are responsible for HR or DEI and maybe not in the C-suite, the shift looks different and depends heavily on your mandate. Your task is no longer to carry the inclusion agenda on your own shoulders.

Your role is to bring forward evidence that links culture directly to business outcomes and risks.

That means quantifying the cost of churn, showing where promotion bottlenecks appear, and explaining how bias slows down innovation. It also means challenging the organisation when initiatives remain symbolic or one-off.

Training without structural change creates cynicism; your job is to keep insisting on systemic fixes. To succeed, you must position yourself not as the owner of inclusion but as the strategic partner who brings leaders the tools and the data they need to act.

At Living Institute, we say it clearly: “Future winners are those who integrate inclusion into the business model.” The winners are the ones who take the diagnostic signs seriously and act before culture becomes a liability.

The question is not whether you can afford to elevate People, Leadership and Culture.

The question is whether you can afford not to.

Do you need help anchoring inclusion in the top? See how we can help here.