How Your Company Can Look Closer

The only way to grow your company’s level of inclusion is to know where you currently stand. For instance, do you know your company’s current self-ID rate, whether your handbooks and references are accessible, or if you have a published accommodations policy?

Once you can clearly articulate your disability inclusion goals, you’ll need to build an appropriate business case to secure buy-in from senior leaders and across business units.

Disability inclusion, like any diversity segment, only works if the whole company is on the same page.

Once you can clearly articulate your business case, it’s time to rally support from colleagues as well as senior leadership.

Now that you’re having these important conversations with stakeholders, including HR representatives and senior leaders, it’s valuable to formalize decisions into policies and practices

Policies should be standard enough to build culture and set expectations, but also flexible enough to accommodate your entire workforce.

Because disability inclusion is a growing priority at your company, you have clearly developed a strong, inclusive, and forward-thinking culture. Way to go!

But we can always do more to support the talented people we have now, and be more welcoming to jobseekers and people we’ll add soon.

Now that you’re as culturally strong as you’ve ever been, and have your inclusion policies locked and loaded, it’s time to start bringing people in. And since you’ve reached this step, you may have found that it’s really hard to find candidates with disabilities.

Once again, NOD can help.

Inclusion is a journey that doesn’t end—there is no finish line. We can always strive to improve. To do so, we need to study what we’re doing: what’s working, what’s not, and what needs tinkering.