Online guidance offering advice with compliance with UK law governing diversity, equity and inclusion has seen a huge surge of interest in the wake of President Donald Trump ending federal DEI initiatives last week.
Training provider Skillcast reported a 92% surge in page views of its Protected Characteristics at Work guide – a resource outlining legally mandated DEI standards in the UK.
The average time users spend on the page is now five minutes – reflecting the growing demand for clarity on workplace discrimination laws, most of which fall under the Equality Act 2010.
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Vivek Dodd, CEO of Skillcast, said companies had seen a “rapid amount of polarised messaging that has left many companies uncertain about the need and the process for DEI agendas moving forward.
“By setting a precedent for companies to deprioritise DEI, this shift has risked stalling and reversing decades of progress While some US businesses are moving away from DEI, UK companies remain legally required to uphold and safeguard diversity and inclusion standards under the Equality Act 2010 – emphasising the importance of ethical and legal compliance, regardless of the current political landscape.”
For Annabelle Vultee, CEO of online learning provider GoodHabitz, who was commenting more widely on the DEI backlash, many companies have only ever paid lip service to DEI. She said: “While some businesses recognise DEI as a competitive advantage rather than just a moral obligation, others are using the current political climate as an excuse to retreat from commitments they never fully embraced.
“Many of these businesses likely saw DEI as a box-ticking exercise rather than a long-term investment, making it easy to abandon when faced with political or financial pressures,” she added. “But dismantling DEI goes beyond affecting recruitment statistics, and actually weakens the very foundations that enable teams to tackle complex global challenges through engagement, collaboration and a sense of wellbeing.”
Vultee said that the best progressive companies were evolving their DEI programmes and were not backing down, but were “moving beyond superficial metrics to address the buried challenges of gender and culture communication, team dynamics, and the real impact of diverse thinking on performance”.
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