Accenture takes top spot as most faith-friendly workplace

NEWS PROVIDED BY
Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF)
May 20, 2025

WASHINGTON, May 20, 2025 /Standard Newswire/ -- Accenture is most faith-friendly workplace among Global Fortune 500 companies in 2025, for the third year running. Equinix takes the number two spot, with DELL, Merck and Intuit rounding out the top five spots on the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation’s 6th annual Faith-Friendly Workplace REDI Index survey.

CMS Energy, Rolls-Royce, and FirstEnergy also score highly among Fortune 500 companies for their faith-friendly policies and practices. Lexmark made its debut among Fortune 500 companies as a record number of global companies participated, including those based in the U.K., and for the first time, in the Middle East, with the entry of Future Pipes Industries.

The REDI survey has 11 indicators of best practices including having faith-and-belief employee resource groups (ERGs), sharing best practices with other companies, and honoring holy days of their employees, among other accommodations such as dress and diet.

In addition to the REDI Index, we monitor the People web pages of Fortune 500 companies. Most faith-friendly initiatives have been facilitated under corporate diversity initiatives, which are rapidly evolving in response to the current environment.

Despite this, faith-oriented inclusion and belonging initiatives have grown in intensity in Q1 2025. For example, the average REDI Monitor score increased significantly from 2024 to 2025 (3.6 to 4.2), and more than doubled since 2022, as shown in the chart.

Why Religious Inclusion and Belonging May Thrive in Current Disruptive Environment

Corporations across the U.S. have scaled back their diversity programs, not only in response to the changing environment, but also in response to Supreme Court rulings finding that some affirmative action programs ran afoul of law. Because most faith-friendly initiatives have been situated within these corporate programs, have they been scaled back along with the other initiatives?

The empirical evidence is that this is not the case, at least not to any significant extent. In fact, there are some indications that the opposite may be true.

As mentioned, the average REDI Monitor score increased significantly from last year. This indicates an increase in the intensity with which companies are embracing faith-friendly workplaces. Another indicator is that for the first time in 2025, eight Fortune 500 companies mentioned the REDI Index on their websites.

At the same time, we saw a slight drop (from 62 to 60) in companies reporting that they have faith-based ERGs. This is probably a change in the external visibility of companies’ websites, because faith ERGs continue to operate in up to eight companies whose websites did not mention faith ERGs on their websites in 2025 but did mention them in 2024.

Also, coinciding with many companies decreasing the visibility of inclusion and belonging information on websites, many U.S. companies stopped participating in external benchmarking surveys this year. Indeed we saw a marked increase in U.K. and international participation even as some U.S.-based firms took a year off. Therefore, it is reasonable to suspect that the dip in the ERGs (shown in the chart below) is a result of website reorientation to the current environment rather than the elimination of faith ERGs. The same may apply to the slight dip (from 429 to 400) in the number of companies mentioning religion on their corporate people and/or inclusion and belonging web pages.

Commenting on the findings of this report, lead researcher Brian Grim notes, "It may be that the pro-religious liberty policies of the current administration may encourage more companies to look to their faith-based belonging and inclusion initiatives to help navigate the future."

For more details, visit the report landing page.

ABOUT RFBF

The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF), founded in 2014 by Dr. Brian Grim, is the preeminent organization dedicated to educating the global business community, policymakers, non-government organizations and consumers about the positive power that faith and religious freedom for all (including those with no religious faith) have on workplaces and the economy. The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation is a non-partisan, nonpolitical registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization in the United States with work worldwide. It works with multiple faiths. It does not take a position on current political debates.

SOURCE Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF)

CONTACT: 814-574-8672, contact@religiousfreedomandbusiness.org