After George Floyd's murder, companies elevated DEI from a compliance checkbox to a strategic priority. Now political backlash and government restrictions on DEI language are forcing service providers to rebrand their offerings as talent-retention solutions to survive.
DEI went through a wave in the US where it was like second-tier players doing DEI as a compliance thing because everybody said we had to. Then we had the George Floyd murder and everybody was like, okay, we need to really, really deal with this at the highest level because this is critical to our employees, to our customers, to our shareholders. And then the tides have changed now where you can't even say those words in certain government agencies. So guess what happened? There's a supply and demand shift there. So we have clients that have been typically what would be called the DEI space, where we've had to reposition to say it's in the strategic talent retention space, because you can't use DEI. We don't want to say, well, we'll just sit this one out until calmer voices prevail. You have to figure out how do you make your IP relevant given what's going on in the marketplace today.
