From reactive to strategic: fostering inclusive workplaces through storytelling, trauma-informed practices and ERGs

Purpose This article articulates a cultural–relational–structural framework for sustaining inclusion under political constraint, intended to inform both DEI scholarship and organizational leadership practice. Design/methodology/approach We conducted an integrative review across organizational behavior, management, psychology, social work and public health to synthesize literature on the three focal practices and the conditions under which they sustain inclusion. Findings Storytelling operates as a cultural mechanism of sensegiving; trauma-informed care provides the relational mechanism of harm reduction and ERGs operate as a structural mechanism of voice infrastructure. Together they form an inclusion infrastructure that can sustain belonging, psychological safety and voice under political constraint, conditional on organizational safeguards against extractive emotional labor, depoliticization of structural harm and symbolic compliance. Originality/value This article synthesizes three established inclusion mechanisms – storytelling, trauma-informed care and ERGs – into an integrated cultural-relational-structural framework, articulating how they reinforce one another and the conditions under which they sustain inclusion when formal DEI programs are politically constrained.