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  1. Meaning well doesn’t equal inclusion

    This month we are revisiting an article from February 2020:

    Meaning well doesn’t equal inclusion

    Real inclusion takes action as well as good intentions.

    by Christina Ryan DLI CEO

    A group of disabled people in a circle at a conference. Some are in wheelchairs, they are talking together.

    It’s unusual to meet someone who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to employ disabled people, or to be working towards an inclusive workplace.

    So, why is it still so hard to find good workplaces that are inclusive where disabled people feel comfortable and stay for the long haul? Why have the statistics on disability employment stagnated for decades, or gone backwards?

    Because everybody thinks they’re doing something, and very few are.

    Disability Leadership Institute (DLI) members recently shared their experiences of workplace inclusion. They identified that workplaces still aren’t getting inclusion right, with a continuing lack of real action, and despite many workplaces claiming they are inclusive.

    There is no doubt employers mean well, but is meaning well enough to get inclusion over the line? Unfortunately not. Meaning well doesn’t equate to action, and it is real action that is needed.

    DLI members had several comments and suggestions for getting inclusion right across a range of workplace touch points. Many of these suggestions come from managers of teams, CEOs, and highly qualified disabled people struggling to find work. All the suggestions are from disabled people as both practitioners of inclusion and participants in inclusive processes.

    Inclusion needs to start at the beginning, during recruitment, and continue as an ongoing focus for management and leadership every day. Complacency is not an option. Never assume your organisation is fully inclusive, nor that you have no further work to do. There is always more to be done, just as there are always more ways of being inclusive, because diverse people are diverse and each person must be treated as an individual.

    Recruitment:

    • Contacting people before their recruitment interview, or appraisal process, to ask what adjustments need to be made and then making those adjustments
    • Making sure interviewers can respond to questions about workplace adjustments at interview
    • Ensuring interviews are accessible so that people can focus on their interview and not their disability needs
    • Ensuring people are confident and comfortable asking for adjustment during the recruitment phase, this means having an accessible recruitment process
    • Providing questions before interview, meeting interview panel members beforehand, or not even having a formal interview process
    • Openly seeking disabled people for your workforce

    Human Resources:

    • Ensuring there are disabled people working in human resources, and valuing the expert contribution of those staff
    • Asking all staff how they like to work/communicate and then creating shared profiles with that information, so everyone knows that everyone one else has particular strengths and preferences
    • Collecting data on diversity numbers and length of employment, including how many people openly identify as disabled

    Management:

    • Taking organisation level policies and applying them at team level
    • Ongoing conversations amongst team members which may lead to flexible work arrangements on where and how work is done
    • Doing regular things like staff meetings and team gatherings in open reflective ways

    Leadership:

    • Leadership leading by example, making sure all team members are checked on as part of daily routines to avoid exclusion and cliques developing
    • Maintaining an open conversation about gaps in inclusion and openly working to address those gaps
    • Workplaces claiming to be diverse should be planning, providing funding and seeking counsel for success in diversity, just as they would any other part of their business mission

    Finally, and rather obviously: having more than good intentions by actually employing disabled people. Many organisations say that employing disabled people is a good thing to do, yet half of all disabled people remain unemployed.

    Clearly good intentions are not good enough. Workplaces need to mean it and that means action.

    Action starts from recruitment and continues throughout the organisation as part of daily operations. Action means policies, processes and an ongoing conversation about what inclusion looks like for this team.

    Action also means management openly taking responsibility for addressing inclusion gaps as a leadership example.

    Inclusion will look different for every team, because every team is different; however, there are some structural underpinnings that can be considered for any organisation that wishes to be inclusive, as well as being seen to be inclusive.

     

    Thanks to the many DLI members who shared thoughts and experiences for this article.

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person

  2. Gaps

    A river flowing through a gap in two steep cliffsGaps

    By Christina Ryan, DLI CEO

     

    Organisations striving to improve their disability diversity want to achieve substantive outcomes. Many are now attempting to measure inclusion.

     

    Unfortunately, inclusion is a highly subjective concept so measuring it is challenging. What exactly might measuring inclusion look like, and how can it be compared to inclusion in other organisations so that benchmarking across industries becomes possible?

     

    Rather than measure ephemeral concepts, organisations could achieve more tangible outcomes by measuring gaps. Disability diversity is either present or it isn’t. Measuring gaps across a range of key areas will indicate what progress an organisation has made towards inclusion, while also indicating specific areas for improvement.

     

    Openly identifying

    Most organisations run an annual staff census to gauge workforce sentiment across a range of areas, including whether people identify as disabled. These surveys are usually anonymous which means people can safely share information that they otherwise would not.

     

    For at least the last decade most of these workforce surveys return results showing a level of people with disability that is around twice that of people who are known as openly disabled in that workplace. In other words, approximately half of the disability workforce in most organisations is not being open about their disability. This gap is a key indicator of inclusion because it points to the level of psychological safety that is, or is not, present.

     

    Comparing anonymous reporting levels to openly known levels is a key gap to monitor. The target outcome is parity between the two figures.

     

    Recruitment

    How many disabled people apply for jobs with an organisation, compared to how many are recruited? This gap speaks to styles of recruitment, advertising, and interview processes; all of which can be adjusted to be more inclusive. Advertising often includes specific requirements which exclude disabled people, and which are often not necessary for the position concerned. Interview processes are held in inaccessible locations or present barriers which do not necessarily produce the most competent person for the job, for example speed writing exercises or rapid problem solving. Adjusting interview processes to reduce barriers has the potential to increase the numbers of disabled people who get recruited.

     

    Measuring the numbers of people who declare their disability prior to interview, with the numbers of disabled people who actually get a job is another key gap that can be measured over time. The outcome to achieve is application and recruitment levels equivalent to population density.

     

    Leadership

    A key workforce diversity building block is diverse leadership. It has long been understood that diverse leadership leads to a more diverse workforce.

     

    Organisations can measure the levels of diversity in their senior leadership teams and on their boards and work to build greater levels across all diversity cohorts. These levels should reflect the population levels of the various diversity cohorts unless the organisation works in a specific diversity area and then the levels would be expected to be much higher for that diversity cohort. The gap between population levels and leadership levels can be addressed through targeted recruitment and career pathway strategies.

     

    Another element of monitoring leadership is to understand the presence of disability in the broader workforce and whether that is reflected in the presence of disability within the leadership of that organisation. Is disability present across all levels of the organisation or is it clustered at more junior levels? For example, if an organisation has 5 per cent disability levels in its workforce, are 5 per cent of its leadership also openly disabled people?

     

    Monitoring gaps can provide substantive measurable indicators of how inclusive an organisation is. Monitoring these gaps over time will also indicate whether an organisation is improving. These indicators are not subjective, rather they are based on specific empirical evidence and can be used across a wide range of organisations and industries.

     

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person.