People with disabilities represent 15% of the global population but are often left out of diversity initiatives, programs, surveys, and even basic conversations about workplace inclusion. Recent research from Global Disability inclusion and Mercer on the engagement gap of employees with disabilities shows a difference in some areas of up to 13% lower than non-disabled colleagues.
So with many employers seeking to do better with equity, inclusion and belonging, what can they be doing to address this problem.
To help us get some more insights into the issues, my guests this week are the research report authors Meg O’Connell, CEO & Founder of Global Disability Inclusion and Pete Rutigliano, Senior Principal at Mercer.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The State of Disability Employee Engagement Study
• Employer attitudes to disabilities
• Attitudinal barriers and dispelling myths
• Research methodology and scope
• Reasons for the engagement gap
• The employee experience for people with disabilities
• Building the right level of trust to allow people to be themselves
• Hidden disabilities
• The benefits of inclusion
• Lessons from the pandemic
• Hopes and predictions for the coming years
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcription:
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Matt Alder [00:01:42]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 368 of the Recruiting Future podcast. People with disabilities represent 15% of the global population, but they’re often left out of diversity initiatives, programs, surveys, and even basic conversations about workplace inclusion. Recent research from Global Disability Inclusion and MRSA on the engagement gap of employees with disabilities showed a difference in some areas of up to 13% lower than non disabled colleagues. So with many employers seeking to do better with equity, inclusion and belonging, what can they be doing to address this problem? To help us get some more insights into the issues, my guests this week are the authors of the research report, Meg O’Connell, CEO and founder of Global Disability Inclusion, and Pete Rutigliano, Senior Principal at Mercer. Hi, Meg. Hi, Pete. And welcome to the podcast. Could we just start by you introducing yourselves and telling us what you do? Meg, would you like to go first?
Meg O’Connell [00:02:51]:
Sure, I’ll go first. I’m Meg O’Connell and I am the CEO and founder of Global Disability Inclusion. We help companies expand their diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities. So we focus on three main areas, the workplace, the workforce, and the marketplace.
Matt Alder [00:03:11]:
Great Stuff. And Pete, would you just like to do the same and introduce yourself?
Pete Rutigliano [00:03:14]:
Yeah, sure. So my name is Pete Rutigliano. I got my PhD in clinical and health psychology a number of years ago specializing in tests and measurements, which landed me in the world of employee engagement that I’ve been doing for the better part of 20 years. I work for Mercer, which is a company that’s part of mmc and I work in the employee listening group. I’m a senior principal there. I also run the data analytics group and I’m responsible for all the benchmarks.
Matt Alder [00:03:45]:
Fantastic stuff. Now we’re going to talk about the survey you’ve done in some detail a little bit later on in the conversation, but just thinking about it, it would be great to maybe hear a bit about how your two organizations work together.
Meg O’Connell [00:03:59]:
Yeah, sure. I’ll go ahead and start. Pete and I actually met probably 15 years ago at this point and we were both working for other companies and at employee engagement data for the company that I was working for. And his company was hired to assist. And I was the head of the employee resource group for people with disabilities at this company. And Pete has a stepdaughter with autism. And so as we’re analyzing all the cuts of data, we saw obviously lots of people identifying in all the other diversity segments, but only a very small percentage of people with disabilities even identified as a person with a disabling condition. We had to fight to get that question asked. Even it really spurred Pete and I on to say this data doesn’t exist. How do we find this data? Obviously Pete has a treasure trove of data around employee engagement. So, you know, fast forward. We continued to look at employee engagement data together with the Mercer database and really frame the story that was developing around that, which, you know, produced the report we came out with in March called the State of Disability Employee Engagement. It covers a 10 year time period. It’s a global study with 12 million data sets. So Pete and I have really been partnering on this topic because no one has been talking about it. And really we want to get the word out that companies really need to start paying attention to employees with disabilities.
Pete Rutigliano [00:05:58]:
Yeah. What was a really big surprise for me is after Meg and I started investigating it within the company she was working with, I started looking at across all of our databases and I was just amazed at the amount of differences that I saw for employees with disabilities that I wasn’t really seeing in the other diversity groups. And most companies weren’t really investigating it, which was a really big surprise for me.
Matt Alder [00:06:23]:
I suppose to give a little bit of context to all of this, what’s the sort of the overall state of employment for people with disabilities? What’s the, how would you sort of contextualize the situation in terms of, in terms of what’s, what’s happening? And, and also the attitudes that employers have?
Meg O’Connell [00:06:40]:
You know, we’ve made a lot of progress. You know, here in the US we’re about to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So we’ve made so much progress and have had so many accomplishments, but there’s still so much to be done, especially when we’re talking about employment. People with disabilities still face record unemployment. It’s typically double the unemployment rate of all other diversity groups. And of course, it’s the largest diversity segment. So we’re still struggling for equity and inclusion in the workplace. Again, we are making progress, but it is slow. The biggest barrier I would say we have is, is we’re still battling attitudinal barriers. People still with the misconception that if you have a disability, you can’t work or you’re going to be contributing less, you’re not going to be a high achiever. And so we spend a lot of time educating companies that that is a myth. And the reality is people with disabilities are in fact very capable and can be a valued part of your workforce.
Matt Alder [00:08:04]:
So let’s move on to talking about the survey. Pete, talk us through a little bit more, the background to the, to the survey and how you’ve sort of put it together.
Pete Rutigliano [00:08:13]:
Yeah, sure. So as part of our work, so my company does employee engagement surveys, which a typical engagement survey is I go into an organization, we come up with customized questions specifically about that organization that we want to measure, and then I collect the data from every employee in the organization and then feed the data back to the company. So as part of that work, typically we’ll want to ask various disability inclusion demographic questions. So we’ll ask about gender, we’ll ask about ethnicity, we’ll ask about sometimes sexual orientation and age. And also one of those data points that we like to ask is the question, do you have an apparent or non apparent disability? So by collecting these data amongst all of these different companies, I’m able to really amass a very large database that really represents what’s going on across the United States and also moreover, across the world. Our database is roughly around half the United States and then including countries from all over the world. So as part of that, I’ll go into individual companies and show how their data compares or how do employees with disabilities compare to those without disabilities? And then from there I notice real significant differences. And we’ll get to those in a little bit.
Matt Alder [00:09:36]:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, talk us through the, the key findings that have come out of this.
Pete Rutigliano [00:09:42]:
So a couple of key findings. Number one, just in terms of the percentage of companies that will allow us to investigate disability inclusion is really small. So what I like to point out in my database, I have about 90% of the companies in my database of 12 million that will investigate gender, so they’ll look into differences between men and women as a diversity group. We have about 75% of the companies that will investigate race and look into differences between, you know, Black, Asian, Native American, et cetera, and look at those differences. I only have about 4% of companies that will even allow me to investigate disability as a diversity group, which is just a very small percentage of the people in there when I do investigate those differences. So now I’m talking about the 4% that actually do investigate disability as a construction. I see real major differences. The biggest difference is overall engagement. I see that employees with disabilities are typically about 7 to 8 points different than those without disabilities. And that is they’re less connected to the organization, they’re less likely to recommend the organization, they aren’t as satisfied with the organization. So we see this really big difference. And one of the things that makes this such an intriguing finding, just looking at overall engagement, is that when I look at other diversity groups, for instance, when I look into gender, I don’t see differences in overall engagement by gender. There’s really no difference between men and women. When I look at differences by race, I typically don’t see any differences there. In fact, even when I look at differences by sexual orientation, when I look at heterosexual versus homosexual populations, I, I don’t see a significant difference between those groups as well. But I always see a difference in the disabled group looking at those with disabilities versus those without. And that’s a real significant finding. We typically will call a five point difference a call to action. When organizations really should start doing some investigative work and taking some actions on the back end.
Matt Alder [00:11:58]:
I know this is something that, that, that Meg sort of touched on earlier in the, the conversation. But do you have sort of insights into, into why that’s the, why that’s the case?
Pete Rutigliano [00:12:07]:
I think there’s a couple of different reasons. So one hypothesis I had, you know, as a scientist, I have to think, well, what’s causing these differences? So one hypothesis that we normally come to is, well, maybe it’s that, let’s face it, people who are have disabilities have a harder time than the rest of us. And maybe it’s that in and of itself that’s causing the decrease in engagement scores. But what’s really interesting is when you look at new hires, right, A new hire employee who identifies as having a disability versus a new hire who doesn’t identify as having a disability, we don’t see differences there. And if it was simply that employees with disabilities have a harder life, then those scores should remain different. Whether they’re a new hire, whether they’re a long term tenure employee. There shouldn’t be that difference. So there’s something about the experience at work that our organizations are doing. And by the way, it’s consistent across most organizations what is causing that difference. And some of our hypotheses have to do with the fact that, number one, there’s this feeling of not being able to identify or disclose that they have a disability. We’ve seen some trends in our data that show that if people are able to disclose that they have a disability, a lot of those differences start to go away. In fact, one real interesting point of the data is when you look at differences by, let’s say, immediate manager. So what is the relationship between an employee with disability and their immediate manager? There’s very small differences between those with disabilities and those without. And if you think about it, that’s where you have your closest relationship. You tell your immediate manager stuff that you wouldn’t tell middle management, senior management, or the executive staff. So the closer connection, the more you could be yourself and the more the company knows you, the smaller the decreases are when we look at differences across the organization. So let’s say my relationship as an employee to senior leadership. So do I trust senior leaders or do I think senior leadership is making the right moves in terms of strategic direction, or do I feel like I’m valued as an employee in this organization? That’s where we see larger differences. Meg, do you have anything you want to add on that?
Meg O’Connell [00:14:33]:
Yeah, I do. I think I want to go back to kind of the top of what you were saying. Pete and Matt, your question about why aren’t companies studying people with disabilities? And I think there are a couple of reason. First, we’re in this cultural shift globally of don’t ask, don’t tell about your disability status and the shift being to disability pride. And that’s really happened over the last, really, I think intense, the last five years, but it’s been building the last 10 or so. So cultural shifts take a long time, and cultural shifts within companies take a long time. So we went from don’t disclose your disability. Companies weren’t allowed to ask about disability to, in the U.S. new legislation about six years ago that essentially was affirmative action for people with disabilities. And companies now have to identify the number of people they’re interviewing, recruiting, hiring with disabilities. So that really set in motion for a lot of global companies the shift in, all right, people with disabilities need to apply, we need to accommodate them, and we need to understand how to really integrate them successfully into our workforce. So it’s been. We’ve had good progress in some areas. It’s been slow, but still with that cultural shift we had, especially if you had an invisible disability, I, for one, have epilepsy, so I don’t have to disclose unless I want to. There was very much coming up, don’t ever disclose your disability unless you need an accommodation. That way, no one will discriminate against you. We still have some of those feelings from people with disabilities because it’s a level of trust that, as Pete was saying, you want to feel comfortable disclosing your disability to those that you trust and that you know are still going to value. Value you even with that disclosure.
Matt Alder [00:16:55]:
Sort of moving forward from this, what would your advice be to employers in terms of what they can sort of do based on these. These. These survey reports to. To. To kind of improve the situation moving forward?
Meg O’Connell [00:17:08]:
Well, I think educating senior leadership and also understanding that even if you don’t think you’re employing people with disabilities, you likely are. There are 1.3 billion people on the planet with a disability. You know, that’s 15% globally. In the US that number is higher at 26%. So you’re already employing people with disabilities, but likely just don’t know it or don’t understand their experiences. So if you just take those numbers, statistically, companies are potentially ignoring 15 to 20% of their employee population. So there’s a huge opportunity here for companies to say, wow, this is a group I haven’t been investigating. This is a group that is, you know, maybe a quarter of our population that I don’t know anything about. So really investigating the employee experience of people with disabilities is really important for companies, which led Pete and I to create the first ever disability climate and culture survey called Amplify. Pete, what do you want to add?
Pete Rutigliano [00:18:36]:
One of the things I love about my job is being able to go to organizations and talk to leadership and say, hey, this is where there’s problems in the organization that we can fix. And what’s great is leaders like to find that information. They want to have really engaged and connected employees that work harder and longer and better for their organization. And to find a pocket of their organization that is so large, that is actively disengaged because of how we’re treating them is just gold. And what I tell the organization is, listen, you can’t know what’s going on unless you measure it. And we had this problem at the beginning with organizations that we wanted to ask questions about disability status. And when we started doing this about 12 to 15 years ago, a lot of times the lawyers in the organization said, wait, we don’t want to ask that question because we don’t want that information to be discoverable in case there’s a lawsuit. What’s nice is the lawyers now are saying, wait a minute. If we don’t investigate this, we’re setting ourselves up for a problem down the road. Let’s figure out what we’re doing wrong now and rectify it. It’s much easier to avoid a lawsuit by creating a better situation for the employees. So we are seeing an uptick in the number of organizations that are willing to investigate disability status. Now, granted, it’s not as high as I would like. You know, it’s not the 90% we’re seeing with gender differences, but at least it’s moving in the right direction. And actually, since COVID happened and during all the social injustices of 2020, we’re seeing a real big uptick in diversity inclusion as a whole, and we’re able to rope disability status into that grouping. So it’s really been some exciting times recently in terms of the uptake of on looking into disability status.
Meg O’Connell [00:20:28]:
I think you can hear, Matt, the excitement in our voices here. You know, having been in talent management for the bulk of my career, opportunities like this don’t come up. As Pete said, this is. This is gold. This is an opportunity for companies to really take action. And we know that if you design for disability, if you create products and services and programs for people with disabilities, improve policies and procedures at your company for people with disabilities, they actually work for everybody. So that’s the beauty about disability inclusion, is that it just doesn’t benefit this one small population. It benefits everybody. I think the best example of that is how quickly we all move to remote working so status. Right? And people with disabilities loved it, especially those that maybe have transportation issues or medical issues that they need to take care of throughout the day. It gave Them, you know, a less stressful environment, to really be able to show up in the same way as everybody else in the room and contribute in their workplaces. And so I think that’s one of the great lessons from the pandemic that we need to take going forward is that we need to create a variety of ways for people to engage and contribute in the workplace.
Pete Rutigliano [00:22:05]:
I also think as a call out on that, a number of people don’t even recognize necessarily that they have a disability, or maybe not even willing to call it a disability. So I had this really interesting experience about nine years ago. I was talking with one of my employees about the research that I do on disability inclusion, and she’s like, wow, that’s really interesting. And for some reason, we started talking about eyesight. And then she mentioned to me that she sometimes she’s got difficulty seeing the screen. And that’s when I found out that she actually had a disability, a visual disability that I’d never known about. And she had been working for me for four years. And because of this conversation, I said, well, do you want. I can get you a larger screen. And we were able to buy her a larger screen to do her work so that she could have it at a larger fund. She was able to become more successful. I think one of the problems with disability is sometimes people don’t even recognize that they’re part of that group. And getting them to really recognize, no, you’re part of that group, and there’s ways that we could help you be more successful in your job. It’s just. It’s just a wonderful change that I was able to create. And just seeing that and being able to extrapolate that to other organizations, there’s just so much opportunity here.
Matt Alder [00:23:21]:
Absolutely. And as a final question to you both, what do you hope is going to happen over the next sort of year to two years? So when you’re doing this survey in the future, what would you hope to see? What would you. You really hope that employers will focus on in the next one to two years?
Meg O’Connell [00:23:39]:
You know, it’s such a great question, Matt. And I think companies understanding the opportunity that exists here, and really taking the survey, investigating the findings between the employment experiences of those with disabilities and without disabilities, and really getting solid, insightful, and actionable that can help them create not just one or two programs. We know in our survey work that when you get data like this, you’ll definitely have quick wins, but there will be things that you have to strategically think about that will take you two, three, five years out so you can create a much larger roadmap for your disability inclusion program when you have better data. So we say all the time, ask better questions, get better answers. And that’s what we’re really hoping to provide for companies.
Pete Rutigliano [00:24:42]:
Yeah, absolutely. And with this 2020 phenomenon, someone asked me, well, Pete, it sounds like disability is really kind of in vogue now and maybe it’s going to trail off at some point. And I don’t think that’s the case. I think once people’s eyes open up to this, I think they’re going to stay opened up to this and this is going to be part of business as usual, that when we measure diversity groups, one of the diversity groups we’re consistently measuring, along with gender and race and age and whatnot, we’re going to continue to look into this. And what’s exciting for me is, you know, my database that Meg and I have pulled together, while it’s huge and we have really great data, I really feel like we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. And what’s most exciting for me is a lot of the questions that I want to answer about disclosure. And maybe there’s differences by the different kinds of disabilities. So, for instance, if you have an apparent disability versus non apparent, there are different ways we’re handling it. The way HR departments are moving is not as a one size fits all approach, but because we have access to incredible data and we have a little bit more. More flexibility with programs with benefits, with how we treat employees, we could curtail and really, really specifically hit different populations a little bit differently to really give employees what they need. Because at the end of the day, I believe that if we set up the situation in a positive manner that really understands individual, we can make for the best working environment for them. And they could work hard and they could work long and really feel successful.
Matt Alder [00:26:25]:
Meg and Pete, thank you very much for joining me.
Meg O’Connell [00:26:28]:
Our pleasure. Thanks for having us.
Pete Rutigliano [00:26:30]:
My pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:26:31]:
My thanks to Meg and Pete. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
