After 17 years spent alongside more than a thousand organizations across 77 countries to foster fair and inclusive workplaces, Aniela Unguresan, founder of the EDGE Certified Foundation and CEO of EDGE Strategy, shares five practices that that boost the role of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) as inclusive culture drivers in organizations.
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) have been part of organizational life since 1970 when the first widely recognized one was created at Xerox Corporation, under the name the National Black Employees Caucus, growing directly from the Civil Rights Movement. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the model expanded to encompass gender, sexual orientation, veterans and disability. By the 2000s, ERGs had acquired budgets, executive sponsors, and goals aligned with business strategy. What began as a channel for advocacy had become a strategic asset.
But the gap between what ERGs could be and what some of them are remains real and wide. Closing that gap is what I want to explore here.
What Are Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)?
The definition I find most useful is this: Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are employee-led groups that foster inclusion, engagement, and business impact. What I value about this definition is that it refuses to separate the human dimension from the commercial one. ERGs are not a wellbeing initiative that happens to sit near the talent management team. They are, at their best, the critical link between an organization’s values and its drivers of economic value creation.
That dual role — culture enabler and business accelerator — is also what makes ERGs genuinely complex to lead effectively. Culture work is more art than science. And yet there is a discipline to building highly effective ERGs, and part of that discipline begins with understanding what actually drives inclusion in the first place.
The Inclusion Insight Most Leaders Get Wrong
When I work with ERG leaders and workplace fairness professionals, I ask them the same question: which of the following is the single most powerful enabler of inclusion in the workplace? The four options are: fairness of mission and goals; the leadership team
treating all employees equally; open and honest communication; or growth opportunities and transparent feedback.
The room almost always divides between open and honest communication and equal treatment from leadership. These feel like the right answers. They are visible, behavioural, and actionable.
But a rigorous research conducted by Bain & Company on the topic – testing both structural and behavioural enablers of inclusion across multiple industries and countries – clearly pointed that the main driver of inclusion is growth opportunities and transparent feedback, by a clear margin.
The finding has an unbeatable common sense to it, once you sit with it. When people have genuine access to career progression, and when the criteria for that progression are transparent and consistently applied, they experience their organizational structures as fair. It creates a sense that the opportunities that shape careers are distributed equally. Career advancement is where inclusion either becomes real or reveals itself as aspiration.
“When there are growth opportunities and transparent feedback, people will tend to experience their workplace culture as being far more inclusive — even more than when the leadership team treats all equally in terms of day-to-day interactions, but growth opportunities do not necessarily follow.”
For ERGs, this reframes the question of impact. Groups that position themselves as talent development platforms — advocating for equitable access to developmental opportunities, tracking promotion rates, mentoring high-potential members — are doing something strategically valuable in a way that event-driven community groups are not.
5 Best Practices for High-Impact Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
Over 17 years of working with more than a thousand organizations across 77 countries and 49 industries to foster fair and inclusive workplaces, we have identified what separates Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that consistently deliver meaningful outcomes from those that plateau. Five practices stand out.
Align Employee Resource Groups with Business Strategy
The first practice — and the one everything else depends on — is alignment with business strategy. Until an ERG can clearly articulate how its work contributes to organizational priorities and business objectives, it will remain peripheral. This is not a theoretical exercise. It is the foundation for credibility, resource allocation, and sustained leadership support. High-impact ERGs understand that inclusion and business performance are mutually reinforcing rather than competing goals.
Secure Executive Sponsorship and Support
Meaningful executive sponsorship follows from strategic alignment. When ERG leaders can demonstrate how their initiatives support business priorities, they are far more likely to attract leaders willing to invest their time, credibility, and influence. Effective sponsors do more than lend their name to an ERG; they help remove barriers, open doors, and advocate for the group’s objectives at senior levels of the organization.
Measure Employee Resource Groups Business Impact
Successful ERGs measure more than attendance figures or event participation. They track indicators that connect ERG activity to talent and business outcomes, such as retention rates among members, promotion rates, employee engagement scores, and participation in development opportunities. The ability to demonstrate impact using metrics that business leaders recognize is what shifts ERGs from being viewed as valuable communities to becoming indispensable strategic partners.
Build Sustainable Leadership Models
ERGs that depend on the energy and commitment of a single individual are inherently fragile. The most effective groups distribute responsibility, develop future leaders, and build governance structures that outlast any one person’s tenure. In doing so, they embody one of the core principles they seek to advance: shared ownership and inclusion in practice.
Create Open and Inclusive Membership
The fifth practice has become increasingly important in today’s legal and political environment: maintaining open and inclusive membership. Many ERGs have evolved from groups serving a specific community into networks that welcome anyone who cares about a given issue and is willing to contribute. This approach strengthens allyship, broadens organizational impact, and, in many jurisdictions, helps ensure that ERGs remain legally compliant and accessible to all employees.
The ERG Leadership Triangle That Makes It Work
No ERG, however well-led and strategically aligned, reaches its full potential working alone. What I think of as the community of practice — a triangle of ERG leaders, business leaders, and HR and talent management professionals — is the structure that makes unlocks their full potential.
ERGs bring the employee voice and an understanding of lived experience inside the organization. Business leaders bring strategic authority and resource allocation. HR and talent management professionals bring data, tools, and the ability to embed practices systematically. Where these three groups work together around shared goals, the results are qualitatively different from what any one group achieves independently.
But this triangle rarely assembles by itself. In my experience, the invitation tends to come from the ERG to the others. A practical starting point is to reach out to executive sponsors first, then to HR and talent management professionals who have culture and talent attraction indicators built into their own performance objectives. The ERG that conveys and contributes strenghtening this community of practice is one that becomes
woven into the organization’s people strategy rather than running alongside it as a parallel initiative.
Once this community of practice is formed, stay focused on highly impactful, ethical, meritocratic and legally permissible ways to make work fair for all such as the proactive management of pay equity and ensure equal opportunities for all to access stretch assignments.
Pay Equity: The Foundation Everything Else Depends On
When asked which single organizational practice most powerfully drives gender balance and fairness, my answer is proactive pay equity management. Ahead of sponsoring and mentoring. Ahead of flexible working. Why is that?
Pay is the most concrete expression of how an organization values its people. When it is equitable – and when the processes that produce that equity are transparent and consistently applied – it communicates something no communications campaign can replicate. It signals that the commitment to fairness has been embedded in the organization’s systems, not only in its stated values.
For organizations in the European Union, pay equity has also become a regulatory matter. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, companies will be required to report gender pay gaps by categories of workers, and any unexplained gap exceeding plus or minus 5% will require both justification and a remediation plan. That threshold is demanding. Reaching it requires measurement frameworks, dedicated remediation budgets, and structured processes that go well beyond the annual compensation cycle.
ERGs are well placed to keep this issue visible at leadership level and to ensure that data collection translates into action rather than annual reporting.
Stretch Assignments: The Career Accelerator Worth Fighting For
The final research finding I want to share concerns career development boosters. When asked which single intervention most powerfully accelerates the career of any type of talent, my answer is stretch assignments. Ahead of leadership development training. Ahead of networking opportunities.
This is based on what Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School, calls the 70-20-10 rule: 70% of professional identity is formed through on-the-job experience, 20% through mentoring and sponsorship relationships, and 10% through formal training. Stretch assignments are the primary vehicle for that 70%.
“The historically overrepresented talent tends to find its way more naturally into stretch assignments. It is therefore important to create a fair and transparent path for high-potential people across the full diversity of the organization to make their way into those highly effective career development opportunities opportunities.”
Access to stretch assignments is rarely equitable by default. Making that allocation fair and transparent — and tracking whether it is actually happening — is one of the highest-leverage actions an organization can take for building genuine meritocracies. ERGs are often uniquely positioned to advocate for this focused approach and to hold the organization accountable to it.
From Gathering to Game-Changer
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) mature along a recognizable spectrum: from event-driven community groups, to talent development platforms, to strategic partners embedded in how the organization builds and retains its people. The groups that make that journey are not necessarily the ones with the largest budgets or the most senior sponsors. They are the ones that understood early that inclusion is felt most powerfully through career progression, that the work requires a triangle of partners to scale, and that measuring impact is not the enemy of culture work — it is what gives it credibility.
When I think of the transformative power ERGs hold, there is a quote from Margaret Mead that comes to my mind: “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” I believe this to be true.
And in an organizational context, commitment needs to be paired with strategy, structure, and a seat at the table. My hope is that everything I have shared here is in service of helping you build all three.
FAQ
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are employee-led networks that foster inclusion, engagement, professional development, and business impact. Originally created to support underrepresented groups, many ERGs have evolved into strategic partners that contribute to talent development, workplace culture, and organizational performance.
High-impact Employee Resource Groups support business performance by improving employee engagement, strengthening talent retention, expanding leadership pipelines, and providing insights into employee and customer needs. When aligned with business priorities, ERGs can contribute directly to organizational goals.
Successful Employee Resource Groups typically share five characteristics: alignment with business strategy, strong executive sponsorship, measurement of impact, sustainable leadership structures, and open, inclusive membership. Together, these practices help ERGs move beyond community building to become strategic partners.
ERGs promote workplace inclusion by creating opportunities for employees to connect, share experiences, and contribute to organizational change. They can also advocate for equitable access to career development opportunities, mentoring, stretch assignments, and other practices that strengthen inclusion across the workforce.
ERGs can help keep pay equity and career development visible within the organization by partnering with leaders and HR teams, providing employee feedback, and advocating for fair access to growth opportunities. They can also support initiatives that increase transparency around career progression and stretch assignments.
