A Letter from our CEO, Anisha Nandi
Six years ago, the ERG space experienced a period of extraordinary growth. The convergence of COVID-19, the movement for racial justice following George Floyd's murder, the continued impact of #MeToo, and a dramatic shift to remote and hybrid work created a moment where companies invested in Employee Resource Groups at an unprecedented scale. New groups were launched. Budgets expanded. Executive commitments were made publicly and loudly.
What many programs did not do, in the middle of all that momentum, was pause and ask hard questions. Why are we launching these groups? What is their purpose at this organization? What kind of commitment can we sustain over time? What structural support needs to exist throughout the organization to make this work feel authentic, aligned, and lasting?
Those questions are now being asked in earnest. And the answers are reshaping the ERG landscape.
This is Verbate's second annual ERG Program Manager Strategy & Outlook Survey, and it represents a significant evolution from last year. In 2025, we asked a single question about investment direction - the simplicity was intentional, as Program Managers were simply looking for reassurance that other companies were continuing to support their ERGs. This year, we went deeper: support structures, global presence, ERG portfolio composition, strategy confidence, and more. We surveyed over 100 ERG Program Managers from companies spanning industries, sizes, and geographies. The result is one of the most detailed datasets on ERG program health that exists in the space today.
The story the data tells is not the one most people expect. The headline is not about budget cuts or political headwinds. It is about infrastructure. The programs that are growing are not the ones with the most ERGs or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that built genuine support structures: cross-functional partnerships, aligned executive sponsors, middle manager buy-in, and operational systems. The programs that are struggling skipped those steps and are now trying to sustain effort without the foundation to support it.
Meanwhile, something remarkable is happening globally. Two-thirds of the organizations we surveyed now run ERGs across multiple countries, and international expansion is accelerating. Even as the U.S. conversation around DEI has grown more complicated, organizations around the world are seeing ERGs (often known by different names like Employee Networks) as a strategic tool to advance talent attraction, retention, corporate social responsibility, accessibility and more.
If you are a leader overseeing an ERG Program, this report was built for you. The data is yours. The insights are designed to help you make the case for what your program needs, have honest conversations with leadership about where you stand, and build the infrastructure that will make everything else possible.
And if you want to talk about what any of this means for your specific situation, my door is open. Grab time on my calendar.
Anisha Nandi CEO & Co-Founder, Verbate
About Verbate: At Verbate, we work with ERG leaders and Program Managers around the world, giving them the community, training, and strategic support they need to build resilient programs. You can learn about our ERG Leadership Community & Training, our annual ERG-Land Conference, and our Monthly ERG PM Meet Up.
Defining ERG Resources
Before we get into the data, let's define what we mean by "resources." ERG work is almost always work on top of people's day jobs, which means resourcing is a combination of factors:
Budget: The monetary allotment ERGs and HR teams are given to plan efforts and support the groups throughout the year.
Time: The bandwidth and recognized time that ERG leaders and Program Managers are given to plan and execute their efforts.
Cross-Functional Support: The champions and team members who support ERG leaders: executive sponsors, cross-functional partners, middle managers, and operational infrastructure from HR and IT.
This last category, cross-functional support, is where this year's data tells its most important story.
ERG Investment Trends in 2026
We asked every respondent: How is your organization's investment in ERGs changing in 2026? When we say resources, we mean a combination of time, budget, and cross-functional support.
74% of organizations are holding their ERG investment steady. 15% are increasing. 12% are decreasing. Not a single respondent reported abandoning their ERGs.
That last number is worth sitting with. In a year where DEI programs broadly have faced scrutiny, executive orders, and public pressure, not one organization in our dataset said they are walking away from ERGs. The floor has held.
Year-Over-Year: What Changed from 2025
In 2025, we surveyed over 100 ERG Program Managers with the same investment question. Here is how the numbers shifted:
The "increasing" cohort shrank by 9 points. The "same" cohort grew by 14 points. And the "decreasing" cohort held essentially flat.
What is Behind the Shift
The headline might look like a cooling of enthusiasm. The reality is more nuanced than that.
The last six years brought an incredible amount of change to the ERG space. In 2020, companies launched new ERGs, expanded budgets, added headcount, and made public statements of support. All of this happened amid a dramatic transformation in workplace culture: remote and hybrid work during COVID, the George Floyd movement, and the ripple effects of #MeToo. ERGs were part of many things that happened all at once during that period.
Fast-forward to 2026, and many programs are realizing that amid all of that commitment, they didn't necessarily stop and ask the hard questions. Questions like: Why are we launching these groups? What is their purpose at this organization? What kind of commitment can we sustain over time? What structural support needs to exist to make this work authentic and aligned?
For the organizations reducing investment, a lot of the time this is not necessarily a negative signal. It may be a right-sizing of a commitment they were not in a position to sustain in the first place. They overextended themselves, and they are correcting.
For the organizations holding steady (nearly three out of four), the pattern we see is that these are programs that asked those hard questions early. They said: despite all the change, we're still committed to this work. Maybe they had ERGs before 2020. Maybe they launched them during that era but paired the launch with genuine structural thinking. Either way, holding steady means they built answers that have remained resilient and sustainable through six years of internal and external change.
The Infrastructure Imperative: What Actually Predicts ERG Program Health
This year, we asked Program Managers about the support structures in place at their organizations for their ERGs. We tested four:
- Executive sponsors assigned to support specific ERGs
- Cross-functional support (e.g., comms, HR, events) ready to help bring efforts to life
- Middle managers encouraged to support ERG participation
- HR/IT centralized operations for most experiences (calendars, group signups, email lists, Slack/Teams channels)
The results revealed the single most important finding in this entire report: Infrastructure is the strongest predictor of whether an ERG program is growing, stable, or declining.
Support Structures by Investment Direction
Organizations that are increasing their ERG investment have an average of 3.2 support structures in place. Organizations that are decreasing have an average of 1.8. That is nearly double the infrastructure for growing programs.
The individual structure breakdown tells an even sharper story:
Executive sponsors are near-universal among growing programs (93%) but also common among declining ones (83%). Sponsors are necessary but not sufficient.
Cross-functional execution partners are where the data splits wide open. 93% of organizations increasing investment have cross-functional partners in place. Among those decreasing, only 33% do.
Middle manager encouragement and HR/IT centralized operations follow the same pattern: present in roughly two-thirds of growing programs, present in only a third of declining ones.
Why Executive Sponsors Aren't Enough
83% of all respondents said they have executive sponsors assigned to their ERGs. It is by far the most common support structure. But it is also the one with the least predictive power on its own.
Here is what we see happening: a lot of programs landed on "we should have executive sponsors" as the answer to the infrastructure question, and then stopped. They did not pursue it further. They did not ask: What do those sponsors need to be able to do? How do they distribute support to middle managers? What is expected of them? Do they understand how to show up for the group? Do they understand what is in it for them?
The best programs went several steps further. They defined expectations for sponsors. They trained them. They cascaded support down to middle managers and across to functional partners. The programs that stopped at step one are now feeling the weight of that gap.
Cross-Functional Partners: The Binary Finding
This is the starkest data point in the entire survey. Cross-functional partners include partners on teams like HR/People, Internal Communications, Events, and more.
Organizations with cross-functional execution partners: 5% are decreasing investment, 19% are increasing.
Organizations without cross-functional execution partners: 29% are decreasing investment, 4% are increasing.
Among the organizations we surveyed, virtually none without cross-functional partners are growing their ERG investment.
Building genuine cross-functional partnerships requires hard conversations about incentive structures, organizational goals, and how to give ERGs influence and authority. All of that has to be in place to see partnerships come to life in a way that feels truly strategic and sustainable. But the data is unambiguous: this is the variable that matters most. This is often the underlying tension when we see programs wanting their ERG's to have "business impact," but struggling to define what that means or how to get there.
Confidence Climbs with Infrastructure
We asked every respondent to rate their confidence in the overall strategy of their ERG program heading into 2026 on a 1 to 10 scale. The mean was 7.2 and the median was 7.
But confidence is not evenly distributed. It tracks with the number of support structures in place, and the jump at the top is striking:
- 1 structure: avg confidence 6.9
- 2 structures: avg confidence 6.7
- 3 structures: avg confidence 6.8
- 4 structures: avg confidence 8.2
Organizations with all four support structures in place averaged 8.2 confidence, and not one of them scored low. The pattern is clear: infrastructure does not just protect against decline. It builds the confidence that Program Managers need to lead effectively.
Infrastructure starts with capable leaders at every level. Verbate's ERG Leadership Community connects leaders across the space with cohort-based training, peer networks, and year-round resources. It is the most direct path to building the kind of infrastructure the data says matters. Learn more about the ERG Leadership Community.
Global ERG Programs: A Growing Opportunity with Real Complexity
ERG programs are increasingly global, but the frameworks most organizations use are still built for a US context. For context, 64% of respondents have employees outside the US or in multiple countries.
How Global ERG Programs Are Structured Today
Among the organizations with a global presence, we asked how their ERGs are structured across regions. The results reveal a range of approaches, and a clear picture of where most programs are in their global journey:
The majority of global programs, roughly 6 in 10, are US-primary with some international presence. These are organizations where ERGs were built for a US context and have started to extend into other markets, but the center of gravity remains states-based. About 1 in 5 have built more robust global ERGs with regional sub-groups, a model where each region has its own chapter or structure that rolls up to a global ERG. A smaller group of companies operate independent regional ERGs, where offices or regions run their own groups with little or no formal connection to a global program.
This is useful context for Program Managers who are thinking about their own global operating model. There is no single "correct" structure, and the right answer depends on where your organization is in its global journey, how your employee base is distributed, and what employees in each region say they need.
What the data does suggest is that programs with more developed global structures tend to report higher confidence in their overall ERG strategy, which makes sense: investing in a thoughtful global model is itself a sign that the program has reached a certain level of maturity and intentionality.
The Two Challenges of Going Global
Global expansion brings two categories of challenges. The first is logistical: coordinating time zones, languages, and different ways of working. The second, and arguably harder, is cultural: understanding how identities and experiences show up differently depending on the region, the history, and the context.
What the Best Global Programs Have in Common
The most resilient global programs have done a few things well. First, they listen to employees in each region about what they need and what type of group they want for support. What you hear might surprise you, and that is a good sign. It means you are truly listening.
Second, they iterate and test different models. Maybe what works is a global chapter model with different chapters in different regions. Maybe it is a centralized structure where chapters funnel up to a single group type. Maybe each region has a separate set of groups depending on what that region specifically needs. There is no one right answer. The key is listening first and reacting with a model that fits.
One more thing worth mentioning: even though there has been undeniable confusion in the US around some of this work, global ERG expansion is growing rapidly. Organizations abroad are excited about this work, running full speed ahead, and many see the confusion in the U.S. as an opportunity: a chance to attract and retain talent by committing fully to these groups and asking the hard questions early.
Building a global ERG operating model is one of the most complex challenges in this space, and one where an expert external perspective can make a meaningful difference. We work with resourced organizations to design governance structures, chapter models, and regional frameworks that fit their specific context. If your team is navigating global ERG expansion and wants a strategic partner, let's talk.
ERG Portfolio Decisions: Types, Scope, and Right-Sizing
ERG Prevalence
Among our respondents, the most common ERG types are LGBTQ+, Women/Gender Diversity, and Black/African American, each present at 80%+ of organizations. Latine/Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Veterans/Military Families follow closely. Neurodiversity and Mental Health ERGs, which were emerging categories just a few years ago, are now present at roughly 4 in 10 organizations.
The Portfolio Size Paradox
Larger ERG portfolios (10+ groups) correlate with higher confidence: an average of 8.2, compared to 5.9 for organizations with 1 to 3 ERGs and 6.4 for those with 4 to 5. But the relationship is not as simple as "more ERGs = better."
Organizations decreasing investment actually have a higher average ERG count (7.9 types) than organizations increasing investment (6.3 types). More ERGs does not predict growth. Infrastructure does.
Small portfolios with strong infrastructure (3 to 4 support structures) outperform large portfolios with weak infrastructure (0 to 2 structures). A program with 5 ERGs and all four support structures in place is in a stronger position than a program with 12 ERGs and only executive sponsors.
The takeaway for PMs: right-sizing your portfolio for your organization's maturity level and infrastructure capacity matters more than growing your count of ERGs.
The Rise of Experience-Based ERGs
For most of their history, ERGs have been organized around identity: gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. These groups remain the foundation of most ERG programs, and for good reason. But, a growing number of organizations are expanding into what we think of as experience-based ERGs: groups organized around a shared life experience that cuts across traditional identity categories.
Veterans and Military Families ERGs were among the first to break this mold. They are now present at over half (54%) of the organizations we surveyed, and their presence in the data consistently signals organizational maturity. Organizations with a Veterans ERG average 8.4 ERG types, 2.7 support structures, and a confidence score of 7.5, compared to 6.0 ERG types, 2.5 structures, and 6.8 confidence for organizations without one. This is not because the Veterans ERG itself drives those outcomes. It is because the kind of program that has been built out to include a Veterans group has typically already invested in the breadth and infrastructure that supports the entire portfolio.
The next wave of experience-based ERGs is Neurodiversity and Mental Health. These groups have moved from emerging to mainstream: Neurodiversity ERGs are now present at a third of organizations we surveyed, and Mental Health ERGs at roughly 1 in 5. This expansion is a positive signal. It reflects a growing understanding that employees' ability to show up and do their best work is shaped by experiences that go well beyond traditional identity categories.
But expanding into these groups comes with higher stakes. Neurodiversity and Mental Health ERGs directly impact how people function at work. They require leaders who can listen carefully, adapt in real time, and navigate sensitive topics with care. And the data is clear: organizations that expand their ERG scope without ensuring strong infrastructure are significantly more likely to see declining investment and lower confidence than those that build the foundation first.
The pitfall we see across the space: an organization decides "we should have this group," launches it, and plans to find leaders as part of the exercise. In our view, that approach is backwards - you need leaders in place before you launch the group. Leaders who are committed, clear-eyed about the work, and ready to build out the group's purpose and infrastructure alongside you. The broader pattern holds: expanding your portfolio is a sign of growth, but only if the infrastructure exists to support what you are building.
Whether you are preparing leaders for an existing ERG or building the bench before launching a new one, Verbate's ERG Leadership Community gives them the training, peer network, and year-round resources to lead with confidence. Learn more about the ERG Leadership Community.
Confidence as a Leading Indicator
The Overall Picture
The mean confidence score was 7.2 on a 10-point scale. The median was 7. Nearly half (48%) of respondents scored in the high-confidence range (8 to 10). But 17%, roughly 1 in 6, scored their confidence at 5 or below.
What Low Confidence Looks Like
Low confidence is not just a feeling. It shows up in the data as a marker for programs that lack structural support:
- Among low-confidence PMs (scoring 5 or below), only 53% have executive sponsors, compared to 96% of high-confidence PMs
- Middle manager encouragement: 41% low-confidence vs. 56% high-confidence
- HR/IT centralized ops: 41% vs. 58%
Low confidence tends to stem from a combination of unclear strategy, insufficient resources, and organizational or political challenges. These PMs are often unable to articulate the program's value. They feel uncertain about their role. And they are working without the structural foundation that would make the rest manageable.
Confidence by Investment Direction
- Increasing programs: avg confidence 8.3
- Holding steady programs: avg confidence 7.1
- Decreasing programs: avg confidence 6.4
Confidence is not just correlated with infrastructure. It is correlated with trajectory. Programs with higher confidence are more likely to be growing. Programs with lower confidence are more likely to be shrinking. That makes confidence not just a thermometer but a leading indicator.
The At-Risk Cohort: Programs in the Structural Danger Zone
When we cross-reference global presence with support structure count, a concerning segment emerges.
20% of all respondents fall into what the data suggests is a structural danger zone: US-only organizations with two or fewer support structures in place.
This cohort looks like this:
- 35% are decreasing investment (vs. 12% overall)
- 5% are increasing investment (vs. 15% overall)
- Average confidence: 6.2 (vs. 7.2 overall)
- Average ERG types managed: 6.8
These are programs running nearly 7 ERG types with minimal infrastructure. They are, by nearly every measure in the dataset, the most vulnerable segment.
Warning Signs of Overextension
If you are managing an ERG program and wondering whether you are in this position, here are the patterns we see across the space:
Member fatigue and declining attendance. People simply are not showing up. Not for meetings, not for events. The energy is gone.
Leader burnout that bleeds into their day jobs. ERG leaders cannot show up and do their best work in their leadership roles. And increasingly, the strain starts to affect their performance in their primary roles.
The PM cannot articulate the program's value. When a Program Manager feels uncertain or insecure about their ability to communicate what the program does and why it matters (to executives, to peers, to individual contributors), that is a sign the structural foundation is missing.
The Path Forward: Pause and Build
If your program is in this position, here is the honest recommendation: put everything else on pause until the infrastructure is built.
The problem in the ERG space is that Program Managers and ERG Leaders are expected (and often the expectation comes from themselves) to execute point-in-time events and programming: heritage months, awareness events, speaker series, all alongside (or in place of) the structural work. When people are already bandwidth-constrained and trust is at a low point in a lot of organizations, that simply is not realistic.
If you are running thin, if you do not have the infrastructure you need, pause the point-in-time efforts. Go and really understand what the incentives of the organization are. Host listening sessions to understand member needs. Build guidelines and guardrails around what the program should do. Make it clear to your ERG leaders. Do all of this work to enable your program, next quarter, next year, to accomplish what it hopes to accomplish with a clear line of sight.
If this describes your program, you are not alone. A significant number of the PMs we work with are navigating the same challenges. Our free Monthly ERG Program Manager Meet Up is the largest recurring convening of ERG PMs in the space, and it is built for exactly these conversations: the structural questions, the hard tradeoffs, and the honest peer exchange that helps you figure out what to do next. Sign up for the next Meet Up.
So What: What Separates Thriving Programs from Struggling Ones
If I had to distill everything in this report into a single recommendation, it would be this: Listen to your employees and build infrastructure that reflects those needs.
Everything else should flow downstream from that. How many efforts do you run per year? How much budget, time, and headcount do you allocate? How do you involve executive sponsors and middle managers? All of it should stem from the answer to: what do our employees say they need right now, and what infrastructure do we need to deliver on that?
The answer may be different than it was six years ago. And that is a good sign. It means you are listening well, asking the hard questions, and doing what needs to be done.
The data in this report tells a consistent story across every dimension we measured: the programs that thrive are the ones that build genuine infrastructure. Cross-functional partnerships. Trained and engaged executive sponsors. Middle manager buy-in. Operational systems. The programs that struggle are the ones that skipped those steps and are now trying to sustain effort without the foundation to support it.
This is not about doing more. It is about building the structures that make everything else possible.
About Verbate
Verbate is a company that supports ERG leaders and Program Managers around the world. We help programs thrive through cohort-based leadership training, a year-round professional community, an annual conference (ERG-Land), custom workshops and summit facilitation, and strategic consulting. We also host a free Monthly ERG Program Manager Meet Up, the largest recurring convening of ERG PMs in the space.
If anything in this report resonated, or raised questions about your own program, we would love to hear from you. Grab time with our team.
Sign up for our free Monthly ERG/DEIB Program Manager Meet Up →
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Methodology
This report is based on responses from over 100 ERG Program Managers collected between December 2025 and March 2026. The primary data source was an asynchronous survey.
Respondents represent organizations spanning a range of industries, including technology, healthcare, financial services, nonprofits, manufacturing, and professional services. Company sizes range from mid-market to large enterprise. 64% of respondents reported having employees outside the United States or in multiple countries.
Survey questions covered investment direction, ERG types, global employee presence, global ERG structure, support structures, and confidence in ERG strategy. Year-over-year comparisons reference Verbate's 2025 survey of over 100 respondents, which asked questions primarily focused on investment direction.