Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Bonnie Crawford Of Umo Mobility On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability
An Interview With Eric Pines
Relationships are the most important part of work. You will spend more time with the people you work with than you will with your significant other, your family, your parents, your friends, and your kids. Invest in those relationships and put people first, always. I have always been very people-oriented. It is a fundamental part of how I live everyday, and certainly how I lead. Early in your career, you may look at people and situations as more transactional. This is a reminder to put empathy and kindness into everything you do, and I promise it will pay dividends.
As we all know, over the past several years there has been a great deal of discussion about inclusion and diversity in the workplace. One aspect of inclusion that is not discussed enough, is how businesses can be inclusive of people with disabilities. We know that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. What exactly does this look like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about the “How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Are Disabled “.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Bonnie Crawford.
Bonnie Crawford is the Vice President & General Manager for Cubic Transportation’s Platform business. The Umo platform hosts a flexible suite of products that enables riders to conveniently pay fares and plan trips across public and private modes, earn rewards for riding public transit and access real-time information to optimize their mobility experience.
Bonnie joined Cubic following several years leading the Client & Product Delivery organization at moovel, a Daimler & BMW joint venture in the Transit and Mobility space. She’s been in the payment and technology industry for over 20 years, leading global teams for GE & Viewpoint (a Trimble Global company) with a focus on opening new markets, developing world-class products, and building customer success and services groups that help clients leverage technology to address challenges they face in the global marketplace.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
I like to summarize my backstory as ‘mailroom to boardroom.’ I started my career as the executive assistant to a CEO at a small technology startup. I’ve also worked for very large organizations like GE. By leaning into new and interesting opportunities, and really staying connected with my network, I’ve had opportunities to work internationally, aiding in opening new markets and building program & services organizations. Those experiences led me to transition into the transit space, where I am now the General Manager for Umo Mobility, part of Cubic Transportation Systems.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
It’s hard to narrow it down to just three character traits, but I’ll start with empathy. Being people-focused, and recognizing that every single person — whether they are a team member, a customer, a partner, or a vendor — has a story and situations that they are facing, personally and professionally. I think practicing empathy, kindness, and putting people first has been critical to my success.
The second trait is curiosity. The best example I have for that is always looking for something new to learn. Ask questions, start with ‘why?’ especially when you begin a new role. People are working on interesting things. I think being curious about what’s going on around you even if it’s not directly in your sphere can give you a great understanding of the different facets of the business.
Lastly, I’ll say ‘get sh*t done’ (GSD). There are lots of people that are deep thinkers with innovative ideas, and certainly, that’s a critical part of my role, but one of the things that has been instrumental to my success over the years is that I am not afraid to roll my sleeves up and just get into the work alongside our team and our customers. Having a ‘whatever it takes to ensure the success of our customers’ attitude, really embodies that characteristic, I think, and is something that has been really, really important.
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
One of my greatest work-related struggles is time. When you are leading a growing business, finding the time to do all the different things and engage with every team member, customer and stakeholder along the way can be a challenge. I think the best way to overcome that challenge is to really think about your mission and how activities align to that. Too often, leaders are only looking at what’s immediately in front of them without really considering if it will serve the longer term goals they’re working towards. For us, that’s ensuring we provide the most equitable mobility solution to agencies large and small. We do that by ensuring customers are successful, and that team members are happy and growing. Keeping your focus on your mission ensures you’re spending time on things that help you achieve it.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
We are really changing the way that riders access mobility. Perhaps, one of the most exciting projects that we’re working on is the ability for any transit system in the world to be interoperable with any other transit system. Imagine as a rider, if you were able to hop from city to city without needing a different app, a different card or a different account. That is really the crux of what we’re building at Umo Mobility, and what our customers and transit agency partners are already benefitting from, via the 70 transit agencies around the world that are using Umo.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about inclusion. Can you tell our readers a bit about your experience working with initiatives to promote Diversity and Inclusion? Can you share a story with us?
I am extremely passionate about diversity and inclusion. It’s something I have been working on from the very earliest days of my career, as part of the GE Women’s Network. In the early 2000s, this was an organization really ahead of its time and long before diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) were top of mind for a lot of organizations. For me, the DE&I initiative was not just about promoting gender. It was about creating opportunities for people across many different walks of life. A great example came in my early teenage years. My parents were working with a humanitarian organization, and I had the opportunity to travel with them to some very, very economically depressed third-world areas across Asia. Witnessing how resilient people are, despite very challenging circumstances, who are often also dealing with disabilities and discrimination, really puts into perspective the importance of making sure that you are inclusive in everything you do. Not just for people of different races, genders, or religions; but also for those who speak different languages, aren’t comfortable with technology or are differently abled.
A great example is with job listings. For so many jobs, we see listings require a four-year degree. There are a lot of people with tremendous experience, who have a lot to offer the business community, but sometimes, by requiring that four-year degree, it is limiting to someone from a different socioeconomic or educational background. Maybe their knowledge and experience is from the ‘school of hard knocks?’ But now, you’re excluding them. By keeping your perspective open and recognizing that, to truly have diversity and inclusion, our teams and our businesses need to reflect the communities that we serve. That is so important because we are serving communities that are filled with people from all walks of life. Riders with disabilities, seniors, students, riders without cash, riders without a smartphone or a bank account, etc. If you think about it, the only way to truly practice what you preach is to ensure that you bring on team members who truly reflect the communities that you’re building the technology for and I’m so proud that our team reflects that.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
Having an inclusive work culture has to be centered around the team members that you work with and thoughtfully considering their unique situations. As I said at the beginning regarding empathy, every single person is working through something which may not be visible to you, and as a teammate, you should have compassion. One thing the COVID-19 pandemic really uncovered for so many people was how many are struggling with mental health or acting in a carer capacity. There may be people taking care of an aging parent; or perhaps your employee is between daycare arrangements, and they’re trying to balance work with being a parent. There are a myriad of things that might limit your ability to be inclusive, especially if you become very rigid with how you set up your organization. By tearing down those walls, and creating a culture that encourages flexibility, empathy and being open-minded about the needs of every team member, you naturally make work a more inclusive environment. That’s not just for people with disabilities, or for people with different backgrounds, but for everyone across the entire team. And that is, I think, super critical to employee retention and successful outcomes for your business.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what this looks like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Can you please share a few examples?
Absolutely, let’s start with what this looks like in practice. A reasonable accommodation in transit, for example, would be ensuring that the bus or the train can accommodate a wheelchair or other mobility device. Or perhaps for someone who is low-vision or blind, a reasonable accommodation might be to ensure that your technology, maybe a mobile app, allows that rider to use the app. What does that actually mean? In the real world, that means that you have built a mobile experience with talkback technology, so that blind people using a screen reader can follow along and purchase their tickets and navigate their communities. Taking this a step further, does the app offer the same support in different languages? Just think about the fact that more than 15% of riders in the US alone speak a language other than English at home. So how can we ensure that those riders are able to access the transit experience in Spanish, or in Arabic, or in Mandarin or Tagalog? You must ensure that you’re providing access for everyone.
Lastly, I think it also comes down to infrastructure. Our buses and trains can provide reasonable accommodations, but you can still end up in a situation that is not accessible for riders. I’ll share an example. I was riding transit with my team, as we do on a very regular basis. We love to explore new communities and learn what the transit system is like in different places. Once, we were riding a bus and were dropped off on the side of a hill with no sidewalks. We had to navigate across a grassy area to the corner where a stoplight was, mind you, there was also no crosswalk! I’m with eight people from my team, and now, we were jogging across five lanes of traffic with no sidewalks or crosswalks, and there was nothing to indicate [to oncoming drivers] that a pedestrian might be crossing there! Had someone on our team been using a wheelchair, they would have been wheeling in the traffic lane to make that connection. The transit system had done everything needed to ensure a truly equitable and accessible experience for riders, but the city we happened to be visiting had done absolutely nothing to ensure that we had reasonable accommodations for a typically-abled person, nevermind if one of us used a cane or a walker, scooter or wheelchair. So those are the kinds of physical accommodations that, as you’re planning, need to take into account. They don’t just begin and end with the transit system, they have to extend to the broader community as well.
Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? If you can, please share a few examples.
Great question. I’m going to start with the ‘if you can see it, you can be it, and you can imagine yourself there’ mentality. If businesses do not showcase the broad cross-section of people and abilities on their teams, or highlight the people in their community — that they actually practice inclusivity, and that they ensure an equitable, diverse and inclusive workplace by showing it not just making it a blurb on their website — how will people with disabilities feel they’d be welcomed?
It begins with your hiring practices. It begins with who is showing up on an interview panel. It’s highlighting differently abled team members in your marketing materials not because you bought a stock photo but because you actually have team members with disabilities working on your team.
If you do not talk openly about how you provide accommodations, then it is going to be very, very difficult for someone who is differently-abled to think about entering the interview process. I think putting that front and center as a business will help you make progress. If I’m someone living with a disability, I don’t want special accommodations made for me; I want to know that the accommodations are accessible to all team members because recognition of all different abilities and experiences is just part of how the business operates.
Can you share a few examples of ideas that were implemented at your workplace to help promote disability inclusion? Can you share with us how the work culture was impacted as a result?
Another great question. The first idea we implemented at Cubic Transportation Systems to promote disability inclusion is to offer employees an option for where and how they work. Although many parts of our business are fully remote, we also maintain a beautiful campus in San Diego, and other offices around the world. Those offices have workspaces to accommodate different abilities. We make sure that team members can access technology, regardless of whether they use screen reading, amplification devices, captioning, or if English is not their primary language. We make sure each new hire has someone to guide them through the onboarding process. This extends to making sure accommodations are provided for a home office, so an employee is set up for success. I think one thing we have really put into practice at Cubic that other businesses often overlook is being more thoughtful about the accessibility of team get togethers. If you are in a very social organization and often get together with your team, are the activities that you choose inclusive? Is it accessible for people with different capabilities or needs? For example, if I have a mobility issue, or if my co-worker is blind or hard of hearing, some after work activities will automatically exclude me or them, because that planned activity doesn’t accommodate our needs. This can result in people not connecting with the team or feeling unwelcome. It also fails to lead with empathy, as we discussed previously. At CTS, our work culture is intentional about always considering the accessibility for every team member. That means we may plan virtual fun gatherings in the morning instead of after 5pm to ensure that people can attend to after work obligations without feeling excluded. In doing that, we ensure employee acceptance and cultivate happiness at work because we’re really bringing a great team together across many walks of life and different abilities, which more closely reflects the communities we serve.
This is our signature question that we ask in many of our interviews. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started My Career”?
Relationships are the most important part of work. You will spend more time with the people you work with than you will with your significant other, your family, your parents, your friends, and your kids. Invest in those relationships and put people first, always. I have always been very people-oriented. It is a fundamental part of how I live everyday, and certainly how I lead. Early in your career, you may look at people and situations as more transactional. This is a reminder to put empathy and kindness into everything you do, and I promise it will pay dividends.
Protect your personal time. If you learn early in your career about the importance of creating space and time for self care, and managing your work-life balance, you will be much better served in 10–15 years, when you have become a senior leader and the demands for your time & energy have significantly increased. If you don’t learn to properly maintain work-life balance early in your career, then doing so later will be a big challenge. The best advice I have is to plan your time, such as leaving earlier in the morning to attend that yoga or spin class if it’s important to you. You’ll still get to where you’re going on time, but you’re protecting a balance that’s super critical for your personal health, and the health and longevity of your career.
Say yes to the hard things. You will be asked throughout your career to do many different things. Some of them will be comfortable for you and you’ll think, ‘Oh I will crush that, totally, yes.’ Others will make you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not remotely qualified to do that, that’s a hard no.’ I encourage you to say yes to the hard things because you will learn more from the professionally uncomfortable situations. Don’t play it safe. When I was about mid-career, I had an opportunity to move overseas and lead an acquired organization. That was a huge, scary step for me, but I said yes. It was the best decision for me and for my career! I learned a tremendous amount about myself, and my experience living in Sydney, Australia for nearly two years drove my passion for public transit. That experience is part of what then led me to the transit industry upon my return to the States.
Stay connected with your network. When you’re early in your career, networking is something that I think many people think is just for executives or salespeople. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know I sound like a broken record, but relationships and the colleagues that you work with, the leaders you connect with in those early years of your career will be instrumental in unlocking opportunities down the road. Keep in touch with them, check in over email or over LinkedIn, even if it’s only once a year, so that they remember who you are. If you’ve moved on from that organization, keep those relationships strong. Across my career, I can point to 2/3rds of the roles that I have taken being directly connected to relationships that I established and maintained from a previous role that I had. That’s why keeping your network strong is so important.
This last one is a bit silly but wow is it important. Invest in your 401K. I will say that I really, really wish that somebody had told me this early in my career. It’s never too early to save for retirement or unexpected life circumstances. When you’re early in your career, you may be living paycheck to paycheck and you’re not thinking about retirement, but compound interest is a real thing. So invest early in your 401k!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
My life lesson quote is ‘seek to understand.’ This often requires slowing down, listening more and putting yourself in the shoes of a person who you are trying to understand. When you are on the go and working in a very fast-paced environment, it is necessary to pause at times and to extend empathy to a team member. About a year or so ago, I experienced a death in my family. It was remarkable and very touching at the time, to see my team react. The empathy that I have always tried my best to put forward to our team and our customers was suddenly multiplied tenfold and extended to me, when I needed it most. From a relevancy perspective, it’s a reminder that everyone is dealing with their own trials, so recognize that empathy and kindness goes a long way, in business and regular life. You may not realize how important it is until you’re on the other side of it. For me, it was that period of time where I was in the midst of an absolutely unexpected and awful crisis, and the kindness, empathy and understanding came back to me in such a meaningful way. It really, really was an incredible gift from everyone around me, and I’ll forever be thankful for that.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
It’s going to be a movement that encourages people to get out into their communities — and that can take on a variety of forms, but if you think about it, if you go back to just the discussion we’ve had today — connect with other people. Think about the physical attributes of being included, and if you put people in the path of their community, on foot, on bike, in transit, if we get out of our little bubbles that we all tend to operate in, and we connect with each other in a meaningful way, whatever that looks like for each individual person, it will increase wellness, both mental and physical, across our communities. It will also help with our carbon emissions, because we’re connecting in more active modes of mobility, whether that’s walking, biking, scootering, wheelchair rolling, riding on rail or bus or ferry, or some other fun form of transit (a sky tram comes to mind). Transit is the great equalizer. Its impact is evident if you ever ride or commute outside of a car in another part of the world. You’ll see business people, students, seniors, people with low or fixed incomes, people with various disabilities, people traveling with family, people who don’t speak the native language for that location. I think that by opening up and connecting to the community, that is the movement that I would want to inspire — getting people out of their single occupancy vehicles, and connecting them with the world around them. That can be a game changer for us and generations to come.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I am pretty active on Linkedin, so please feel free to follow or add me on Linkedin, just search Bonnie Crawford. You can also keep up with Umo and all the fun and innovative things we’re doing at umomobility.com.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
