9 Simple Ways Your Workplace Can Be More Inclusive of People with Disabilities
Disability-rights advocates want the push to hire and retain Americans with disabilities to endure long beyond this month.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) celebrates National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) in October, with a theme this year of “America’s Workforce: Empowering All.” The month “celebrates the contributions of workers with disabilities throughout American history, and emphasizes the importance of ensuring that all Americans have access to the services and supports to enable them to work,” according to a news release.
About one in four adults in the U.S. (61 million people) lives with a disability, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report in August that accounted for disabilities related to mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living and self-care; meanwhile, disabilities can also come with aging, illness and injury. Labor-force participation of people with disabilities hovers at 21.4%, compared to 68.2% of those without disabilities.
“With us being the largest minority group in the country and the world, there’s no reason to be ignorant of who we are and to ignore us,” Vilissa Thompson, a Winnsboro, S.C.-based social worker and disability-rights consultant who has the rare condition osteogenesis imperfecta, told Moneyish. “Employers need to do better about hiring us and retaining us.”
Send a strong message from the top. An inclusive business culture starts with senior leadership making a commitment to hire people with disabilities, Jennifer Sheehy, the deputy assistant secretary in ODEP, told Moneyish. “When a leader is open about their disability,” she added, “they send the message through the whole structure of the company that people with disabilities are valued, and that the company will support those who face trauma or disability throughout their career to be successful.”
Check your own assumptions. “It’s important to remember that people with disabilities are not a homogenous community,” said Sheehy, who experienced a spinal-cord injury more than two decades ago and uses a wheelchair. In addition to spanning every race, nationality and ethnicity, she said, people with disabilities may have blindness or be hard of hearing; have chronic conditions like lupus or multiple sclerosis; have intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder; or have psychiatric disabilities like depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. (Consider that many disabilities are invisible to observers.)
Rachael Langston, a staff attorney at Legal Aid at Work who uses a mobility scooter, advised challenging your biases and beliefs of what people are able to do. “I think with a little bit of collaboration, or even by just giving someone the benefit of the doubt, you’ll be surprised that the expectations you may have had surrounding limitations of people with disabilities are incorrect,” she told Moneyish. “And that even if there are some limitations, that it doesn’t take a lot in many cases to accommodate those so that someone can be an amazing asset to your company.”
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Be creative about reasonable accommodations. “I think the one thing about disability accommodation is that there’s not an exhaustive list of what an employer has to do or can do, but it really is an individualized process,” Langston said. “Bounce ideas back and forth, and don’t look at it necessarily as a negative process that you have to do.” That might mean getting someone the specific type of desk they need, Thompson said, or giving them the flexibility to work from home sometimes.
When you interview or hire someone with a disability -- or if an existing employee acquires one through illness or injury -- “a reasonable accommodation is usually all that stands between that person and the success in the job,” Sheehy said. Thankfully, she added, “you don’t have to be the expert.” Consult ODEP’s Job Accommodation Network (JAN), which provides one-on-one consultation on the Americans with Disabilities Act, workplace accommodations and other topics. And “to refresh your current policies and processes or benchmark what others are doing,” JAN co-director Louis Orslene told Moneyish in an email, review the JAN Accommodation Toolkit.
Foster a work environment in which employees feel comfortable asking for accommodations -- especially since you may have workers with invisible disabilities who don’t feel safe disclosing them. “Do people feel comfortable talking about their disability?” Thompson said. “If you were a disabled person, would you want to work in your organization as it is now?” Pay attention to how you talk about disability, she added, even in casual conversation.
If workers at your company don’t feel comfortable talking about their disabilities or asking for accommodations they need, Sheehy said, you risk creating poor morale and an adversarial employee-manager relationship, or even losing that employee.
Make job postings accessible -- and inviting. “If your online job application system isn’t accessible, then you are eliminating potentially superstar applicants from the very beginning,” Sheehy said. Thompson also recommended scrutinizing job requirements -- particularly ones that could discourage applicants with disabilities -- to determine whether all of them are truly essential to the role. Do you really need that person working in the office, or could they perform the same job remotely?
Your company’s hiring page could also mention any history of providing accommodations, and perhaps even lay out the process for requesting accommodations and the estimated time they may take. “Requesting anything as a disabled person, particularly when it comes to your needs, can be very stressful,” Thompson said. “The more that you’re able to put out there to alleviate their stress and their worry, the better it is.”
Make sure folks with disabilities are getting promoted. Employees with disabilities “often get stuck in the assistant trap,” said Rebecca Cokley, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress and a little person. So provide pipelines for them to move up the corporate ladder: “As you start to see employees with disabilities move up the ladder in a corporate setting or even in a nonprofit setting, you start to see the culture shift around what it means to be a person with a disability,” she said.
If having a mentor is vital for somebody’s progression in your organization, connect them with a mentor, Thompson said; encourage them to go for new or open positions. Make sure training opportunities are accessible, Sheehy added. If rising stars generally have to take a month-long offsite training in a different state before they’re promoted, for example, see if there are local and/or differently timed alternatives that would provide both working parents and people with disabilities the same credentials they’d need to advance.
Use the words that people prefer. Many individuals prefer people-first language that emphasizes the person instead of the disability, i.e., “people with disabilities.” And though use of the label “differently abled” has gained some traction in recent years, Cokley dismissed it as euphemistic. “I personally don’t care for that term,” agreed Langston. “Everybody’s different, but I think most people don’t tend to use that.”
Thompson, for her part, identifies herself as a “black disabled woman” using identity-first language. Just ask someone what term they prefer instead of assuming, she suggested. “It’s just being respectful of people’s language choice.”
Brand your company accordingly. “People with disabilities are more likely to apply for a job where they see themselves reflected in the branding for the company,” Cokley said. Make sure disability is included in your company’s diversity statement, she said, and seek out images for your corporate branding that depict both a diversity of people and diversity of disability. Verizon subsidiary Oath, in partnership with the National Disability Leadership Alliance and Getty Images, launched a new image collection in May that “more accurately portrays individuals with disabilities and breaks stereotypes.” Orslene of JAN, suggesting businesses feature people with disabilities in both internal and public-facing communications, recommended the Campaign for Disability Employment as a resource.
Make networking accessible again. Do your best to ensure that offsite networking events are held in accessible locations, Langston said. Office happy hours can often be physically inaccessible, Cokley added, not to mention untenable for people who are trying to maintain their sobriety.