Disability Employment Awareness Month: Which Us Employers Are Stepping Up?

Recognizing workplace contributions and celebrating the experience of living with disability

Every October, communities across the country remember to reflect or recognize efforts that improve the quality of life for PwD through various local and national events. The national conversation has progressed in both force and meaning from being about Disability Awareness (we are here & exist) to an increasing focus on Disability Employment Awareness (we make contributions at work & in society). Maybe the Employment part of the awareness is a sign of the economic times, the result of advocacy or a bit of both!

For example, last months US Business Leadership Network conference in Chicago provided valuable information regarding business and corporate sector efforts at measuring ROI and leveraging this information to successfully make the business case for hiring, recruiting, and retaining PwD at some of the worlds largest multinational businesses.

One presentation featured a panel sharing how leveraging disability diversity inclusion through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can drive change throughout the workplace, marketplace, and supply chain. Through the work of Disability ERGs, these multinational corporations have made great strides at articulating the economic benefit achieved by aligning disability strategies to the bottom line of the company.

Some companies, such as Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and KPMG have centralized budgets for resources tied to their ERG activities, long-standing disability affinity groups with senior leadership commitment and active participation across many countries, chapters and members.

Jennifer Brown's excellent survey producing trackable metrics for Disability ERGs

P&G uses ERG tracking (see Jennifer Browns chart above) as part of their overall global marketing strategy and making the business case for disability inclusion. KPMG also provides supplier diversity training by engaging up and coming Disability-owned business enterprises.

Through ERGs, corporations are discovering what is important to employees with disabilities or workers who have family members with disability. ERGs enable effective strategic alignment which recognizes that when steps are taken to reduce their workforce worries about disclosure backlash or family members who have disability-related problems, staff consistently achieve peak performances.

Other companies are ramping up similar efforts (Diversity Supplier Programs have only been in existence since 2003) and ERG members may appointed, rather than self-selected. They are picking it up quickly, as Pfizer demonstrates by putting in place a Global Disability Resource Council

All speakers represented companies who run established or recently launched disability resource councils/advisory groups. It was interesting to hear multinational corporations publically share tangible efforts at Disability D&I showing the way for others on methods that achieve scale while factoring impact across countries, functions, and subsidiary corporations- all of which complicate the implementation process.

Opportunities and challenges

It was also refreshing to hear plain talk about to barriers and work yet to be done for greater impact.

Some examples of barriers and friendly suggestions for consideration:

1. KPMG seeks to build/sustain efforts to develop talent pipeline reflecting disability diversity. They also identify reluctance from staff to disclose their work-related manifestation of disability. The ability to become more representative of the disability community will occur as they can create an environment where self-disclosure and the trust issues that go with it are successfully tackled.

Unlike other groups such as LGBT and Women, there is no higher-level management in KPMG that openly disclose, are living role models or identified as mentors. Actively recruiting mid-level and senior leaders to openly disclose their conditions and set the example as mentors would take KPMG to a higher level as first among equals.

2. P&G has practical day-to-day operational issues to address such as finding resources within the organization to support dyslexic staff to use spreadsheets, etc. This help will allow otherwise qualified staff to thrive, get better projects, and have more meaningful tasks rather than support roles.

It would seem that they would be able to source internally their own IT people to craft shortcuts, put it out as a thread on LinkedIn/similar professional social media or connect with the Learning Disability Association of America who have University-based IT/accessibility resources for assisting functional literacy.