ABOUT THIS EPISODE.
In this episode of the FT ‘Working It’ podcast, Isabel Berwick talks to our founder Caroline Casey about Disability Inclusion at the workplace and what managers and leaders should do to retain disabled talent.
Caroline is interviewed alongside Naomi Rovnick, an FT markets reporter who was recently diagnosed with dyspraxia.
Caroline and Naomi offer some practical next steps for managers and leaders in any organisation: it’s time to be open about disability.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT.
Caroline Casey: We were at a dinner party. And this person is quite senior in a very, very, very, I would say, progressive company. And we got onto the conversation about disability inclusion, and this person who is a really good human being said, Well, the thing is, you don’t realise we really couldn’t have a disabled person, talk to our clients. Okay, mic drop right. Now, first of all, that company is a brilliant company. Secondly, that person is somebody I would genuinely say did not even realise what they said. But that to me is how are we still saying that? How are we still saying that? And that just shows that if anybody tells me we still don’t have more awareness, and we don’t have work to do? Yes, we do. Because, look, business is one of the most powerful forces on our planet, I don’t even have to make the case anymore for the 13 trillion that we represent. It will be a risk to the brand, it will be a risk to the employee base, it will be a risk to innovation, and kind of past the hustling and pass the begging. It’s like we’re here to help you. It’s your opportunity.
Isabelle Barrack: Hello, and welcome to Working it with me Isabelle barrack. Today we’re discussing disability at work. In this instance, we’re discussing disability in the broadest sense, from physical to mental illness, and neurodiversity. And that’s one of the things that makes this topic so easy to avoid at work. People act like it’s too big, there are too many subsections and too many allowances for too many people. But in 2022 Are people starting to be more open about disabilities at work, and our workplaces fostering cultures that enable that? To find out we’re hearing from a chat I had with Caroline Casey. She’s the founder of the Valuable 500. It’s a global business collective made up of 500 CEOs and their companies, all of whom have made a pledge to improve disability inclusion.
Caroline Casey: I became a campaigner and an activist, sort of by accident, there was no plan. But the moment when that happened is when I was working for Accenture as a management consultant. I have a rare genetic condition called ocular albinism, which means I’m actually registered blind. But I had covered that for all of my career to that point. And just as we came into 2000, just a long time ago, now, I came out of the closet, about my site and my disability. And I’ve been fascinated by the fact that business has been very absent from the table of eradicating disability exclusion, because of 15% of our global population have a lived experience and with a mother and a father, that’s 53% of our economy. And I think that’s been my obsession, really. So I think that’s how I kind of fell into it.
Isabelle Barrack: And you found, at the Valuable 500, are CEOs and senior leaders ever open about their own disabilities or how has that gone?
Caroline Casey: When we began the Valuable 500 We did a piece of research with EY. 7% of our CEOs have lived experience disability, four out of five of them are hiding it. What does that mean about the culture of their company? If they’re worried, whatever reason they have not to tell their experience of it, then we’re kind of saying it’s not okay to talk about disability. Right. The other piece of research that was really frightening that we did in the last sort of 10 months was with tortoise we looked at our footsie 100 companies over senior level, we have not one person who identifies as having a disability in our footsie 100 companies. Now that is not true. Because 80% of disability is invisible. So if they’re not going to talk about it, then why would an employee talk about it? When somebody like Elon Musk who came out in June and talked about his Aspergers that might not sound like a big story, but that is a big story. It is important when Richard Branson actually owned his dyslexia. Because what it’s saying it’s signalling it’s okay. But at the moment, we’ve got a lot of uncovering to do.
Isabelle Barrack: So a lot of CEOs and influential people are hiding their disabilities, what you might call masking, and that’s understandable. People with declared disabilities may risk losing their jobs or if they’re senior, they may worry that they’ll lose status. In the year to April 2019, so just before the pandemic, 7000 people in the UK alone brought legal cases alleging disability discrimination at work, massive jump of 26% in just one year. And remember, only a fraction of people who are discriminated against or lose their jobs will ever bring a formal case. So we’ll get on to the wider implications in a bit and try and work out why only half of the UK 7.7 million disabled people are in work, and how organisations can do better to hire and retain, and most importantly, what we can all do to create change and more inclusion in our own workplaces. But first, what about those silent CEOs?
Naomi Rovnick: So, my worry is that any CEO who’s masking a neurodivergent condition is not working at his or her best.
Isabelle Barrack: That’s Nomi Rudnick. She’s an ft reporter whose day job is making sense of the financial markets for our readers. She recently discovered she was dyspraxic after her son was diagnosed with autism, and the diagnosis has made her look at her work. And in fact, her entire career in a whole new way.
Naomi Rovnick: They’re probably burning out, and they’re probably not going to stay in that job for very long. What would be the ideal situation as if they could communicate to their stakeholders? Do you know what? Because of my ADHD or because of my dyspraxia, I’m brilliant at pattern spotting. I’m a great performer. I’m really creative. I’m very entrepreneurial, and resilient. But you need to look at me when I speak in board meetings, and allow me to speak as myself and not considered me strange, and then you’ll get the best out of me.
Isabelle Barrack: So further down the employment hierarchy, there’s often a lot of talk about employers just can’t find the diverse talent. It’s just not out there. And I talked to Caroline, about the ways in which employers can seek more diverse talent and be much more inclusive to people with disabilities.
Caroline Casey: 47% of our Valuable 500 companies, and the piece of research we’ve done said, we can’t find disabled people, right. That’s what they’re saying. However, in the UK alone with Virgin Media and scope, we have discovered there are 1.1 million people with a disability who want to work but are being denied the opportunity. That is a complete misfit. So what’s happening right now are my experience of understanding it. If you said you had a disability, at the accommodation, you’d see the business already rolling its eyes and going, Oh, God, what do you need? But we’ve just had COVID, right? Everybody needed accommodations? Exactly. I was gonna ask about accommodations. So now business system, in 17 days, you changed all the things that you said you couldn’t do what you did, because you needed to and you wanted to, and it wasn’t about disability, it was about the kind of chair I was going to have the computer I was going to have everybody had needs, we have different needs and requirements to level the playing field. So this is the greatest chance. We have to do this. Because still at the bottom of disability business inclusion remains fear, damage, weakness.
Isabelle Barrack: I think one of the other things that’s coming out the pandemic and perhaps we’re just at the very beginning of starting to scratch the surface of this is people with disabilities arising from COVID, or mental health issues arising from the long periods of isolation. And of course, long COVID. We just don’t know very much about that. What would you say to managers in companies about accommodating this big new cohort of people who have new disabilities?
Naomi Rovnick: I feel for managers,
Isabelle Barrack: Here’s my colleague, Naomi Rovnick. Again.
Naomi Rovnick: I speak to a lot of managers and heads of department and CEOs in my work, and one said to me over dinner the other day, and I’m trying to be really accommodating, but people are saying things like, I can’t come back to the office in London, because I moved to Ipswich or I can’t come back because I don’t really like it. And you’ve got to it depends on the job, you’ve got to have people around you. But I think if somebody in your team has had long COVID, or they have anxiety, or they’re getting anxiety, because of the thought of coming back, I think you have to just say to them, and I think this applies to all adjustments for disabilities, what do you need? So no manager has to come up with a strategy for me, which also might be a strategy for like people who’ve got dyscalculia or hyperlexia, or OCD or bipolar, or menopause. The strategy is, what do you need? How can we get the most out of you, while keeping you well? What I’ve agreed and formally with my bosses is that I come in probably twice a week, but I don’t come in for Oh 700.
Isabelle Barrack: It was interesting. We had a an intern of a couple of years ago who has cystic fibrosis, and she wrote a piece for us, which I’ll put in the show notes about how she you know, she’s obviously Gen Z. She’s very open about her condition. She has to go to hospital and and she needs accommodation for those appointments. And she got to quite a final stage of her interviews when she would disclose. And then she was ghosted by multiple employers. And this is so interesting. She’s one of the best interns we’ve ever had. And I’m pleased to say she’s got a great job now, but there’s you know, it’s this is real, this discrimination against even the younger generation who are very open and who are coming at it with an owning it. And there’s this sort of block. So I asked Caroline Casey, what she believes managers and leaders can and should do to retain disabled talent.
Caroline Casey:There’s three things that we would say, another piece of information that we got from our companies, 63% of our companies have no idea about their employees who have lived experience or connections to disability. So the first thing we’d say to any organisation, go and talk to your people and find out their connection to disability, you have to find that out because there’s a dearth of intelligence and innovation that you’re missing. Do you have employee resource groups, you know, if you have them for other protected characteristics do you have for disability and if you do, what the most important thing is to get executive sponsorship of that, because that’s the permission. That’s the space. The most important thing any company can do now is say, you know, what, we don’t know. Help us, teach us, what is your experience, talk to your employees, whether that’s through confidential surveys, or whether that’s through E orgies, or most importantly, whether that’s who are leaders standing up and saying, this is my experience. My biggest concern right now people are very worried about causing offence, and in the fear of causing offence, nothing gets done. I’d rather somebody gets it wrong with the right intention than do nothing at all.
Isabelle Barrack: One of the things that Caroline just said there and that struck me was don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to talk about it at work, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. People are so wary about doing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing. So I wanted to look at who’s doing this well and what we can learn from them, and actually being really brutal about it, because I know some listeners will be thinking it. Why should you care about getting disabled talent? I guess the answer is that there are huge advantages to having a diverse workforce in all ways as Caroline and Naomi were showing us. And we are in a massive global talent shortage, it’s time to look wider for that talent. And as for your existing staff, Naomi’s advice is to ask your staff with disabilities what it is they need? And the phrase that comes to my mind is “nothing for us, without us.” That’s the very important campaigning slogan that disability campaigners rightly demand. And in the UK, for example, disabled people are entitled to reasonable adjustments at work to enable them to do their jobs. And that could mean offering flexibility about where and when the staff member works. Or it might mean making adjustments to your physical workspace, such as changing doorknobs for handles, and making sure there’s enough space between desks for wheelchairs to pass through, as well as quiet spaces for neurodiverse people to be alone. And there are loads of examples of businesses that are going beyond this into the wider business ecosphere. So for example, Marriott International, the US hotel chain is working to diversify its supply chains to include more businesses owned by people with disabilities. But if we’re going to make any progress in terms of including our disabled and neurodiverse colleagues in the workplace, and really acting to include them and promote them in the same way, as we’ve had loads of schemes and actions for women, for people of colour for our LGBT+ colleagues, that’s got to start now because people with disabilities have been left behind and we all know it. So we’ve got to pick this post pandemic moment to make the change.
Thanks to Caroline Casey and Naomi Rovnick for this episode, and I’ll put links to Caroline’s campaigns and some ft articles about disability and neurodiversity at work in the show notes, including that piece I mentioned by one of our interns about how she was ghosted while applying for jobs. And please do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. We’re working @ft.com. And I’m @Isabelle Berek on Twitter. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. ‘Working it’ is produced by novel for the Financial Times. With thanks to our producer Allison Field, Executive Producer Joe Wheeler. And we have editorial direction from the FTS Rene Kaplan, and production support from Persis love. Thank you for listening.
