Disability in or versus the workplace

Diversity is just differences, celebrate it.

I thought to myself having worked in the field for many years, that it was about time that I returned to working in the disability field, not only as an Occupational Psychology Consultant, but as an Equity, Disability, and Inclusion Consultant this time around.  Employers are now actively seeking disabled people to hire.  A lot of time, money, and effort over the years judging people’s abilities by their belonging to a particular group.  Employers assign people abilities based on our collective stereotypes.  Employers spend a lot of money hiring consultants or staff to look at diversity.  But it boils down to one idea, diversity is just differences, celebrate it.  Employers have and are spending a lot of money looking at gender, race, and ethnicity because it adds to our value.  We can’t keep going around judging people on our stereotypical understanding.  Like Lesa, as she outlined in her TEDx talk, why is it that people still approach me in a patronising way giving me the cognitive credibility of a five-year-old?  A few years back I was doing administrative work for a senior manager on a learning and development training programme.  The feedback I was given by her, the person who employed me for the project, was that I had surpassed her expectations.  The implication was you worked and I didn’t expect you to do the job properly.  The implication was that I exceeded her expectations and that in essence, I was brave for going out to work.  Meanwhile, I was thinking to myself, I am not a firefighter, I am just going to work. I got credibility status for doing practically nothing.

I participate in an exercise class and I am told I am courageous.  What about the other people in the exercise class?  Why am I getting credibility for not doing much?  You give it some thought and you realise people have very low benchmarks or expectations for disabled people.  So, if you do something normal, they say you champion, while you are thinking not really.  Why is this?  It is because, as Lesa says, we don’t understand disability.  We see people’s disabilities and we judge people’s abilities on that.

Seeing the value of a person with a disability in the workplace

If you have low benchmarks in the workplace, you don’t see the value a person with a disability can add to your organisation.  You may panic a bit and go we only employ one percent when you know you should be hiring and retaining a higher percentage of disabled employees.  So, what do you do, you have a meeting where you go ooh ee I don’t know about this, we are a really busy organisation or department, we can’t have disabled people working here: – It’s too dynamic or it is too busy here.  If you have a disabled candidate or employee who becomes disabled and uses a wheelchair in front of you, it is like judging your decision based on someone sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over them putting a bolt on a nut.  That is not disability.  The problem with this picture is that we tend to assign what jobs are suitable for people with a disability.  The starting strategy for many companies and organisations doing a diversity, disability inclusion process, is having a meeting amongst themselves to determine what positions would be suitable for the disabled.  Often potential roles are limited to reception, the switchboard, call centre jobs, or jobs existing employees just can’t fill.  My question is, do you also say what positions are suitable for particular genders, ethnicity, or black people?  When you say that people say that’s not right that is discriminatory.  But why?  Because in the category of black people, there is such a range of different potentials, skills, knowledge, personalities, and motivations.  You can’t say which positions are suitable for black people so why is it okay to assign positions which are viewed as suitable for disabled people?  You are thinking along the lines of a blind, deaf, or wheelchair user, you are thinking from a functionality perspective.  When the reality is disability includes a wide range of impairments that may or may not impair the individual’s performance depending upon the circumstances they find themselves in, and the context they are operating in.

Where are we now?

We are more than 25 years down the line from when the Disability Discrimination Act was passed and we are no closer to integrating disabled people into the workplace.  It feels as if we have gone backward.  Yes, we are let into the front door, but the representation in the workplace has actually dropped.  Not only are we not getting it right we are getting it wrong.  What do we do?  You have to stop deciding what people with disabilities can and can’t do.  The problem is we are trying to find people who fit into our existing corporate structures.  So, if you find someone with a missing finger, great, job done, inclusion box ticked, or someone with a minor hearing impairment in an ear ok.  But if you have a candidate with depression or schizophrenia we re-evaluate and go oh no we can’t have people coming to work with axes, chopping people up, that will not do. We have to get companies or employers to understand it is not about finding disabilities that suit your structure.  It is changing your structure to suit people with a disability.  An example is requiring all entrants to have a minimum number of GCSEs and A- Levels.  90 percent of companies require them.  Why?  Companies will say succession planning.  Well, here is the problem, our mainstream schools and special education schools here in England are bad at providing an adequate level of education. We don’t have the resources, so disabled students don’t have the right skills.  We don’t have the money too from a resource assistive device perspective.  Here is a case study example given by Lesa Bradshaw in her TEDx talk.  A candidate went for a job interview with Lesa, Lesa assumed he was visually impaired because he went to a school for visually impaired students.  Lesa was surprised when he showed up in a wheelchair for the interview.  Lesa was like well ok, what is up with that?  According to the applicant, there was no other accessible school so the candidate had to go to the school for the blind and visually impaired.  Do you see the problem with categorising the disabled as a group?

What we need to do is to become more flexible.

We need to think what are the purposes of GCSEs and A -Levels as a requirement.  It is to train and develop.  You may have to start your training and development programme one step back.  Do a bridging programme to help them to get their GCSEs or A-Levels and then move on to the next step.  It’s flexibility, but people panic when they don’t have a one-size-fits-all policy.  You don’t have to change your company’s or organization’s policies to say anyone with a disability doesn’t have to have specific qualifications.  It is specific to individual cases.  Use your judgement.  Did this person have equal access to schooling?  If not, did the person graduate from secondary school? No, but they did get an A in English or Maths.  Does the candidate have learning potential to learn on this job?  Do they have the right attitude?  Yes, they do.  It is a no-brainer if you ask me.  Let me take you back and put this into context in Lesa’s topic, It’s About Time.  We have to stop associating disability with charity only.  There are a lot of people with a disability who require and depend on charity.  The same as those without a disability that need to benefit from charity but it is not a synonymous term.  So, if we are approaching disability in the workplace from a social responsibility perspective it is not going to work.  If you are doing it from a value-added transaction this person is going to add value to my organization and I am going to bring value to the person then it is sustainable.  I have read an interesting statistic recently, which said it is estimated that 70 percent of us will acquire our disability at some point.  So, from a risk management perspective the older we get well…  It is going to work to your advantage if you start working, getting it right now, starting now, put things in place.  The other thing is disability is just diversity.  It will be normalized just the same as gender and race once we get used to it.

You think that disability is not normal but it is.  According to Scope, there are 14.1 million disabled people in the UK.  19 percent of working-age adults (32.81 million, Office of National Statistics, ONS, 13 August 2019) are disabled in the UK.  That increases to 44 percent of pension-aged adults who are classed as disabled, that is a lot of people.  It is not as uncommon as you think.  It is about time we stop thinking of disability as something medically wrong with that person.  It is not about what is broken in you, it is a dynamic between you, your impairment, your personality, your upbringing, your opportunities, and your environment. Let me give you an example, someone who is short of stature, or someone with dwarfism to use the medical term.  That person is fine functionally absolutely perfect.  There is nothing actually impairing that person until you put that person in an environment that is built for average-height people.  Cars are built for average-sized people, modes of transport, production lines, manufacturing equipment, hospitality areas, and high desks at reception or banks.  You see that there is someone in a wheelchair with an arm and hand flapping and that is how you know someone has arrived.  You don’t have the disability until you are placed in a context that disables you.

If you can get this right in the workplace stop worrying about your list of disabilities so that you can look at your checklist, and go on and say hold on a minute you are not on my list so you don’t have a disability sorry.  Look at the job function a candidate is going to be in and decide what is disabling them and see whether you can remove or minimise that barrier.  That is accommodation.

Disability integration in the workplace facilitates a competitive advantage

I did my postgraduate degree training on disability integration in the workplace and one of the things I enjoyed was telling companies bits of information.  I know one of the principal drivers of hiring Consultants to work on disability inclusion projects is to comply with disability legislation.  Because we know it is part of diversity because we have to be an equal opportunities company, organisation etc.  You are forgetting one important point, the competitive edge and advantage.  It is estimated that 20 percent of the consumer population is directly influenced by disability in their decision-making.  So, although 14.8 million people in the UK have a disability, they all have friends and family, spouses and children and so that factors into their consumer behaviour.  Let’s say I want to go to a café; I will choose the accessible café over the non-accessible one.  Perhaps that restaurant is accessible because they have made accessibility a key feature.  So, I went to that restaurant and so did the fifteen other people I was going out with.  So, can you see the consumer impact, the 20 percent?  From a branding perspective, it gives you the same positive feelings as it does for example, you promote environmentally friendly practices.  You get that same feel-good vibe.

I came across a company in Oxford that is a social enterprise organisation employing a range of people with disabilities, and mental health issues; what they do is they provide training in woodworking skills.  They are highly productive, selling their products all over the UK which are very popular and competitively priced.  What contributes to their success? Quite simply it is because generally people like seeing other people being empowered and empowering themselves – it feels good.  Are you seeing the competitive edge – it makes good business sense?