The importance of building inclusive workplaces for persons with disabilities has long been emphasised. However, a recent report indicates that less than 19 percent of Indian companies in the private sector have specific policies or processes in place to promote the inclusion of persons with disabilities.
In line with these findings, less than 25 percent of workplaces were reported to offer accessible toilets and technological accommodations such as wheelchairs and screen readers for persons with disabilities. Moreover, 17 percent of workplaces offered no accommodations whatsoever. It is evident that the inclusion of persons with disabilities remains in its nascent stages in the nation.
What are the challenges that companies face in their journey towards disability inclusion, and what can they do to overcome the roadblocks? To answer these questions, we spoke with Akshay Tyagi—head of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group—and Sanyucta Chakravarty—head of culture transformation, learning and development (L&D), and DEI at Forbes Marshall.
It isn’t always smooth sailing
Attempting to build an inclusive organisation is not without its challenges. Recalling their experience with implementing inclusive hiring and operational practices, Sanyucta and Akshay highlighted some of the major barriers that companies are likely to come up against:
Ensuring representation
According to Akshay, an important first step towards facilitating inclusion is incorporating representation into an organisation’s ethos. He says, “Our intent is that every person who enters, whether as a guest or a team member, finds themselves represented within the larger fabric of the organisation.”
Sanyucta notes that it is also important that representation is found at various levels of the organisation. “Although we’re a manufacturing company, we don’t want to simply give someone shop floor employment to tick off another item on our representation checklist. We’re trying to make careers here, so we aim to assign roles that complement a person’s innate abilities or the skills they could develop through training.”
However, 25 percent of the 7.8 million disabled children in India do not attend any educational institution. In addition to that, a variety of representation-, accessibility-, and discrimination-related challenges in higher education institutions also limit their access to equal opportunity and restrict their integration into the mainstream student body. Limited educational opportunities in turn affects their employability in the corporate sector.
Akshay says, “We don’t have enough schools or hotel management institutes offering courses through which people with hearing, speech, or visual disabilities or neurodivergent individuals are provided adequate support. This is a significant shortfall in the education and skill development sectors, and it also impacts corporations’ efforts to ensure representation within the workplace. Consequently, many corporate policies and frameworks are designed by individuals without a lived experience of disability.”
Those who do manage to secure jobs in the sector can be distrustful of corporate workplaces, which they may perceive as extensions of the same unsupportive systems that presented them with numerous obstacles. Their families and caregivers are similarly unlikely to trust a company solely based on its claim of being inclusive.
Overcoming attitudinal barriers
There is a pressing need to build greater trust between corporations and persons with disabilities. This requires challenging prevailing assumptions about the capabilities of persons with disabilities and addressing the concerns of managers who believe that hiring them demands more time and resources. Akshay believes that the solution lies in fostering interactions between persons with disabilities (and their families) and non-disabled stakeholders within corporate environments.
It is important to be mindful of the varied lived realities of persons with disabilities.
He says, “We are talking about communities that have been marginalised for years, so gaining their trust is essential. For example, parents of many disabled youths come to us with apprehensions about how we intend to integrate their children into the workforce. It is critical for us to engage with them and secure their buy-in, as it facilitates the inclusion we seek.” Akshay also believes that continued engagement with the community helps shift pre-existing biases among employers. “A lot changes once you start involving and engaging with the disability community, as it helps you question your presuppositions about whether someone is ready or capable of meeting workplace expectations.”
Sanyucta notes that it is also important to be mindful of the varied lived realities of persons with disabilities. “The biggest challenge is our assumptions and biases. Every individual—whether they have a locomotor disorder, hearing impairment, or visual impairment—has such unique experiences. So our learning is that we need to take it case by case and figure out what [accommodations] will work for each person.”
The path to inclusion
Although these challenges may hinder a seamless transition to disability-friendly work environments, corporates can take actionable steps to address them.
1. Begin with accessibility
Ensuring accessibility in the workplace is a fundamental component of building an inclusive workplace culture. An inclusive environment at work opens up the opportunity for persons with disabilities to feel welcomed and participate fully. Building such accessibility into the organisational culture involves providing a barrier-free physical infrastructure, using accessible language, adopting flexible training methodologies and work arrangements, and offering appropriate assistive technology to enable the participation of persons with disabilities in regular operations.
2. Take a flexible approach
Every corporate space has unique roles, responsibilities, and ways of functioning. As a result, promoting inclusivity in each of these spaces will require an approach that accounts for the disabled individual’s distinctiveness. There’s no fixed template that can be copied from one organisation and pasted on to another.
It’s important to understand people’s strengths and identify opportunities that allow them to effectively utilise those.
Akshay points out, “When you’re dealing with diverse communities, you cannot have a static approach.” The adoption of a dynamic strategy also helps account for the diverse support needs of different disabilities.
“Find the roles within the organisation that would suit people with differing competencies,” adds Sanyucta. It’s important to understand people’s strengths and identify opportunities that allow them to effectively utilise those, while also ensuring that they are provided with an environment conducive for them to flourish. To illustrate this, Sanyucta provided the example of a hearing- and speech-disabled person with a diploma in fine arts who was hired by the organisation. They were provided with the opportunity to work in research and development (R&D) and have since continued to work closely with the marketing department to help develop the organisation’s visual brand.
3. Be proactive
Organisations may lament the gaps in the education system that hamper the employability of persons with disabilities. Akshay emphasises that the system’s imperfections, however, needn’t deter employers from investing in widening the pool of candidates to select from. He states, “Instead of waiting for the system to fix itself, we thought it would be better to provide scholarships to candidates with disabilities who are interested in learning hotel management. This has helped us create a more diverse pool of candidates to choose from while furthering our goal of building an inclusive organisation.”
Similarly, it is important to ensure that persons with disabilities are involved in conceptualising initiatives that aim to facilitate their participation in the workplace. This will ensure that their lived experiences serve as the bedrock of the policies and practices designed for them.
4. Work with external partners
Disability inclusion is the key focus of several community-based organisations and nonprofits. Their sustained community engagement and expertise in the realm of disability make them suitable partners for companies seeking assistance with various inclusion-oriented tasks. These include:
- Formulating inclusive workplace policies and planning reasonable accommodations to enable the contribution of persons with disabilities at work.
- Serving as external counsellors or grievance officers who make persons with disabilities feel safer at work.
- Designing sensitisation and awareness programmes for non-disabled individuals.
- Conducting accessibility audits.
Akshay says, “To us, DEI is a collaborative journey. So, we like to share our vision [with our partners beforehand] and work with other organisations [to help achieve that vision]. In addition to collaborating with these nonprofits for hiring, we also support their initiatives.”
Ultimately, fostering inclusion is an iterative process. Every new initiative may have unforeseen gaps that can be improved upon. Therefore, organisations must also build in a feedback component, encourage relevant stakeholders to indicate what improvements can be made, and subsequently work towards addressing those gaps.
Akshay emphasised the value of feedback in his description of how persons with disabilities are assessed through the apprenticeship and placement process. He says, “We check in with team members [with disabilities] at regular intervals, and we also speak to their parents/guardians and their peers at work to understand whether it really makes any sense for them to be in that space [within the organisation]. We don’t want them to work in a position that doesn’t suit them simply because they feel a pressure to ‘fit in’.” Through these regular assessments, the organisation is able to ensure that the team member remains at the centre throughout the apprenticeship period and that they are upskilled to fulfil a role in which they can thrive.
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Know more
- Read this article on how to build a stronger DEI culture within nonprofits.
- Read this article to learn more about best practices in employing persons with disabilities in the private sector.
