Using digital tools to communicate about disability in the workplace
With nearly 80% of disabilities being invisible, you might have met an employee with a disability during your career without even knowing it. Invisible disabilities receive little media coverage and are poorly known by companies: chronic pathologies such as diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis or rare diseases, cognitive disorders such as dyslexia and dysphasia, mental illnesses or sensory disabilities (visual and hearing impairments) are one of them.
Most people with invisible disabilities are not always recognized as disabled and therefore do not have appropriate medical monitoring and a suitable working environment. Even if they manage to claim disability and get a status such as the recognition of the status of disabled worker (RQTH in France), many companies still fear in 2021 to recruit disabled people, many managers don’t know how to talk about disability, how to integrate people with disability into their teams and how to adapt his or her position.
The issue is that there is a real lack of sensibilization and awareness on this topic in the workplace. It’s even more alarming as almost everyone will temporarily or permanently experience disability at some point in their life (WHO).
Therefore I’d like to highlight some tips to encourage companies to communicate about diversity & disability using digital tools.
In fact, I recently took a training course to obtain a Management and Disability Certificate and acquire the necessary knowledge to be an actor in the disability policy of my company. During this training, I interviewed several french employees from big companies such as Total, Danone, GSK, BPCE and I asked them one simple question:
What do you know about the disability policy of your company?
They all replied they knew little about the disability policy of their company. However, it is not a lack of knowledge on the subject of disability among employees that is to blame, but rather a lack of internal communication, awareness and access to available resources. Even if in France, the law sets an employment obligation quota of 6% of disabled workers for any employer with at least 20 employees, it often does not result in concrete actions regarding the disability policy.
#What are the digital contents to communicate about disability?
(1) Blog “tousunique.fr”, Societe Generale
(2) Online game “Handipoursuite”, AGEFIPH
(3) Online recruitment forum, Talent Handicap
(4) Mini-web serie, SII Group
(5) #DisabilityStories campaign, Accor Group
#How to communicate internally about disability and inclusion?
The way you communicate your message is as important as the message itself. When I asked employees from French companies to tell me what they know about the disability policy of their company, I also asked them to search for information via the intranet. Most of them found out that their company was actually quite committed to raising awareness but they never received the info because the message was not correctly shared. So here are three simple tips on what you need to do:
- Create an internal communications strategy and/or plan
- Use the right communication tools:
- Intranet: create a specific tab called for instance “Inclusion & Disability”
- Youtube Channel: to store your awareness videos
- Blog: to post your article, visuals
- Enterprise Social Network: for instance, BPCE is using Yammer to post about diversity & handicap topics. Others: Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Zimbra, VMware,….
- Email: design an email to communicate about your online conference, new video, article. Create a dedicated email address for this specific communication so that employees can identify the thematic more easily. Example: disability@nameofthegroup.com
3. Adopt an inclusive and accessible communication
Don’t forget to promote digital accessibility so that communications can be understood by all, especially by the visually or hearing impaired.
For example, provide subtitles under videos, alt texts in the source code to explain images, use the formatting styles such as Title, Heading 1, Heading 2, check accessibility in Word documents by using the “Accessibility Checker” tool.
Do you have some suggestions or information sources you would like to share? If so, add them in the comment and let’s start a discussion.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
