The ADA is seen as a turning point for disabled people in the US, yet workplace discrimination still exists, driving initiatives and policy ideas to make the workplace fairer to all workers. (Photo: Shutterstock)
After a year where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) became a hot topic in the workplace, advocates for workers with disabilities express cautious optimism about the nation's movement toward a more-inclusive workplace. There has been progress, they say, but disabled workers—many of whom have no outward sign of disability—can still feel overlooked or undervalued by the companies they work for.
Part of the problem, advocates say, is that "disability" covers such a wide range of conditions, many of them not apparent to people who may be co-workers or managers. And workers who start a career free of disabilities may acquire one or more as they grow older.
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"The disability community is incredibly diverse," noted Maria Town, president and CEO of American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD). "We often say that disability doesn't discriminate; it covers all sorts of people. It's the only diversity category of that you can enter at any time in your life."
The history of disability in the American workplace includes a piece of major legislation to improve inclusion: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, which requires the places of employment and other public spaces to make reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. The ADA is seen as a turning point for disabled people in the US, yet workplace discrimination still exists, and groups like AAPD have championed other initiatives and policy ideas to make the workplace fairer to all workers.
One initiative that Town's group created is the Disability Equality Index, a tool used by Fortune 1,000 companies to evaluate their inclusion of workers with disabilities. Town said that despite the pandemic, interest in the Index continues to increase, with more than 300 companies registering for the Index in early 2021, compared to 247 in 2020.
Disabled workers are more likely to feel disconnected
"Organizations can actually make wonderful positive change when they create an opportunity for people to disclose, be open, and feel like they can be their authentic self at work."
A recent study by Global Disability Inclusion (GDI) found that even among groups where inclusion is a concern, disabled workers feel less engaged and rank their work experiences as less satisfying than workers without disabilities.
The study, conducted in collaboration with Mercer, asked questions about the work experiences of different groups, such as people of color, women, LGBTQ employees, and measured their perception of inclusion and engagement. It consistently found that workers with disabilities scored their experience lower than other groups.
For example, the survey asked workers to respond to the statement, "My company treats employees fairly regardless of their age, family/marital status, gender, disability, race/color, religion or sexual orientation." The affirmative responses of disabled workers were 10 points lower than the responses from all other employees. A similar statement, "My company creates an environment where people of diverse backgrounds can succeed," saw an eight-point lower response between disabled workers and all other employee groups.
Peter J. Rutigliano, Ph.D., a senior principal at Mercer, who authored the study along with GDI founder Meg O'Connell, said this data shows that disabled workers are experiencing higher levels of feeling disconnected.
"When we look in the same data set across different ethnicities, genders, and even sexual orientation, we're typically not seeing any notable differences between those groups," he said. "But consistently, we've seen those differences with employees with disabilities—specifically around overall engagement."
O'Connell said that there remains a gap in trust among employees with disabilities, and that part of that gap has to do with disclosure. "It's only over the past 10 years that companies have been inviting disability disclosure," she noted. "So that level of trust is evolving as we move from a time of 'don't ask, don't tell.'"
Rutigliano said employee distrust can be overcome with an open approach to disclosure. "Organizations can actually make wonderful positive change when they create an opportunity for people to disclose, be open, and feel like they can be their authentic self at work," he said.
Remote work: New opportunities, but new problems as well
"It should not be the responsibility of people with disabilities to teach everyone about their experience, but change does happen when people have to work together face-to-face in real time."
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a huge shift to remote work—and even as infection levels decrease and workplaces reopen, remote work seems likely to continue to have a much more prominent role. In some ways, this development is good for workers with disabilities, but other challenges also may emerge, Town said.
"People with disabilities have been asking for telework as a reasonable accommodation for decades," she noted. "And all too often, folks were told, 'this job isn't eligible for telework.' And before COVID, a lot of the policies for telework that we saw required that you prove yourself as an employee before you could be eligible for telework, and even then, it became a negotiation. For employees with disabilities, that's not setting people up for success."
With the new acceptance of remote work, Town said there will be new opportunities for disabled workers—but added that these systems are evolving, and not all the problems have been ironed out—or even discovered.
"We're still not entirely there yet," she said. "In making all our telework tools totally accessible to people with disabilities, both the disability community and the employer/HR communities are learning about what gaps and barriers there are in these systems. Websites, for example, are not required to be accessible by the ADA."
Town said there may be an impulse to shift work roles too far in one direction or the other. "One thing we don't want to see happen is that when you have an employee with a disability, that they are automatically placed into a remote-work situation," she said. "We consistently see our [business partners] talking about the importance and value of having a person with disabilities in their office space, in person, and the learning that comes from that.
"It should not be the responsibility of people with disabilities to teach everyone about their experience, but change does happen when people have to work together face-to-face in real time," she added. "And what I worry about, with this move to remote work, is that workplaces will feel as if they have less of a mandate to become accessible and inclusive… We have to make sure that we don't lose the progress that we've made in terms of physical workplaces and in-person work when it comes to disability and inclusion."
An opportunity for action
"There's no excuse for inaction anymore."
O'Connell said that to make progress in inclusion efforts, companies will have to be more proactive. "A lot of companies are afraid of action because of the legislation that exists around disability, and they're fearful of getting it wrong," she said. "But inaction is worse than no action at all. What's true of every project is true here: there will be bumps in the road with every project that you have, and we can't be fearful of those just because the topic is disability."
She added that companies don't have to go at the topic blind—there are numerous examples of businesses that worked successfully to improve their inclusion of disabled workers. "There are many excellent case studies that organizations can learn from. When I started 30 years ago, there weren't; it was a little bit of the wild west," O'Connell said. "Now we have case studies from some of the world's largest companies that are doing disability inclusion. So, there's no excuse for inaction anymore."
Town said employers will make better progress when they see employees with disabilities as part of the norm of employment. "If employers wonder if they have people with disabilities—you do," she said.
In addition, she said employers and HR departments should keep in mind that employees often fall into more than one group. "With all the work that we're seeing around DEI, we would hope that they recognize that every worker isn't solely just one facet of this diversity conversation," she said. "Right now, as we're talking, I'm a queer disabled women. So, any initiatives that speak to those identities are going to speak to me, but an initiative that speaks to all three at once would be amazing."
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