Creating a Workplace Where People with Disabilities Actually Want to Work

Transcript for Creating a workplace for People With Disabilities (PWDs)

Hi, I'm Sheri Byrne-Haber, and welcome to my session for Accessibility Plus, the global conference on how businesses empower accessibility and why they should. In this session, I'm going to be talking about creating workplaces where persons with disabilities want to work. OK. So first of all, before we get too far into this conversation, I want to talk about why accessible recruiting and employing people with disabilities is so important.

First of all, being inclusive is part of most organizations values. And even if it's not explicitly stated, nobody advertises, oh, we're exclusive. We don't want people with disabilities working for us. And that's true for other underrepresented communities as well.

Secondly, you don't want a visit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if you're in the US. If you're not doing your recruiting in a way that's encouraging people with disabilities to apply because you're putting up barriers in the applications process, for example, or you're putting up barriers in your accommodations process, that's going to potentially put you at legal risk from compliance violations.

Companies that are disability champions are four times more likely to outperform their peers. They have increased innovation and they have a higher ROI. There's a number of reasons for that. One is that innovation is really tightly connected with psychological safety. And psychological safety, if you have an environment that's psychologically safe for people to be different, for people to ask for help, for people to make mistakes, that's going to be an environment where people with disabilities are going to thrive more than in an organization where these things don't exist.

So you may not have an executive staff that cares about people with disabilities explicitly, but most executives care about money. And it is well documented that in larger companies, companies that are disability champions make more money. A third of managers say people with disabilities are more loyal, meaning that they're more likely to stay around when the going gets tough. So that's an important thing.

Turnover is a really big hidden cost to employers. And the higher the salaries and the more specialized the positions, the more it costs. So a general estimate is that turnover in a specialized industry that's in high demand like tech can cost up to four times the annual salary of the individual who leaves the company. So in Silicon Valley that could easily run a million dollars, if not more. If you have people who are more loyal, those turnover costs are going to be less felt in your organization.

Finally, taking a detour here, millennials are currently 35% of the workforce. And that number is only growing as more millennials come into the workforce and more baby boomers and Gen Xers are retiring from the workforce. 67% of millennials strongly consider diversity when deciding where to accept employment offer, and that is independent of whether or not that millennial considers himself diverse, OK? So they care about diversity organically. They don't care about it just because it's part of their identity.

20% of millennials said they struck an employer off the list of a place to apply to just because there wasn't enough evidence of neurodiversity inclusion. Neurodiversity is a really hot topic for millennials as we're getting more and more diagnoses of people who are autistic or dyslexic or who have attention deficit disorder. The numbers have really grown over time.

And 80% of millennials said that they would be more likely to apply for a job where they saw neurodiversity inclusion being exhibited by the company, stuff on their website pages, discussions during the interview process, even if they didn't identify it's neurodiverse. So these are all really important reasons why it will cost companies to not extend their processes to be inclusive of people with disabilities as employees.

Now, when the ADA was passed 31 years ago, one of the goals of the ADA was to seek more employment for people with disabilities. In actuality, the exact opposite has happened. So I have a chart here that shows the employment rate slightly before the ADA was passed, since the ADA was passed, and then when the ADA was reenacted in an amended form in 2008.

You could see up to the pandemic, this chart goes through 2015. The employment rate of people between the ages of 18 and 65 is pretty constant. What you can also see and the red line is that the employment rate of people with disabilities has plummeted. It used to be just a little bit below 50%.

And when the ADA was passed and as of 2015, it was 30%. In post pandemic it has dropped below 25%. What that means is half of the disabled employees have left the workforce or have stopped identifying as disabled because they fear retribution for identifying as having a disability.

So we're going to talk about six different things now that we've gotten through this quick introduction. Number one is the research that people do before they decide to apply for a job. Number two is the application process. Number three is the interview process. Number four is the offer process. Number five is the onboarding process. And finally, number six is the retention process. All of these factor into whether you can identify, get, and keep people with disabilities as employees.

So first of all, organizational research. It's really not too terribly much different than the organizational research that's done by people without disabilities. We get information about your company. You're going to want to make sure that your organizational website is also accessible for the same reason. And you want to make sure that there are no ablest requirements in the job descriptions.

Literally within the last two years, somebody forwarded me a job description from a major company in the US for a director of design. And one of the job requirements literally said that the individual has to be able to use a mouse on a keyboard simultaneously. Well, first of all, what does the ability of being able to use a mouse and a keyboard simultaneously have to do with being a director of design for a retail organization?

And the answer is nothing. You don't need to be able to do those things. You don't even need to be able to use a mouse to be a design director. So what that ablest job requirement did is it basically hung out a banner saying, no disabled people need to apply, in direct violation of the EEOC rules around these types of things. And when it was raised to their attention, quickly the offending line item was deleted.

After somebody has done their organizational research and decided to apply for a job, then we get into the application process itself. The entire job application submission has to be accessible. So that's going to include things like filling out the form online, being able to attach your resume, and most importantly, any required tests and evaluations, because especially in tech, which is my background, things like HackerRank, which are commonly used to assess somebody's programming skills, there's not a single one of those test and evaluation services that's accessible.

So something has to be substituted so that the person with the disability can complete the assessment and be considered equally with all the other individuals who went through HackerRank for their assessment. Is your process compliant for people who use assistive technology, or is it straightforward and easy? One of the things I hear complained about a lot in groups of people with disabilities is how much harder it is to put in an application when you can't use your LinkedIn profile as a starting point.

Most people who are looking for jobs in tech have LinkedIn profiles and actual being able to carry over all that data or import a resume to prefill the form and then go back and update things that aren't quite right. That is straightforward and easy. Providing a forum where people can type in everything by hand, OK, that's compliant but it's going to take the person with a disability three to five times as long to complete the application process. And they may either decide-- I know at least one individual who has told me, I don't apply anywhere anymore that doesn't allow me to import my resume or import my LinkedIn profile.

1. And then finally you need to look at whether your applicant tracking system has any biases against people with disabilities. If you have an applicant tracking system that, for example, says, I'm not going to take anybody who didn't graduate from a tier one university, or I'm not going to take anybody who's got more than a six-month gap on their resume, you're discriminating against several groups. And the first, you're discriminating against people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who maybe couldn't afford to go to a tier one university or who couldn't get in because they had a sub adequate special education program, if it's a congenital disability.

And if you're eliminating people based on job gaps, you're discriminating against people with disabilities who are more likely to take leave between jobs to deal with medical issues and women because women are more likely to be out of the workforce for more than six months at a time. So you need to look through your applicant tracking system rules with the idea of unconscious bias in mind and looking for it and eliminating it.

The next step would be the interview process. So their views have to be either physically or digitally accessible, including captioning and interpreters if those are requested. You need to train your interviewers on how to interview people with disabilities. If you have an interviewer who thinks a firm handshake and eye contact drives their decisions about who they're going to hire, you're automatically discriminating against people with disabilities.

I have really bad arthritis in my hands. I don't give a firm handshake. In fact, I try to avoid handshakes altogether because they're painful. It's not any reason other than my disability. And you're not necessarily going to get the same type of eye contact from somebody who's neurodiverse as you are from somebody who's neurotypical.

Candidate needs to be able to request interview and job accommodations at any time in the process without fear of retribution. I can't tell you how many EEOC complaints where I've seen huge fines handed out because a company, as soon as they get a request for an interpreter, all of a sudden the job vanishes, an interview vanishes. That's illegal retribution. You can't do that.

Make accommodations normalized. Ask every single candidate whether or not you think they have a disability, whether they require an accommodation. Since 70% of disabilities are hidden, somebody may identify an accommodation that they need and you didn't even think they had a disability.

And then finally, you want to make sure for the interviews that you've got multiple channels using different communications modalities to communicate back and forth with the candidate. So for example, my daughter is deaf. She hates talking on the phone, but she will love to send email, or even better, use a live chat process where people with vision loss might be the complete opposite. They might vastly prefer a phone conversation or a Zoom call to get questions answered or to follow up over email and things that are keyboard-driven. So all of these things are essential to making sure that your interview process is equal for people with disabilities.

OK, then next we move on to the offer stage. I call this stage death by 1,000 PDF files because really the offer stage tends to be lots and lots and lots of PDF files from lots and lots of different vendors. Generally speaking, not accessible. So if I got an offer letter that's a PDF file and I couldn't see, I would have to have somebody read it to me. The first person finding about my great job opportunity isn't me, it's whoever is reading the letter to me. And that's not equal and that's also not fair.

So you need to make sure that all of the third-party vendors that you work with, make sure that their processes are accessible, too, because the stuff that comes with offers tends to be managed by third parties. It's background checks. Its immigration paperwork. Its health insurance documentation, retirement plan enrollment, and other types of benefits.

And I remember when I got my job offer at VMware, I got an email saying, hey, congratulations, here's your job offer. It had 16 PDF files attached to it, none of which were accessible. After the offer is accepted, the next step is onboarding. If you haven't onboarded somebody with a particular type of disability before, you need to take a really critical eye and walk through your onboarding process step by step and figure out, OK, every step, how is a person who's deaf, for example, going to consume this? How is a person in a wheelchair going to consume this?

For example, when I went to my day one orientation at VMware, there was a scavenger hunt. I had my older wheelchair at that point in time. And so I was left on the corner not participating because they didn't think about people with mobility needs being in orientations. That's the kind of stuff you've got to get rid of because not only is it discriminatory, it just looks bad to everybody else who's in the room also.

Potential issues for accessibility in onboarding that you might run into are things like your machine image. It used to be that for larger companies, you would just walk with your laptop into the corner where IT resided. You can't do that anymore because we're all working from home. So the image has to be set up in such a way that it can be obtained by the person with a disability.

Getting assistive technology added to a software catalog is sometimes important, things like screen readers that might normally not be installed on that machine image. The person with a disability might need administrative rights on their PC, which are normally not granted, in order to get things like screen readers installed, or you can add them to the software catalog, which is a good approach, so that everybody in the company can now install those.

You need to make sure that you're training videos are captioned, OK? Captioning 100% of the time, absolutely mandatory. Audio description is not always required, but every video at least has to be assessed to see if audio description is required. If it's just a presentation like this where somebody is reading off of a PowerPoint deck and throwing in a few anecdotes that don't require being even visually see what's on the screen, then you don't need a special audio description file.

But for example, let's say you're teaching somebody how to use your source code control system and it's a lecture that somebody gave and they're writing on a whiteboard, if everything on that whiteboard is not set out loud, that video is going to require a described audio soundtrack so that the information written on the whiteboard gets picked up in the special audio track that can be used by somebody who can't see the whiteboard.

Having a buddy system, especially large companies, is really helpful for people with disabilities so they don't spend a lot of time spinning their wheels when they're getting set up on things like, how do I create a purchase order? How do I onboard a new vendor? How do I register for training? Training is a big component of getting onboarded depending on the level of the job. It could be anywhere from maybe four hours on the low end to more than 40 on the high end.

All that training has to be accessible. If the training is being done by video, which a lot of it is these days, then you have to do that video assessment that I described earlier. And you want to make sure all your internal communications are accessible.

So if somebody's sending out let's say an email to the entire company about an event, or we just had an email go out recently at VMware about a mountain lion sighting on campus. Everybody needs to be able to access that email. If you're not describing your graphics in those emails, for example, or if they have links to videos that aren't captioned or haven't been assessed for audio description, that communication is not going to be equal and that's going to make a person with a disability feel like they're being excluded and left out.

OK, final step is retention. So what do you have in place to keep employees happy? How easy is it to get reasonable accommodations? We talked about it for the interview process, but it needs to be as easy when the employee is onboarded as it was when they were still considering whether or not to become an employee of your organization.

Keep in mind most disabilities aren't congenital. Most disabilities are acquired. So it could be that somebody has an interview and they can hear at normal levels and then all of a sudden they wake up one morning and they've had a meniere's disease attack that they've never experienced before and they're completely deaf on one side. They need to be able to request an accommodation immediately to make sure that they are able to hear everything that everybody else is hearing.

Is everything your organization buys, uses, and builds accessible? Another thing that is important but subtle that makes employees with disabilities feel like they're not included and belong is the continuous acquisition of inaccessible software. So it's important that the procurement teams actually request VPATs, which are Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates. And try to choose the most accessible option that's available that does what it is that you're trying to get that software to do.

Otherwise, you build an environment where it's expected that the employees with disabilities are going to need to request accommodations because the software is not accessible and that creates a lot of stress and a lot of overhead and again makes employees with disabilities feel like they don't belong. OK, you need to make sure that any internal development programs that you've put in place are accessible to employees with disabilities.

And you want to double check and make sure that you have a self identification that tells you whether or not the employees with disabilities are participating at an equal rate to their overall representation at your company. And you need to make sure that your facilities, your support systems and your events are accessible. It's not all about the office and team meeting. It's about the entire experience.

OK, so what support are you providing your employees with disabilities? Well, the first thing is if you have employee resource groups, you must, must, must have a disability ERG. That's the number one factor that I look at to determine whether or not accessibility programs are going to be successful. Companies that have strong disability ERGs are more likely to have successful accessibility programs.

Are you doing frequent, say, annually self-ID campaigns? So self identification, it's the government form. Yes, it's kind of dreadful because it only asks for yes, no and it doesn't really provide a lot of great examples about what constitutes a disability. But having an environment where people feel comfortable self disclosing is important to building that psychological safety that you need to get to those innovative states and make sure your employees with disabilities want to stay.

What kind of mental illness and stress reduction programs do you have? So people with disabilities have more financial stress in their lives. Disabilities are expensive. If their disability is genetic, they may have children with disabilities, which also creates more stress. Mental health conditions have a very high correlation rate to having disability.

So I, as a wheelchair user who is a type 1 diabetic, am vastly more likely to be suffering from clinical depression than somebody who doesn't have a disability. So having these programs really helps all your employees, but it extra helps your employees with disabilities or with family members with disabilities. Are you offering flexible schedules and full work from home options without having to go through the accommodations to process.

I'm hearing from a lot of people who work for certain companies, who are trying to require people to go back in the office, talk about how difficult it is for them as a disabled person to be getting the work from home extended that they want or the flexible schedules that they need. And this is another important factor to whether or not employees with disabilities feel like they belong.

Talks circles are definitely an added benefit where people with disabilities can confidentially get together and just talk about things that are bugging them or how did one person with a disability get from one department to an next department for a transfer, for example, or how did they get promoted in their own department. It's great and supportive for comparison purposes.

Make sure that you have an anonymous grievance process. If somebody who's your employee has been discriminated against in some way, they have to have some way to be able to report that discrimination, again, without the fear of retaliation that we talked about earlier. If you don't have an anonymous grievance process, you're not going to hear about what stuff is going on and the HR team may be in denial of the actual state of the corporate culture.

And finally not tokenizing or expecting persons with disabilities to volunteer for all disability-related projects. When you start, you have to start somewhere, right? So whoever you hire, it may be the first autistic person you've hired, it may be the first person in a wheelchair you've hired, it may be the first person with alopecia that you've fired. You can't put a load of all the volunteer efforts. They can't be expected to carry the weight of all employees and potential employees with disabilities for the entire company.

So just to sum things up, disability needs to be considered throughout the entire employee lifecycle, all the way from materials where people are considering becoming an employee, all the way through the retention process. Disability needs to be considered in all departments. Disability is not a DEI thing. Disability is not an HR thing. Disability is an everybody thing, OK? It procurement, its communications, it's video production. If you want to be truly disability-inclusive your entire company has to be disability-inclusive.

Disability needs to be a normalized experience. You don't want to, other people with disabilities saying, well, we'll do this for you 98% of people who are non disabled, but you person in the wheelchair over here, you can go do this other thing, OK? That is not acceptable. So thank you very much for listening to my talk, and I would be pleased to answer any questions that you might have. You can reach out to me at these channels. Thanks.

Transcript for Live Q&A

(Kevin McDaniel) Wow, thank you very much, Sheri. That was very informative presentation, and we're so grateful for your support and for all that great content. Got a ton of questions here. And I think that she's going to join in just a moment.

There she is. Hey, Sheri.

(Sheri Byrne-Haber) Hi!

(Kevin) How are you?

(Sheri) I'm good, Kevin. Thanks.

(Kevin) Hey, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you again for the presentation. That was really, really great information. The entire time I'm getting comments. "This is great!"

"This is the best presentation!" "Can we have copies of this?" So...

(Sheri) A couple of people have already pinged me on LinkedIn for copies, and I'm happy to send copies to anybody. I just need their email addresses.

(Kevin) OK, OK.

I will make sure I report it to them. I really appreciate it. So I have a ton of questions here, and I think it's great because we actually started a few minutes early so we might be able to get to most of them.

(Sheri) I'll do my best.

(Kevin) OK, thank you. Thank you. So one of them is pretty interesting because we talked about this a little bit earlier in the day. We talked about COVID with the director of Disability Rights California, Miss Tobler.

And this question, I think, came up because, you know, one they talked about the long term effects. But are you seeing in your experience, are you finding any accommodation requests arise as a result of long term COVID side effects?

And if so, what kind of requests are you seeing?

(Sheri) So somebody is reading my mind because I downloaded the 2021 Mental Health Report from a group called Mind Share Partners, and they said that certain types of accommodation requests have gone up between 300 and 550% post COVID, you know, pre-COVID and post-COVID, strictly for mental health stuff.

And it largely is around making scheduling accommodations for therapy appointments and getting, you know, mental health time off.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. OK. OK.

(Sheri) So those those for sure, have gone way up. And then obviously people who are in very physical occupations who have long haul symptoms, breathing problems and what have you, they're going to need accommodations as well.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. Do you think that I mean, we talked about the great resignation earlier, you know, absent those accommodations requests. What do you think? What do you what do you think happens next? I mean, I because you just people, those-

(Sheri) People will walk away.

It's very clear that there was some amazing statistics about employees being less engaged and less productive if they don't feel supported in their mental health conditions and there was a much higher rate of turnover as well.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. Yeah, it's it's-

(Sheri) I haven't had a chance to digest the whole thing yet, but it was a very well structured survey and I don't say that a lot. I'm pretty fussy about my surveys. Actually took this one as a participant, which is why they sent me an email about the the findings. But it looks like there's some, some crystal clear and very impactful data in there.

(Kevin) Do you and I know you have a lot of folks here that are already connected with you. I mean, it's just it's just coming here. So do you mind sharing that survey results?

(Sheri) Oh, no, not I can. Should I put it in the chat window?

(Kevin) That'd be great. Yeah, I can. I can share it with everyone into the moderator list. And yeah, I the everyone said to me their email address, I certainly can get it to everyone that sends it to me from one listening.

(Sheri) So of course, of course, Mind Share Partners wants everybody's email address. I can't share the source file directly, but if you go there. They have a great meeting. I think it's monthly, I don't always get to all of them.

But the idea is that the meeting is for people who are leading in mental health issues or disability ERGs at their organizations. And so they get like 80 or 90 people together every month brainstorming some really cool stuff.

(Kevin) That sounds like a great resource, actually. Yeah, I mean...

(Sheri) Super recommend them, not getting paid for this recommendation.

(Kevin) No, I think it's great. It's just so funny. I'm sorry. It's a little distracting because all these folks just keep sending their email addresses the first time that's happened.

So one of the questions here, because I have to concentrate, I can't. And I'm so sorry, everybody. This is why I'm asking for your questions before we get the speakers on for Q&A. And I will try to get to everyone's, though, as I get to this list.

How can neurodiverse individuals work with the hiring manager slash interviewer slash recruiters in accommodations are not automatically accessible in the interview process?

(Sheri) That's a good question. So I have two different answers for it, and the answers depend on whether the company is a company that has a neurodiversity hiring initiative.

If the company has a neurodiversity hiring initiative, but you're not going through that program. You probably want to try to get the people that you're talking to, talking to the people who run the neurodiversity hiring initiative because those are the people who are going to be able to tell the talent acquisition and H.R. partners what they should be doing and how they should be doing it within the context of that particular organization. If you're interviewing at a company that doesn't have a neurodiversity hiring initiative, say it's a smaller company, then I would suggest getting them in touch with perhaps an organization like Ask JAN.

The Job Accomodations Network, so that they can get some external independent but still free advice on how to do accommodations for interviewing with people with neurodiverse conditions.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm.

(Sheri) Some of the things we've done at VMware, for example, is we will if they are in-person interviews, we'll make sure that they're, you know, low light and no sound distractions.

We do longer breaks between interviews. We've turned off the timer on certain skills evaluations that would normally be timed. So those are some of the things that are quite typical to to be granted for hiring for neurodiversity.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm.

No. And that's a good point, too for everybody else. If you're not familiar with that AskJAN.org is where is the resource that Sheri's referring to. And I would recommend that I know that some departments, some agencies get a little wary about contacting the Department of Justice or ASKJAN, but these are completely confidential consultations where they're there-

(Sheri) And also completely free. So it's not like you're putting a burden on the employer to spend money to, you know, maybe offer you the job and maybe not offer you the job and and basically, you know, disability related hiring and accommodations is all they do, they know this stuff inside out and backwards.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. That's right. OK, so see here and I have to go back here to this because I'm getting so many. I wasn't able to write them down quick enough. So let me go here. OK?

(Sheri) Or do not put the burden on you, people can just ping me on LinkedIn and I'll send it to them.

(Kevin) Yeah. Oh no, no, I will. Definitely. Yeah, I'll definitely get the file to everyone that's here. But please, yeah, please do ping Sheri on LinkedIn that she's offered.

So please. I was just having the write questions so fast that I just started writing names so I could go back and control. So another question about, I believe it's about neurodiverse. Let me get to the question is along these lines, is there a trend towards reading body language that could be a form of discrimination for people, in particular people with disabilities where their disability affects their social interactions? I'm just wondering if anyone's familiar with this form of employment practice and how to educate the body language is not a defined measured of a person's abilities.

(Sheri) So I think the trends that I see that that kind of overlaps a little bit is the requests to send in videos with applications. And I'm not super keen on that for the exact. That the that the person highlighted, it's, you know, it's just presents another way that there can be, you know, unconscious bias applied to the applicant. So, you know, we've recently at VMware gone over to something called go hiring. And it's a more objective form of hiring where we're not doing laundry lists of, you know, the perfect candidate has all these things, but rather we talk about what the person will be doing in the job.

And then there's a sample that you're asked to perform and then perhaps in addition, a skills test for the engineering oriented positions.

(Kevin) You know, to the skills test and I want to get I'll get back to the everyones' questions.

But just to follow up on that, because it's just really it's very hard when the questions that come in at this rate, but back to the skills test I noted during your presentation. What what's your advice to H.R. managers who have things like we talked about and talked about the ablest job descriptions?

Well, let's say your a hiring manager and you're hiring for clerks. And one of the requirements is a 40 word per minute requirement. And I want to give you just a very specific scenario because this does come up, you know, hiring a clerk 40 words per minute.

Naturally, accommodations speech to text. But what if the job requires some confidentiality? Is that is that an acceptable reason, an undue hardship? Or are there other accommodation options in that case of how creative do we have to be?

(Sheri) Well, I don't see why speech to text would violate a confidentiality requirement. You know, speech to text isn't always Cortana or Siri, where it's going up into the cloud and then coming back down. You can get something local like Dragon and still perfectly good speech to text.

You also have to look at, you know, as you identified, whether this is an essential skill for the job. You know, it's not super often that that that's an essential skill anymore, but it is conceivable that it might be.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm.

(Sheri) So I would just say, look for look for a way of getting that accommodation that works within the security and the confidentiality of the job.

(Kevin) OK. That's that's what I would... because I think a lot of people have trouble defining undue hardship.

You know, it's so it's-

(Sheri) Oh, no, no, no. Undue hardship is easy.

(Kevin) OK.

(Sheri) Too many people think that it's an undue hardship. So I'll give you another example. I left a job seven years ago because they claimed it was an undue hardship to allow me to work from home two days a week. Seven years later, during the pandemic, in two weeks, they have 180,000 people working from home. Tell me what the undue hardship was? Right? So undue hardship in terms of cost literally has to rise to the point where it would hurt the company's profits or drive the company into bankruptcy.

They do not look at individual department budgets. You cannot have a person say, Oh, it's an undue hardship because they don't have budget for this. The EEOC is not having that. So assume that it is not an undue hardship unless it meets that very, very, very narrow exception.

And if you search my name and undue hardship, I've probably written a rant or two about this in my blog.

(Kevin) OK. OK, let me go back to these questions here. I have more written down, but I just want to bounce around because I really appreciate your time.

One of the just came in. If you could redesign - this is a good question - if you could redesign your hiring practices, how would you envision a model where bias and discrimination are minimized or eliminated?

(Sheri) Well, I mean, at the abstract level, I look at all dimensions of diversity and inclusion being intersectional.

You can't I can't say where my wheelchair using identity of me ends and where my identity as a Jewish grandmother begins, right? It's all just kind of one great big Sheri. So my preference is for intersectional because DEI is not a pie.

Just because somebody is getting a larger slice of the pie doesn't mean that somebody else is getting a smaller piece. You know, when when we do better at DEI, we should be doing better at all aspects of DEI and not doing better at DEI at the expense, for example, of LGBTQ.

So I would not look at each of these things individually. I would look at it as just a global blob, shall we say, of differences and training people on how not to make judgments based on differences.

(Kevin) Mm hmm.

And that's that's that goes to, you talk about the intersectionality, and I immediately go to things like socioeconomic, you know, you know, access to transportation, access to education and employment. What do you think? Where do you think this is going to go from here?

You know it. We've gone home. A lot of folks have gone home. The remote working employers, which are they, you know, go back to the COVID thing. They've talked about mandates regardless if you work home or not. But what what is the argument for a remote work as just the baseline, not an accommodation, necessarily?

What what would be the what would be the efficiency as you would speak to?

(Sheri) Well, I think that is where we are going ultimately, I mean, right now we've got a lot of companies with a lot of lease obligations because they've rented all this expensive space, especially in Silicon Valley.

But I think as over time as these leases expire, companies aren't going to renew them and then that's going to provide them with more latitude to support people working at home because they're not shelling out enormous amounts of money for rent.

Now, obviously, there are some - sorry about that. There are some situations where that's not going to be doable. Manufacturing plants, for example, there are certain jobs that just, you know, people who take x-rays, you're not going to be able to take x-rays at your home.

You're always going to have to be in a medical facility for that. But I think that things that can be done from home are will be done from home more and more. The overall concern used to be that there was this automatic distrust between business and employees, that there was the assumption that, oh, if I can't keep my eye on you, you're not going to be doing what you're supposed to be doing. But because of the pandemic. I think we've learned that that's not the case, that employees are actually putting in more hours, not fewer. And there's there's no reason to reverse that.

I don't understand companies like Apple that are trying to force everybody back into the office. That makes no sense to me.

(Kevin) Right. If you're if you're efficient from a productivity standpoint, why not?

(Sheri) Exactly. Getting the job done? Who cares where it's getting done?

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. There's another question here that talks about accessibility, and I'm going to take this question and move it a little bit. Just because I'd like to know your thoughts on this is a practice. Their question in particular was, I said, you know, I know Sheri's presentation is about web accessibility, but Christopher Patnoe opened the door with his analogy is an accessibility sandwich analogy. And I'd love to hear her thoughts juxtaposed to the head of accessibility, disability disability inclusion at Google. I think they're both right and this discussions worth having. I believe what he's speaking to is the influence piece.

How important is it that advocates in the organization have the ability to influence? But I'd like to expand on that on the accessibility question. So I guess maybe the question here is is influence. But my question is, where do you rate?

You know, we know that if we're serving customers, content has to be accessible. You know, that's really not even a question to program access thing, but for employees, whether it's a different process. Do you see that process as something that should be adhered to as kind of intended by the ADA?

Or should we just start off being accessible across the board?

(Sheri) Well, the only way you get to start off being accessible across the board is if starting a company today. Right? So companies have a history of not being as accessible as they could be, and most larger companies have a history of treating their customers better than they treat their employees, largely because the customers or the public are more likely to sue them. So it's it's purely a risk analysis type of thing. Now, VMware, we actually handle both internal and external accessibility within the same organization.

So that allows us to make efficient use of resources, and we make sure that we're playing the same standards everywhere. And if I suddenly have a surge of need, I can borrow one of the external team accessibility people. And if they have a surge of need and I've got some spare cycles, I can loan them an internal accessibility person. I don't think it works particularly well when you separate it into two different efforts.

(Kevin) Okay. Well, I mean that makes-

(Sheri) You start getting you start getting disparate definitions where you might not be defining disability the same way, or you might not be sorry, you might not be defining effective communications the same way.

And the one way to make sure that everybody's on the same playbook is to have everybody on the same team.

(Kevin) I totally agree with that one. And so let me-

(Sheri) Now I'm going to have to go back and watch Chris's presentation because I didn't see it.

I don't see accessibility sandwich. So I I love everything Chris does or whatever he said I agree with.

(Kevin) It was. Yeah, it was. He had a diagram. It was an influence sandwich. And, you know, it was an interesting diagram that he had, but I completely agree with him.

You know, you have to understand how leadership works. You have to speak their language and you have to be able to influence middle management. I just wonder, you know, they were speaking to the accessibility piece. I thought I'd throw it out, but please take a look.

I want to go back to zoom in on something you said in your presentation about the documents being accessible. And I see Alycia here. So I guess I've got a minute or two, but I'd like to ask this because I'm putting on my hat here and I'm thinking about H.R. professionals in the business.

They're working the process and, you know, it takes time. It takes money to implement changes. They're sending out documents because that's a big one. You hit a big one in the PowerPoint presentation about how the accessibility of documents. Are there any trends in technology and efficiencies that you've noticed that you can recommend to hiring managers to improve or streamline that onboarding process with more accessible technology than the standard documents? Because sometimes I would imagine them trying to make all the documents accessible after the fact. That's that's more of a challenge. I don't know. What would you-

(Sheri) Right. No, it's it's you don't need to make a document accessible that you gave to somebody ten years ago who might not still work in your organization. What you have to do is draw a line in the sand. Just like Gandalf, you know, accessible documents shall not pass, accessible documents shall not pass.

And to do that, you need to do two things. one is you need to make sure that the people generating one off documents know how to run the Microsoft and Adobe accessibility checkers because that's where most documents come from.

And then the other thing that you have to look at is you have to look at your document generation engines and the documents that are being generated by your third parties. So if somebody is doing background check and they're giving you a PDF file to fill out, it's got to follow of the fillable PDF file rules.

So it's it's the technology is there. You just have to find all of the data points where those requirements get triggered and make sure pushing the accessibility requirements to each of those channels.

(Kevin) So it sounds like the answer in summary, is procurement.Procurement, procurement.

(Sheri) Procurement. It's definitely part of it. And that's one of the reasons why the disability in DEI index section on procurement, because it doesn't matter if everything that you do is accessible. If everything that your subcontractors do isn't because basically your subcontractors are acting in your place, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between a file that you hand an employee and a file that a subcontractor emails an employee. They both have to be accessible.

(Kevin) Right. Wow, well, Sheri, I really appreciate it. I hate to, Alycia. You know, I have. I have.

They go on and on they go. And the entire time we've been talking, it's just been, you know, so-

(Sheri) Well feel free to send me the fruit, feel free to e-mail me the questions, and maybe I'll just post a big Q&A on LinkedIn.

I do that sometimes when the questions last longer than the time allows.

(Alycia Anderson - MC) Looks like next thing, we need you for double time.

(Kevin) Yeah.

(Sheri) Well, you can put that in the feedback to John. Yeah. Give her twice as much time for questions.

(Kevin) Yeah, we will. We'll do. Thank you so much Sheri, and we look forward to your presentation tomorrow and thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

(Sheri) Hey, no problem.

(Kevin) All right. Talk to you later.

(Sheri) Have a good afternoon.

Bye.