(Illustration by Nancy Marks)
At a moment of heightened polarization around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the United States and elsewhere—echoing earlier tensions surrounding the #MeToo movement—organizations face increasing pressure over practices intended to promote equal opportunity. These dynamics require structures and skills that enable people who are different from one another to engage in conversations about challenging topics. Yet traditional equal employment opportunity compliance systems, though essential, often leave organizations unprepared to navigate that conflict constructively.
Many organizations orient toward avoiding complaints, lawsuits, and regulatory scrutiny, but in doing so, they miss opportunities to surface and correct problems early through systems that build employees’ trust. And when employees do not trust that leaders will hear and fairly address their concerns, productive dialogue and solutions are less likely to emerge. This risk avoidance posture leaves leaders without the tools, skills, and structures they need to respond to fairness concerns in ways that maintain accountability while preserving healthy working relationships.
Productive conversations that navigate disagreement—whether about fairness, organizational change, or competing priorities—have never been more necessary. Across much of American life, for example, people are increasingly divided in how they live and see the world—residential integration has stalled and school segregation has grown. Workplaces may be the most consequential setting where people from different backgrounds regularly come together to navigate disagreement and solve shared problems. When employees collaborate in pursuit of common goals, they create sustained contact—the condition research shows is most likely to reduce bias. This also builds organizational capacity to engage differing perspectives in ways that strengthen decision-making, surface problems earlier, and support durable performance over time.
The good news is that many capacity-building tools are at hand. Organizations can benefit from employee insights on policy development through advisory councils; provide mediation or ombuds services, and/or restorative justice programs, and use digital platforms to facilitate and increase transparency. These pathways between silence and formal complaint equip organizations to address concerns before they escalate and, more broadly, support organizational effectiveness.
Shared Ideals, Broken Systems
People largely agree that fairness is a core value. Across the United States, people of all races, ethnicities, and genders—whether in cities, suburbs, or rural areas—overwhelmingly agree that equality matters. Contrary to the conventional narrative of racial polarization, a nationwide survey conducted in August 2024 found that more than 90 percent of people believe that individuals of all races should be treated equally, and over 70 percent prioritize improving racial equality. This consensus—including among those who are white—runs counter to prevailing assumptions. A common refrain among diversity experts is that whites believe that there is more racism against them than against Blacks. But while a vocal minority holds this view, the vast majority consistently reject it.
What people do contest is how to achieve equality objectives. The current polarization around DEI efforts provides a vivid example. Most Americans share the ideals underlying DEI, believing that diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is valuable, that equity (making sure that people have a fair shot) matters, and that workplaces benefit from inclusion (meaning people feel respected and valued, and have a chance to contribute). But they are divided about how organizations implement DEI commitments. Some employees fear that DEI efforts undermine their chances for promotion and other benefits, while a much larger number worry that organizations do not value the programs or achieve meaningful change through them. Companies that dismantle DEI programs, citing reasons like “inherent tensions in practicing inclusion,” reinforce these concerns.
Gender equality in the workplace provides another instructive parallel. Animating the #MeToo movement was widespread agreement that sexual harassment is unacceptable, yet some saw the movement as not doing enough, and others as going too far. When allegations concerned powerful people, employers frequently prioritized containment over accountability. In addition, worries that sexual harassment allegations would automatically end a person’s career fueled what some referred to as #MeToo Backlash. One result was that some male managers became more reluctant to mentor or hire women for roles that required close interaction. Without structures to surface concerns, test competing stories, and challenge internal power dynamics, organizations struggled to address misconduct in fair and effective ways.
The Limits of Formal Compliance
Spurred by the American Civil Rights Movement, federal, state, and local civil rights laws in the United States established a legal commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. These laws, enforceable by individuals as well as government entities, provide that all workers are entitled to fair and nondiscriminatory treatment in hiring, pay, promotion, and other terms and conditions of work without regard to legally protected characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, and age. Initial compliance structures leaned formal and adversarial, placing primary responsibility on individuals to assert their rights, often overlooking workplace power imbalance and the risks of speaking up. Despite the more covert and complex forms that discrimination takes today, equal opportunity compliance mechanisms have remained largely unchanged for decades.
Formal mechanisms remain essential, but they are inherently reactive and capture only a fraction of workplace concerns; studies estimate that just 6 to 13 percent of harassment incidents are formally reported. When organizations route a wide range of concerns—many relational, ambiguous, or rooted in misunderstanding—into rigid, adversarial processes, they risk escalating issues. Employees may hesitate to raise concerns about a manager who discourages dissent, for example, or to stop a colleague’s harmful conduct, if the only available avenue is a formal process that may result in damaging relationships or triggering retaliation. Defensive responses that dismiss credibility or fault those who raise concerns increase polarization and discourage interpersonal risk-taking. Meanwhile, managers fearing legal action may avoid giving candid performance feedback to employees or making hard policy or business decisions, undermining organizational effectiveness.
Organizations need to provide multiple, accessible avenues for raising concerns, including informal and confidential options, and proactive tools such as climate surveys, focus groups, exit interviews, and systematic reviews to identify patterns and risks early.
Designing Systems for Early Conflict Navigation and Organizational Growth
In this fraught moment, many organizations are either dismantling existing, top-down programs—citing lack of support or impact, and increased risk—or maintaining ineffective, symbolic programs. The fix is twofold: Establishing clear, credible mechanisms for employees to surface conflict early, and investing in leaders’ skills to navigate conflicts that emerge. Importantly, employees need an opportunity to help shape how organizations design and implement efforts to create genuine fairness. While many people presume that conflict undercuts productivity and well-being, the constructive clash of views—what researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call “optimal conflict”—can reveal new insights, and help organizations identify and address vulnerabilities.
Conflict navigation can feel challenging in the workplace generally, and people tend to have less experience in addressing conflict about equal opportunity and identity than scheduling or feedback models. When issues of race, ethnicity, or gender are at play, intergroup anxiety can undermine cross-group interactions both inside and outside organizations.
To promote genuine equal opportunity, leaders and managers need what Donna Hicks calls “dignity-based skills.” Among the most important are the fundamental tools to give, take, and ask for feedback, along with the relational skills to protect people’s dignity in the moment. Relational skills include “bystander” strategies to step in when someone may be experiencing harm—say, if colleagues ignore someone’s comments in a meeting or attribute their ideas to someone else, or if people begin making sexual jokes. They also include the ability to bring people together to resolve potentially explosive dynamics with constructive dialogue.
These skills allow leaders to engage in problem-solving directly rather than deferring to compliance or formal adversarial processes. They also benefit organizations more broadly: While diverse teams often face more conflict, those that bridge disagreement constructively unlock the innovation and performance gains that multiple perspectives provide, as well as strengthen relationships and improve accountability among and across work teams.
Systems to Promote Constructive Conflict and Stronger Work Cultures
For skills to translate into meaningful impact, organizations need well-designed, complementary channels to understand workplace concerns and to transform individual capacity into collective progress. John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, described collaborative work toward a dignity-centered organizational culture by integrating restorative practices, conflict coaching, and communications training into its core mission—so that all employees experience “equitable access, treatment, consideration, and opportunity.”
The five mechanisms below are examples of ways organizations can detect emerging problems before they harden into formal disputes while enabling employees to raise concerns and strengthen practices without the personal risk of filing a complaint.
- Advisory councils and task forces are employee committees that review practices and recommend changes related to diversity and conflict resolution. A landmark longitudinal study of more than 800 US firms found that diversity task forces and committees were among the most effective organizational practices for increasing the representation of women and people of color in management. These structures outperformed training-only interventions by creating responsibility and accountability for diagnosing problems and pressing for change.
- Organizational ombuds offices are staffed by trained conflict-management professionals who operate under established standards of independence, confidentiality, neutrality, and informality. Many organizations engage ombuds as part of their internal governance or ethics infrastructure, offering employees voluntary, confidential, impartial support outside formal reporting channels. By clarifying issues, explaining options, and facilitating informal resolution, ombuds help resolve conflicts—particularly those rooted in differences in communication style and cognitive approaches, including neurodiversity—by fostering mutual understanding and practical strategies that support working relationships.
- Restorative justice programs are operated by either outside organizations or in-house facilitators. They bring together parties in structured, facilitated dialogues to understand harm, restore relationships, and prevent recurrence, with often profound results. At one national nonprofit, formal complaints to human resources (HR) declined while requests for restorative processes increased. Employees began describing identity-based conflict and strained relationships in terms of repair and accountability rather than discrimination. Some ombuds have also successfully relied on these approaches, particularly with equal employment opportunity violations or harassment allegations.
- Voluntary mediation offers a non-adversarial pathway for resolving conflict, drawing on trained mediators—internal professionals or external neutrals—to facilitate voluntary agreements through structured negotiation. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) evaluated its mediation program and found that more than 98 percent of employers and 92 percent of employees said they would participate again. Participants reported that mediation enabled creative, flexible resolutions, including apologies, communication agreements, training, schedule changes, or supervisory adjustments—remedies often unavailable in litigation. Although EEOC mediation takes place after a charge is filed, its effectiveness points to the value of internal mediation even earlier, when organizations have greater room to resolve issues constructively and prevent escalation.
- Electronic fairness or equity trackers have shown great promise in strengthening accountability and worker voice. These digital platforms (often operated by HR or an advisory council) allow employees to anonymously raise systemic concerns and track organizational responses from proposal through implementation and outcomes. Employees at one health care nonprofit reported that leadership commitments to fairness felt abstract and unverifiable. In response, leadership implemented a dashboard that invited feedback from staff about topics like the availability of mentorship programs, workplace culture concerns, and vacation scheduling, and that tracked the organization's plans for actions and progress. The nonprofit simultaneously launched a platform allowing leaders to respond to employee suggestions directly. These tools closed feedback loops, modeled transparency, and rebuilt trust by demonstrating that leaders saw, tracked, and acted on employee input.
Importantly, these five mechanisms complement rather than replace formal processes, including HR or union grievance procedures. They provide employees greater agency while enabling organizations to respond before relationships fracture and productivity suffers. Conflict coaching and skills-based communication training reinforce these systems by equipping individuals to address tensions early and by building a shared organizational language that makes those skills usable across teams.
The benefits of building organizational capacity to effectively manage disagreement are manifold. On an individual level, consistent with our respective
experiences, employees who use resolution-oriented channels early are more likely to remain engaged and to view organizational responses as fair. For organizations, enterprise-level efforts that demonstrate institutional courage through transparency and active harm-repair—by systematically evaluating practices, analyzing workforce data, and listening through multiple channels—can identify and address conflict before it escalates. This advances workplace effectiveness and equal opportunity in turn. But the positive effects extend further still: Learning to manage conflict and fostering cooperation among people from varied backgrounds and viewpoints also strengthens the collaborative capacity essential to resilient democracies.
Read more stories by Jenny R. Yang & Rachel Godsil.