Inclusively wants disability inclusion to havew placew at the corporate boardroom table
The latest offering from disability-inclusive hiring and retention platform Inclusively has a core focus on addressing one of the most complex and longstanding issues impacting workplace diversity, equity and inclusion practices related to candidates and employees with disabilities.
This principally pertains to ensuring disability inclusion receives its rightful recognition as a leadership-driven business priority, rather than, as it all too often has been in the past, something that is siloed within the confines of HR departments with minimal levels of boardroom visibility.
St Louis-based Inclusively launched in 2020 primarily as a hiring platform that matches job candidates to positions with full transparency on both workplace disability accommodations they require and what the employer can offer — avoiding the need for awkward and potentially stigmatizing disclosures later in the hiring process. Last summer, the company launched its Retain platform which deploys similar artificial intelligence-based matching algorithms to assist existing employees to learn more about and request disability accommodations or “success enablers” as they are referred to.
Inclusively’s answer to the fundamental disconnect, as it views it, between the operational levels of HR and the C-suite is its new Leadership Board which it launched in January. The Inclusively Leadership Board is an invite-only consortium of HR leaders, principally Chief Human Resources Officers, which seeks to leverage collective intelligence and data insights through bespoke learning resources, webinars and in-person networking events – the first of which took place earlier this month.
The ILB entrenches disability inclusion within a C-suite leadership context enabling executives to share insights on important topics such as leveraging exclusive data, DEI trends and new tech deployment. Discussion topics include how to negotiate the choppy waters of AI hiring tools, which hold the potential to introduce considerable efficiency and unwanted bias into recruitment processes in equal measure, in addition to best practices in employee retention and the delivery of accommodations.
Beyond the HR silo
Inclusively boasts amongst its clients the likes of Delta, Lyft, Accenture and New York Life and closed $13 million in Series A funding in November of last year. The company’s COO and co-founder Sarah Bernard freely admits that the ILB is not reinventing the wheel but rather closing the gaps and joining the dots on a component of corporate culture that is all too often fragmented.
“After we started Inclusively, we realized that a lot of the end users of our products are not the same executives that were able to look at the holistic issue of DEI and disability inclusion. They might be responsible for a piece of it like accommodations or talent acquisition,” Bernard explains.
“What was missing was that connection point of seeing how this all fits into the bigger picture within rapidly changing workforce dynamics. Previously, corporate disability inclusion has just been so siloed. We thought that if we could expand on that we could help build a more modern framework to help companies solve some of those larger problems that they face today.”
Business Basics
Jon Singel is VP of Talent Acquisition at Lyft and a member of the Inclusively Leadership Board. He agrees that in order to gain corporate disability inclusion the priority it deserves the lens has to be widened.
“These initiatives are not just HR initiatives. They’re business initiatives,” Singel explains.
“This is the core idea that we’re here to support and drive forward. It has to be coming from that leadership level and that’s where there have been disconnects in the past because the C-suite is focused on just the financials or the results of the latest product shipment.”
Singel also appreciates the opportunities for learning and collaboration offered by the ILB.
“A big part of this is going to be education and learning from each other. When you create a safe space to talk about best practices, learnings, failures and successes, I think all of that ultimately breaks these silos down. What I love about working for a company like Lyft that has an influenceable brand is that we have an opportunity to not just influence what we're doing internally but what others are doing too. We have that seat at the table with the ILB which enables us to talk to others as well as learn from them.”
Undoubtedly, when it comes to corporate disability inclusion, there are significant negative long-term trends that seriously need addressing. According to the Center for Research on Disability, employment rates for people with disabilities stand at 30-40% compared to 70% for non-disabled people.
This, however, is not just a static picture and as Benard alluded to, layered on top of this are contemporary shifting sands that make corporate DEI more complex and nuanced than ever before.
Drilling down, Bernard explains, “First, there was the pandemic and everyone got an accommodation with remote work. Now they are going back into the office, they want to bring many of those things that they got accustomed to with them. “
She continues, “By 2030, millennials and Gen Z will make up two-thirds of the workforce. They have grown up in an education system where they have been accommodated for learning disabilities and mental health and they're demanding that same thing in their workplace. It's also a generation that has grown up with personalization at their fingertips across everything. So, when we talk to employers, we have to explain that this is not going away. Requests for flexibility, personalization and accommodations are just going to continue and those employers will require a far better more scalable framework to be able to deliver on those.”
Given this potentially volatile and certainly rapidly changing environment, any opportunity for learning, networking and dialogue that can cut through to the top of an organization is surely a unique value proposition.
