Month: October 2022

Why Disability Inclusion Strengthens Your Company and How to Achieve It

Posted on by Anthony Santa Maria

“Nothing about us without us.” This is the global slogan for the disability rights movement. It means that nothing should be decided for people with disabilities without their presence, participation, and inclusion. 

While the movement has achieved a great deal of progress since its founding in the 1960s, people with disabilities still face many challenges in the corporate world. They face exclusion from decision-making and also from consideration within workplace diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice initiatives. 

In fact, according to a report from the Return On Disability Group, while 90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity, only 4% consider disability in those initiatives. This is a staggering statistic considering the CDC’s estimate that 1 in 4 U.S. adults—61 million people—live with a  cognitive, physical, or emotional disability that impacts major life activities. 

Companies cannot consider themselves truly inclusive if they continue down this path. And it hurts them from far more than just a PR angle. To remedy the issue, business leaders must first understand the challenges people with disabilities face in the workplace. And then take concrete, informed actions to better recruit and retain a truly diverse workforce.

Diagnosing the Problem: Obstacles to Disability Inclusion in the Workplace

For many people with disabilities, the obstacles begin before they even get the job or enter an office. Even the application process can be extremely exclusionary. Example issue areas can include: 

  • The format of the application
  • Online accessibility
  • The language used in job descriptions
  • Requirements for physical tasks (even when the role does not demand them)
  • In-person interview requirements (even when remote is allowed)  

These items are often coded and hard to detect by the average, well-meaning person. They could even reflect an unconscious bias that needs to be unpacked.

Even when a candidate successfully navigates the application process and gets the job, a lack of accessibility presents major challenges. This can range from holding a work event in an inaccessible location to forcing people to quickly read small text in a presentation. Careful consideration of these obstacles is especially relevant now that many companies require at least a partial return to work. 

Just as harmfully, people with disabilities often face microaggressions and a general lack of understanding from organization leadership and colleagues. While this is true for members of any underrepresented group, it can be more pronounced for people with disabilities who are often excluded or glossed over in DEIJ trainings.

Taking Accountability: How Leaders Can be Advocates for Disability Inclusion in the Workplace

In light of the challenges people with disabilities face, there are many ways an empathetic, emotionally intelligent leader can show up as an advocate and ally for disability inclusion in the workplace. Here are five actionable activities leaders can do to create a culture where people with disabilities can thrive:

 1. Collect employee experience data on people with disabilities

Research and data can help you build sturdy foundations for an intentional, high-impact strategy. Consider including questions on future employee pulse surveys that help you understand the following points:

  • What policies, practices, and activities contribute to inequities? 
  • Do disabled people feel valued as their whole selves, including their differences?

Just like any other employee, people with disabilities want to be valued and appreciated for what they bring to the table. In this evaluation, leaders should be particularly cautious that messaging and practices do not communicate pity or tokenism.

2. Educate employees on disability inclusion

This can look like making sure your current DEIJ training adequately centers disability, or finding additional training that does. It’s particularly important for anyone involved in hiring to consider accessibility throughout the recruitment process. 

Education about disability inclusion can lead to innovation and can help companies connect with a severely under-tapped talent pool. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities is higher than for the rest of the US population. 

Ernst & Young, for example, created a specific hiring program focused on autistic and otherwise neurodiverse people. Hiren Shukla, the executive who founded the initiative, said EY has saved over 3.5 million hours on work process optimization thanks to its Neuro-Diverse Centers of Excellence. 

3. Create Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for employees with disabilities 

ERGs not only provide support for employees with shared characteristics or life experiences, but play an outsize role in wellness, community advocacy, and building dialogue across an organization.

For people with disabilities, they are crucial for creating dedicated time for discussing disability inclusion in the workplace and encouraging leadership to engage with the subject. Also, since many disabilities are invisible (and only 39% of employees with disabilities disclose them to their manager), this can literally create visibility and transparency within the company.

4. Make sure physical accommodations are in place and accessible 

This is a great example of when to be proactive rather than reactive. When leaders are proactive about supporting employees with disabilities, it can remove the burden of needing to ask. Information such as the location of accessible bathrooms should be easily available to everyone in an organization. Digital resources, like login information for a company’s mental health app subscription, should also be readily available. 

Presenting this information in a centralized way, like in an employee onboarding packet or a dedicated section of your company’s intranet can improve access and use.  

5. Consider your company’s products and services

If applicable, reflect on the products, goods, and services your company creates and how it can better serve and support people with disabilities. Not only is it the right thing to do, but being inclusive is a great way to attract talent, build an authentic brand, and have a more resilient business.

Not to mention, having more diverse employees at a company also leads to more diversity of thought. The lived experience of people with disabilities can lead to otherwise overlooked business breakthroughs For example, Microsoft created a captioning feature on its products because their own employees demanded it, and it has exploded in popularity on its Teams app since the start of the pandemic. 

Leading With Empathy as We Face New Challenges

In the past few years, we’ve seen enormous strides in how business leaders are prioritizing DEI initiatives. As of July 2022, every single Fortune 100 company has DEI initiatives outlined on their respective websites. 

Yet many companies face increasingly worrisome talent shortages, exacerbated by the pandemic and the still-unknown long-term effects of COVID and long COVID. Corporate and DEI leaders simply cannot afford to continue ignoring people with disabilities, both for moral and economic reasons. 

Most importantly, we can all heed the “nothing about us without us” call to lead with empathy and action.

Why Every Leader Should Focus on Empathy (and How to Do It)

Posted on by Anthony Santa Maria

Reading about current workplace trends — like Quiet Quitting and the Great Resignation — it’s clear that people are unhappy at work. These phenomena are a wakeup call for business leaders to do something different. 

Luckily, there’s a treasure trove of inspiration from companies who are getting it right. Among companies who are boasting high levels of retention and engagement, one theme is clear: empathetic leadership. 

Why empathetic leadership, why now?

For one thing, several recent studies and reports have shown that employees care about it. They care about it a lot. 

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) surveyed nearly 2,500 U.S. workers and found that a whopping 97% believe empathy is an essential quality of a healthy culture. More specifically, 92% say that when looking for a job they value organizations that demonstrate empathy.

In our current volatile talent market, empathetic leadership is more important than ever. You’ve likely read about workers leaving their jobs and even entire industries in droves (this has been referred to as the Great Resignation or the Great Attrition), as well as the phenomena of quiet quitting. To illustrate this recent trend of employee dissatisfaction, studies show that the voluntary quit rate is hovering at 25 percent higher than at pre-pandemic levels.

Based on SHRM’s report, it’s easy to see why people are seeking greener pastures. Over half of respondents believe their organization’s leadership would lie to employees if it would benefit the business. Over a third claim to have witnessed inconsiderate or insensitive treatment of a co-worker by a manager in the past year. And, according to Gallup, only 28% of employees strongly agree that their organization is fair to everyone

Empathetic Leadership is the Key to Retention

Companies are competing for talent in ways they never had to before.

According to a recent McKinsey report, there’s a disconnect between why employers thought people were quitting and the reasons people actually gave. Employers named things like compensation and work-life balance, while employees cited factors like not being valued and uncaring or uninspiring leadership. 

These types of cultural and human factors are especially important to younger generations. Millennials and Gen-Z in particular value inclusivity and diversity more highly than other generational groups. 

These trends go beyond retention. A growing body of evidence indicates that empathetic leadership is crucial to a company maintaining high levels of engagement, retention, innovation, and productivity. Empathetic organizations promote positive workplace relationships, encourage collaboration, and foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). 

For organizations to reap the benefits of an empathetic workforce, it needs to start at the top. Read on below for tips business leaders can take to prioritize and build empathy. 

How Can Leaders Build Workplace Empathy?

Fortunately, empathy is not necessarily something you’re born with — it can be developed and learned. Making a conscious effort to build empathetic leadership among executive teams and people leaders is a great start. Here are three ways L&D and DEI teams can build empathy as a core leadership skill:

1. Harness the power of perspective-taking:

Leaders should make a conscious effort to understand and imagine what it is like to experience the world as someone other than themselves. The benefits are even greater when leaders encourage all employees to do the same. When building empathetic leadership at scale, immersive learning technology can give you the upperhand. 

By understanding where someone from a different background is coming from, one can learn to respond to them in an empathetic way. This is especially important when an employee is bringing up something difficult or making a complaint. It is equally important when leaders are managing complex change management projects, or supporting their employees during global crises. 

2. Expand professional networks:

It’s hard to open yourself to ideas or perspectives when you’re always talking to the same people. Leaders, like most people, usually seek advice from their peers. And our networks tend to look a lot like we do. While you might get some great insights about business, it won’t help much when it comes to empathy.

Instead, leaders should make an effort to seriously and regularly engage with employees who are from different backgrounds. This can be done in a formalized mentoring (or reverse mentoring) structure, or in more informal settings like ERGs and lunches. When employees see leaders making an effort on this front, they are more likely to see them as trustworthy.

3. Create space for self-reflection:

Most managers do not realize they have a trust or empathy issue until it is too late. This is why they should practice checking in with themselves about how they are showing up in the world and leading at their company. 

Leaders should regularly review their company’s core values and reflect on how they embody them in their day-to-day. How might a junior employee answer that same question? Are others in leadership roles being held accountable? Is there an open dialogue of communication across company hierarchies? Is there a culture of cooperation and teamwork being fostered? Am I behaving empathetically? Am I someone people can trust?

All of these and more are questions that go beyond basic financial metrics that leaders should keep top of mind. When tied to specific measures, leaders can assess how they are progressing towards a more empathetic workplace. 

Empathetic Leadership Drives DEIJ

Leaders are viewed as role models by the entire organization. How they practice (or don’t practice) empathy sets a standard that can inspire behavior change and dedication to empathy from others. This can have a powerful ripple effect that can transform an organization, leading to significant gains in retention, cooperation, as well as in DEIJ initiatives that build trust and understanding across all employees. 

As Chantal Gaemperle, LVMH group executive VP of human resources & synergies said, “Understanding of the power of empathy is rooted in an important core value: people make the difference. As we create a truly inclusive workplace, empathy plays an important role in ensuring talent can come to work in an emotionally safe environment where they feel comfortable being their true selves.”