5 Phases of Facilitating Disability Inclusion Companywide

One in four of us is disabled, yet only 1% of primetime TV ads represent people with disabilities and only 4% of companies are focused on expanding their offerings to disabled people. Nearly half of business leaders believe there aren’t enough job candidates with disabilities, but only 20% of disabled people are employed and there are a million people with disabilities looking for work in the UK alone. Among CEOs, at least 7% live with a disability, though eight in 10 “hide that fact,” which tells me the lack of disability inclusion starts at the top, with you — and does trickle down.

When I was in middle school, my classmates picked on their peers with disabilities. Kids with Down syndrome. Kids with autism. Kids in wheelchairs. Kids with glasses or hearing aids. Basically, anyone who needed “special” accommodations. In fact, it was one of my deciding factors in aligning with an anti-discrimination organization to create my high school’s first-ever diversity day a few years later. (Back then, I hadn’t even heard of diversity and equity and inclusion.) Fast forward nearly three decades, and TikTok, the far-preferred social media platform of the so-called “liberal” generation, the fastest-growing segment of the workforce, actively suppresses content from “fat” and disabled creators and is inundated with so much toxic hate and extremism, exploitation and cyberbullying that political foes are co-writing bills to erase it from every device in the country. 

As adults, we’d like to think we’ve done better, at least at work, than the kids on their phones; unfortunately, while it may now seem obvious that your property requires ramps for employees who use wheelchairs, most organizations are still less likely to hire someone with a disability and, as Kevin Mintz told me, “lack thoughtfulness in terms of how to reorganize and restructure workplaces so that they are truly accessible.”

It’s been nearly 33 years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Mintz is the first postdoctoral student with cerebral palsy to be trained at Stanford Medical School. A postdoctoral fellow in the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics and genomics, Mintz pointed to his “white middle class privilege” and said we’ll know “things have really changed when the success of people like me is not as much contingent on being in the right place with the right people at the right time.” And then there are the microaggressions. 

While it may not be entirely evident why your team member with autism needs a ‘quiet room’ in your hybrid office space, it should be clear that, as Ted Kennedy, Jr., chair of the Disability Equality Index, said, “to prepare for the future and create sustainable businesses, companies must engage their stakeholders with disabilities and weave disability inclusion into everything they do.”

Companies that are inclusive of disabled people report 100% higher income and 30% higher profit, perhaps “because people with disabilities are inherent problem-solvers — crucial for steering an organization through testing times.” 

Yet, people with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed and, even though the number of companies that reported having “a senior executive known internally as being a person with a disability” increased nearly 25% in 2022, fewer than one in 100 C-suite positions is held by someone with a disability today. 

Plus, hiring is only the beginning.

Diverse Hiring is Not Enough: Why Only Real Inclusion and Equity Can Turn Around a Toxic Corporate Culture

For decades, brands believed hiring a diverse workforce was sufficient — and met their legally mandated goals mostly out of necessity, not as part of a strategic business plan. In fact, even today, “despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, [most] companies are [still] doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s.” However, diversity simply isn’t sufficient, because there are still offices all around the world that ignore or actively enable the type of toxic ‘middle-school’ behavior that’s better known in employment law as discrimination. In fact, toxic corporate culture is by far the biggest reason companies lose (and can’t attract) top talent — 1,000% more important than compensation. 

So what defines toxicity in the workplace? In case it isn’t already obvious from what can happen on a social media app, let’s take another look at what happens behind the scenes:

We may be smiling. We may post on Instagram with industry influencers and celebrities. We may use the IG “Share Black Stories” filter and be featured on marketing pieces. We may embrace each other and share how happy we are to have the opportunity to work with a company that impacts nearly three billion people. On the inside, we are sad. Angry. Oppressed. Depressed. And treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here.

According to Project Include, a nonprofit focused on accelerating DEI (particularly in the very biased tech industry), “[c]ompanies usually force workers to disclose their disabilities and then provide ‘proof’ to access accommodations and medical or disability leave.” Managers, meanwhile, also exhibit ableism by micromanaging and surveilling disabled people. Predictably, it’s even worse for disabled people who are Black, Asian, Hispanic, multi-ethnic, LGBTQ+ or women.

As Azza Altiraifi, senior policy manager at Liberation in a Generation, writes in Next City:

Only 27% of working-age Black disabled women had a job in 2020, which is especially alarming when juxtaposed to white women with disabilities and white disabled men at 33.7 percent and 40.3 percent, respectively. In the same year, 25% of Black adults with disabilities lived in poverty, compared to 14% of white disabled adults. Disabled people as a whole are shut out of the paid labor economy at extraordinarily high rates, with Black disabled women especially affected. And because the state rations access to healthcare and other life-sustaining resources by employment status, the consequences of such economic disenfranchisement are life-altering. Even when Black disabled workers are able to access the labor market, they are met with pay inequity (among other injustices), receiving only 68 cents for every dollar earned by white workers with no disability.

In its recent report, Disability in the new workplace: What companies need to know and do, Project Include quotes Altiraifi:

I reflect on the extent to which we, as disabled workers of color, are much more likely to live further away from the place we are commuting to than white non-disabled folks in our organizations, who are more likely to be part of the leadership structure trying to bring people back into the office. I’m also thinking about people who work irregular schedules or don’t know their schedule in advance and how absolutely difficult and challenging that is in normal circumstances, let alone in a pandemic. And the extent to which disabled workers and workers of color who are overrepresented in those kinds of sectors and work impossibly long and irregular hours face real adverse health effects as a consequence and face real barriers to being able to meet their own needs — and as a consequence, experience higher rates of burnout, depletion and other adverse outcomes.

It is this very “systemic ableism and the stigmatization of disabled people” that makes it increasingly difficult “for disabled people to trust their coworkers and companies,” which contributes significantly to why they frequently withhold their disabilities from coworkers, managers and HR, and “push their body past its limit in order to mask their disability and be taken seriously at work.”

Three Friends with Disabilities Tell Me Their Story

I asked Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the founder of Everywhere Accessible and one of the most vocal disability justice advocates I’ve met online, to share her thoughts on living and working with a disability. Here’s what she said (using Otter.ai):

The efforts stop with whatever measures protect the company. That’s partly because accommodating us is not seen as profitable in the short term, and partly because companies are made of people and people think disability accommodation means “can a wheelchair user technically get into this building/area,” or “does a blind person have access to the braille version of this.” They don’t think the other needs of wheelchair users are important, or their responsibility, and when they do they follow the model of policing. Instead of making sure there are enough disabled stalls/spaces, they harass people with non-apparent disabilities. The process to get accommodations is often itself inaccessible. If you’re able to figure out the process, getting what you need to work is a struggle. And make sure you aren’t neurodivergent or need fatigue accommodation; instead of having your need addressed, you could just be dismissed for not meeting arbitrary requirements that no one in a similar job even does on a regular basis, like lifting 50 lbs.

I also asked Robin Wilson-Beattie, who uses her own experiences “as a Black woman with visible and invisible disabilities…” to help individuals and organizations “learn how to #AccessBetter.” She told me:

• HR departments “do not clearly understand that disability is a spectrum, and what works for one disabled employee might not work for another — even when people share their diagnoses and disabilities”
• Even with the limitations of most organizations’ HR leaders, “disabled people are [still] not involved in making official decisions on the disability accommodations offered to employees”

Madeline Ryan Smith, the disability caucus chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, agrees. She said:

Individuals with disabilities have historically been marginalized and excluded from important decision-making processes in society. This is evident in the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in various spheres of life, including government, business, media, and others. The lack of representation has resulted in the perpetuation of poverty and the denial of basic human rights such as access to quality education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. The signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 marked a turning point in the recognition and protection of the rights of people with disabilities. However, there are still ongoing struggles for things like marriage equality, equal pay, and inclusive education. While some states have made significant strides in supporting individuals with disabilities, there is still much room for improvement in terms of policy and support. Ensuring the equal treatment of and opportunities for individuals with disabilities in the workplace is crucial for breaking the cycle of poverty and exclusion. This includes fair accommodations from employers and an end to the practice of paying subminimum wages.

A Story Within the Story: Why All The Photos in This Article Suck

Speaking of “underrepresentation of people with disabilities in various spheres of life,” in writing this article I discovered that there is a significant dearth of real-life (or even stock) photos of people with disabilities — and, specifically, disabled people who are not in a wheelchair.

I’ve long used Unsplash to illustrate my blog posts because, in my experience, it has always done the best job of providing options that look authentic and not manufactured. Perhaps this changed when Unsplash signed its deal with iStock, gating the best images for paying subscribers. Or perhaps I never noticed before because, I, too, am guilty of sidestepping this issue for too long.

Nevertheless, this is what you see first when you search “disabled” on Unsplash (I reduced the screen view to 33% to show a larger sample size):

As you’ll notice, of the 14 photos shown in full, 10 include a wheelchair in some way, one has nothing to do with disability at all, and five are not even of people; there are no more than one or two people of color. And by the way, while there are nearly 1,500 images of the nebulous term “influencer marketing” on Unsplash, there were fewer than 400 depicting “disabled.”

So, in hopes of improving the diversity of the people and disabilities shown in this article, I went back to the last article I wrote about artificial intelligence to find the link to the AI tool that — supposedly — converts text into real-life stock photos.

As it turns out, Stockimg.ai merely creates racist and ableist caricatures. 

A Little More on the Importance of Doing Disability Inclusion and DEI the Right Way

While DEI in corporate speak typically refers to an organization’s HR policy or program to standardize processes and procedures related to diversity, equity and inclusion, what DEI really means is an entire organization actively not only hiring but welcoming, valuing, respecting, supporting and promoting all workers — and especially those from underrepresented populations, like the disabled community. It also includes making the necessary investments to determine exactly what all your employees truly need and want. 

As Harvard Business School professor Robin J. Ely and Morehouse College president David A. Thomas explain:

Being genuinely valued and respected involves more than just feeling included. It involves having the power to help set the agenda, influence what — and how — work is done, have one’s needs and interests taken into account, and have one’s contributions recognized and rewarded with further opportunities to contribute and advance.

Yet, as Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t co-authors Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev point out, “firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers,” but “laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out.”

That’s why, with the help of some of the coolest and smartest people I know, I’ve developed a list of actions organizations can take to truly embrace diversity, equity and inclusion for everybody, including employees with visible or invisible disabilities. 

How to Include People with Disabilities

According to Respectability.org, while 72% of organizations claim to be making DEI a priority and 93% are focused on the equity and inclusion of different races, only 68% consider disability an area of focus or concern. Likewise, while more than three quarters of organizations say they’ve provided DEI training to staff, only about one third included disability inclusion. Needless to say, this is a problem — and why I believe Mintz, the Stanford postdoctoral fellow, said “part of the process has to involve reforming the ADA to include a federal funding mechanism for companies that provide accommodations and are more thoughtful at the management level in including disability in DEI efforts.”

I agree, like tax credits for environmentally conscious business decisions; or, maybe the federal government could financially penalize organizations that do not demonstrate their commitment to DEI and disability inclusion.

Meanwhile, here’s what companies can and should do — and do now.

5 Steps to Making Your Organization Truly Disability Inclusive 

Step 1: Research the state of disability inclusion at your organization, prioritizing the feedback of workers with disabilities and particularly that of disabled people who are Black or otherwise further disfranchised

1. Survey your staff (there are free templates on the internet) on issues of fairness, discrimination, personal belonging, trust, respect and purpose, decision making, hiring and onboarding, diversity and inclusion, and opportunities and resources (equity). Then, analyze for gaps and opportunities in your employee recruitment, hiring, development and advancement efforts. 
2. Study your competitors and Disability:IN's best places to work to identify the ways they are outperforming you in hiring, training and promoting employees with disabilities.
3. Follow the work of disabled scholars, influencers and justice organizers (hint: many of them are quoted in this article) for the latest and most trusted information on what disabled employees truly think and require.
4. Ensure you’re measuring your DEI efforts against the right KPIs, including (a) percentage of representation on your organization’s board, (b) percentage of representation by employee category, and (c) pay equality, or the ratio of compensation by employee category (i.e., equal pay for equal work), along with promotion and turnover rates, percentage of participation in ERGs (see below), and supplier diversity. Develop an internal dashboard for tracking, analysis and reporting. And continually analyze and adjust for gaps and opportunities in your employee recruitment, hiring, development and advancement efforts. 

Step 2: Hire a DEI director who is disabled and/or has demonstrated experience in guiding organizations through the ups and downs of developing truly inclusive DEI policies and practices

As Mita Mallick, a LinkedIn Top Voice, suggests: 

Instead of looking for direct senior DEI leadership experience, consider people with broader backgrounds but all the right skills: the ability to influence and be a change agent, to design strategy and deliver results, to create metrics and drive accountability, and to communicate effectively across all levels of the hierarchy. Those with marketing, sales, or communications backgrounds might be a great fit. Also consider people who have been informal D&I champions or, more specifically, have served as an executive sponsor for an employee resource group. You don’t have to be a career HR professional to do this work.

Here’s proof:

• Walmart’s chief culture, diversity, equity and inclusion officer, Ben Saba-Hasan, was an IT leader before taking on his latest role
• The chief equality and recruiting officer for Salesforce, Tony Prophet, worked in marketing and operations
• Zoom’s first-ever chief diversity officer, Damien Hooper-Campbell, has a background in finance

My advice:

1. Start with the LinkedIn Top Voices in disability and advocacy, company culture, leadership, social impact and “next gen,” as well as mental health, racial equity, gender equity and LGBTQ+
2. Reach out, schedule accessible meetings, and solicit advice
3. Be willing to pay a consultancy fee
4. Be flexible and open minded
5. Take copious notes on the individuals whose experience, expertise, values and mission most closely align with yours
6. Hire from outside your organization, and outside your traditional networking bases and talent pools

Once onboarded, this new hire should lead your DEI efforts.

Step 3: Inspire alignment around DEI and disability inclusion across your organization

As we now know, there’s no use in forcing anyone to undergo diversity training. For your DEI initiative to work, it must be supported by your people — and the only way to earn their buy-in is to demonstrate the need and the value, or the problem and the solution. The problem for most organizations is insufficient diversity (a recruiting and hiring issue), equity (a hiring, training, development and advancement issue) and inclusion (a company culture issue); the need is improvement in all three areas. 

The value of thoughtfully constructed DEI programs can be seen in successes across industries and geographies, and the solution is to work together under the leadership of your director of diversity, equity and inclusion to customize a program that would benefit the organization and all its employees — and, specifically, employees who historically wouldn’t have felt respected, valued or part of the group. 

1. Initiate the discussion with a town hall on the interests, challenges and biases identified in the companywide survey
2. Ask participants to contribute ideas to the development of the program; provide perks for participation
3. Develop the program and distribute details internally, requesting feedback
4. Finalize the program
5. Celebrate your alignment and new commitment through public relations, marketing and advertising campaigns aimed at potential new employees (and customers)
6. Ensure your management team never forgets the why behind it all

Jody David Armour, Soros Justice Senior Fellow of The Open Society Institute’s Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, said it best, telling me in May 2022:

Diversity centers on recruiting and hiring people from underrepresented groups. Often underrepresented groups in an organization are also socially marginalized; often the very reason a group is underrepresented in a business is because the group’s members suffer social oppression in society at large. So a business committed to employing a diverse workforce must seek to make sure that the societal burdens that members of underrepresented and socially marginalized groups must cope with outside the workplace (stereotypes, prejudice, micro- and macro-aggressions, etc.) don’t follow them into their place of employment. The point of pursuing inclusion and equity is to create working conditions that allow all employees, including those from underrepresented and marginalized communities, to flourish and not be limited by conscious or unconscious biases.

Step 4: Build an equitable, inclusive culture and safe, comfortable working environment from the ground up

1. Create DEI task forces with employees of all ability levels, from all levels of the organization
2. Create employee resource groups (ERGs) for employees who share a common characteristic, such as disability, race, ethnicity, gender, generation or religious affiliation, to provide support and expand professional networking and career development opportunities
3. Create a public-facing, accessible digital scorecard measuring and showcasing your DEI metrics over time, with particular focus on the least-recognized protected classes, like people with disabilities
4. Develop DEI policies for managers and staff, including a code of conduct policy, outlining the company’s policy on diversity, equity inclusion; a communication plan, outlining non-discriminatory communication practices; a non-discrimination policy, outlining discrimination laws and what is not allowed in the workplace; a zero-tolerance policy, outlining how instances of discrimination, harassment, bullying and stereotyping will be addressed by the organization; and a grievance policy, outlining how employees can use the company alternative complaint system (see below)
5. Develop DEI workshops from the inside out, leveraging your lead learners in the creation of each workshop and training, encouraging the hard conversations; collecting all perspectives, prioritizing members of historically disfranchised groups; promoting intersectionality, or the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as disability, race, class, gender and sexuality in overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; focusing on intervention and not just bias reduction; and facilitating ongoing engagement through lead learner-led one-on-one meetings, workshops and town halls, as well as diversity-related outreach programs and informal information sharing
6. Create safe spaces in your workplace, such as quiet workspaces for workers who may be distracted or overstimulated by open-floor-plan seating, gender-neutral restrooms for non-binary and genderqueer individuals, or lactation rooms for new mothers; if you’re fully remote or have some staff working from home, you can create safe ‘spaces’ digitally by encouraging employees to add pronouns to their email signatures and usernames, inviting employees to reserve time for personal needs by blocking it out on the calendar, honoring introverts by making digital culture events optional, and always providing the tools and support necessary to ensure all communications and experiences are accessible
7. Deploy an alternative, accessible complaint system (without one, half of all discrimination and harassment complaints lead to retaliation), providing an employee assistance plan (EAP) for anonymous, free support, as well as implementing transformative mediation, designed to empower all parties and ensure each party recognizes the other’s needs, interests, values and points of view

Step 5: Start recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding and developing talent with a focus on equity and inclusion for people with disabilities

1. Audit and update your website, social media accounts, content marketing and advertising to ensure all are fully accessible (and prominently highlight your commitment to DEI and disability inclusion)
2. Write more inclusive job descriptions, avoiding stigmatizing language, and deleting any phrases like “must be able to lift 50 pounds” or “must have a car and valid driver’s license” that discriminate against people with disabilities
3. Diversify your talent pipeline by hosting accessible online and in-person events targeting diverse populations; leveraging your ERGs for help better understanding biases and barriers; and continually collecting and analyzing data, pivoting as necessary
4. Incorporate a diverse interview panel to ensure candidates are chosen solely based on suitability
5. Train interview panelists not to ask questions about disability or age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, country of origin, birthplace, address, arrest record, citizenship, credit rating, financial status, height or weight, marital status, family status, or pregnancy
6. Evaluate and update welcome packages to ensure they are accessible and non-discriminatory
7. Prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the onboarding process, ensure all aspects of onboarding are fully accessible, and leverage the adaptive learning model so that everyone receives only the training that makes the most sense for them
8. Train managers and HR staff on how to communicate about disability and communicate to disabled employees, as well as how to provide equitable access to resources and opportunities

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/o6jUolZ7QJk
2. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wBQzfKJM5Qg
3. Photo by History in HD on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/39rGV19A6A0
4. Photo by AllGo - An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/cnbSXFbVK2E
5. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/aRI1wZIPPF0
6. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/rbz1hVh7_LM
7. Photo by CDC on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/1tt7DzXb1WA
8. Photo by Alex Nemo Hanse on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/_KP6Ve-rnNw
9. Photo by myHQ Workspaces on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/OhNSJMm9yJI
10. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/VpM7nqJlySE