How to Support Employees with Hidden Disabilities

26 Nov

As a business leader, manager and owner, it is important to know you’re looking after the welfare of your employees. Disability, accessibility and inclusion can seem like a large and intimidating topic to navigate, never mind throwing in the idea that some of your employees will be dealing with invisible or hidden disabilities.

So how do you make sure you’re supporting your employees who don’t have obvious, visible disabilities? It isn’t as simple as creating a step free office space, or installing a screen reader onto a computer.

Be open about your own experiences

For many disabled people, talking about your disability at work can be an intimidating and stressful experience. There is social stigma and assumptions tied to disability such as ability to do work to a high standard, and the amount of effort needed to accommodate someone.

If you have a disability, chronic or mental health condition, consider being more open about your own experiences, access needs and day-to-day requirements. Something as simple as knowing your manager, or your manager’s manager is disabled can open the door to more people coming forward. You’re telling people that this is a safe space to talk about this topic.

Not everyone will have a story to share, or life experience to draw upon. If this is you, think about how else you can create a safe space for your employees and kickstart these conversations. Bringing in outside speakers and running team workshops is a great place to start, not only specifically for conversations to do with disability and access, but also hiring disabled experts in other fields to come in and do training for your team. Not everything a disabled person does has to be educating on disability and inclusion, and by hiring a disabled person to talk about their area of expertise you’re telling your team that you value their talent.

How to create a safe platform for employees to give feedback

We don’t always get it right first time, and from the point of view of your employees, giving you negative or constructive feedback can be intimidating! Couple that with some of your employees desire to not reveal they have a hidden disability and you have a cycle of unproductive initiatives that you end up giving up on because no one is engaging with you.

A great way of giving your employees the space and safety to give you feedback is through anonymous feedback. For smaller teams, this can look like bringing in a facilitator to have 1-2-1 confidential conversations with your team, providing you (management) with their recommendations, without naming or ‘outing’ any of your employees. For larger companies, where 1-2-1 meetings aren’t feasible to organise on an ongoing basis, anonymous feedback through surveys provided by third parties is another great option. The large number of employees means that their feedback is able to stay anonymous, and you can watch for trends in the feedback you’re getting, pinpointing exactly what you need to work on!

Though it is important to train your HR and people managers properly—and diversity, inclusion and accessibility training should be undertaken every year as new access initiatives and developing thought in the industry comes out—we recommend that you always go through third parties who are not affiliated with you in order to provide your employees with the reassurance that their feedback isn’t going to be used against them in some way.

What does flexibility look like in the workplace?

An important thing to remember is that disability looks different for everyone. Flexibility is a core way to ensure that you’re meeting access needs of your employees, but it can be difficult to figure out what this looks like.

In an office, it can be allocating a specific desk to someone who needs consistency in their working environment, a programme installed on a computer, or a lock box in their desk for medication.

Flexibility can look like allowing remote working, or hybrid working. If this is a possibility, make sure you’re actively talking to your employees to see what this would look like for them in an ideal scenario, and where possible, give each employee the opportunity to tailor it to their own needs.

Whether that looks like remote working, or being in the office, flexibility can be the number of hours they work a week, the days they work and which projects would suit their access needs and skillset best. It can look like an hour lunch to rest, providing them an empty office and sofa to have a nap, or the flexibility of working in the office in a morning, and working from home in the afternoon.

No matter what your disability, accessibility and inclusion strategy is, always keep in mind what it takes to create a safe space for your employees to talk about their experiences and needs.

Are you stopping disabled people from applying to your vacancies without even knowing it? Read how job application norms discriminate against disabled people here.