On-Demand Webinar

Key Intel:

• Proactive Leadership: The importance of asking employees what they need to succeed, rather than waiting for them to disclose. Leaders should foster an environment of empathy and open communication, understanding that needs can be dynamic and multifaceted.
• Collaboration and Innovation: Successful accommodations often arise from collaborative efforts between employees and management. By centering solutions around individual needs and fostering a culture of inclusivity, companies can drive innovation and create a more supportive work environment.
• Leveraging Technology: Inclusively’s Retain platform demonstrates how technology can play a pivotal role in supporting employees. By allowing anonymous access to accommodations and resources, companies can increase the number of employees benefiting from support, ultimately improving productivity and retention.

Who It’s For: Senior executives, HR professionals, diversity and inclusion leaders, managers, and job seekers in the creative industry committed to fostering an inclusive workplace. It’s valuable for those looking to enhance productivity and retention through accommodations and proactive leadership, and for job seekers aiming to advocate for inclusive practices in their careers.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dionna Dorsey 0:00
Okay, welcome everyone. Thanks so much for joining choosing to join us here today. Before we get started, we want to mention our Access Notes for today’s webinar. For those who need ASL interpretation, please navigate to the bottom menu and select Sign language interpretation View feature to display our two ASL interpreters, Rebecca and Matthew, and please let us know if you have any questions there. We also have live captioning enabled. Just click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to activate that option as well. We are going to kick things off with the panel discussion today. Afterward, we’ll address any questions you may have, and some of you have already posed your questions in advance. We’ve actually used some of those to help guide our conversation for today. So we’ll leave a few minutes at the end of today’s session for additional questions. Feel free to drop your questions in the chat, and if we don’t get to them, we’ll also be sure to follow up afterward with that, I think we’re ready to get started. I’m Dionna Dorsey, Co-founder and CEO of The Creative Ladder, and I’ll be your moderator for today. Couldn’t be more excited to share insights from our collaborative research report with Inclusively on navigating accessibility and inclusion in the workplace to empower rising leaders. Thanks again to Inclusively for your partnership.

That leads me to Sarah. Sarah Bernard here with us today. Is ours, excuse me, is the COO and Co-founder of Inclusively. She’s an expert in corporate HR, accommodation, accessibility group challenges, and she’s created technology solutions to help employees, employers and innovative companies to help the employee, the overall employee experience be more inclusive. Up next we have Dr. Marcus, Collins, professor and best-selling author. Marcus studies cultural contagion and meaning-making to help bridge the academic practitioner gap to help those who aim to put ideas in the world and inspire people to take action. He’s also a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Thanks so much for choosing to join us today.

Dr. Marcus Collins 2:13
Thank you.

Dionna Dorsey 2:14
And last but not least, we have Marisa Hamamoto, professional dancer and founder of Infinite Flow Dance. Marisa firmly believes that there’s a way to approach and carry yourself, to set yourself up to be inclusive and adaptable at all times. And with that, is everyone ready to kick things off?

Marisa Hamamoto 2:31
Yes, do it.

Dionna Dorsey 2:32
Let’s do it. Question one, and this is for all of you. Does the perfect work environment exist for employees requesting accommodation. How can we set up employees for success? Sarah?

Sarah Bernard 2:48
So, I can kick us off. I think the environment today from for requesting accommodations is very far from perfect. I think we saw that and a lot of the data on the joint research paper that we did. Today, typically across the US, three to 5% of employees request accommodations. But we know about 20 to 30% of today’s workforce actually qualifies as having a disability on the ADA, so that, you know, there’s a question that comes up, why are only three to 5% actually formally going through that process? Then I think it’s because, you know, it’s a far from perfect process. You have to disclose, typically today, when an employee needs support or has identified the need for support, they have to disclose really personal details about themselves, they have to go through what is at most companies called the Interactive Accommodations Process to even start, start the search and discovery process for accommodations. And oftentimes companies even require that that employee provides a medical note. So it’s like, “tell me why you need this and prove it”, which is very different from kind of our stance that Inclusively and starting with a question and not you know what, what do you need this for? It’s really starts with, it’s more proactive. It’s like, what do you need to be more successful in your role? How do you be more pro at? Like, how do companies become more proactive around that?

Dr. Marcus Collins 4:19
Yeah, I love that, Sarah, I think that you know, what you’ve highlighted is there’s a sense of like, there’s a passiveness, if you will, and perhaps even some tension that exists that you have to, you know, adversarially, prove that you need this thing, and therefore I’m obliged to do it, as opposed to proactively making those steps. I think the question is interesting, like, is there a perfect environment? I think that there’s a perfect environment for the right people, unfortunately that the right people seems to be more exclusive than it is inclusive.

Marisa Hamamoto 5:03
Hi, this is Marisa speaking quick visual description. I am a Japanese-American woman with long black hair, and I am wearing a pink shirt. My disabilities are non-apparent. I am autistic and I am a stroke survivor, with that said, kind of piggybacking on Dr. Collins and Sarah. So I think we need to take the word perfectionism and perfect out of our vocabulary, is where I want to start with. At the same time, we can continue to perfect the environment as well as our mindset and what I like to call our “heart-set” as we all know, everyone is different to everyone has a different body, a different mind, a different upbringing, different abilities, it’s disabilities, yada yada yada. You know it’s impossible to to even with with ADA compliance and meeting ADA standards to meet everybody’s needs. So rather than trying to check off boxes, what we can do is continue to perfect our mindset. But doesn’t mean that our that it’s going to be perfect. So so for example, for me, I come from the mindset and the heart-set that disability inclusion benefits everyone. Historically, a lot of innovations have been created as a result of disability inclusion. For example, the typewriter, which was invented in the early 1800s was invented as a result of a blind woman wanting to write a love letter in her privacy. Many iterations, letter, here’s our computers, our type boards, yada yada, ya, right. You know, email was invented as a result of a deaf engineer wanting to communicate with his deaf wife at a distance. So again, there’s many, many, I mean, those are kind of like very famous examples where inclusion led to innovation. But I come from that mindset of, okay, inclusion, disability, inclusion, access, accommodations. It’s not a burden, it’s actually an opportunity to create and innovate.

Sarah Bernard 7:17
Can I add something to that, we a while ago, there was a webinar that a few of us on our team attended, and it was all about a quote that was shared was that if you solve for the edge case, which is around disability inclusion, you almost get the core for free. So you solve for disability and everyone benefits from you know, those accommodations, those innovations that take place, so very much reinforcing what you just shared Marisa, and I know, personally, I’m a self-diagnosed dyslexic, and there are so many tools that I have found to help make me so much more productive in my job, because I found them from, you know, accommodations that those on our team have requested because of a disability, things like Grammarly is a tool that I rely so heavily on. I everyone who works with me knows that, and either my words are always twisted or I’m missing words or full sentences, and it’s really bad if it’s sending a message at 4am or at 10pm and that’s a tool that, like I it has it makes me feel more confident in my role. It gives me more credibility, especially if I’m sending messages out to clients and investors. I think my team probably is a lot more lenient with me than probably clients and investors would be. But again, it’s those tools that you learn from others, and if you create an environment that is inclusive, that is accommodating, everyone can benefit from those tools, and they’re going to be far more productive.

Marisa Hamamoto 8:43
And that’s awesome. I use Grammarly as well. In fact, I kind of rely on Grammarly, but that is definitely, I don’t know what the origin story of Grammarly is. I’m guessing there was someone like like ourselves, that needed that tool that came a came out to be a tool that’s great for everyone. I’m going to have Tiffany, who’s in behind the scenes, you know, managing our Zoom, Zoom webinar. Here drop a link to my work at the at infinite flow. This is just, this is a visual representation of, I guess I don’t want to brag, but it’s a visual representation of how inclusion inspires innovation. And so for anyone that doesn’t know about Infinite Flow, there’s a link. You can watch a couple, you know, maybe if 30 seconds of it, but later on, definitely watch it again. It’s also audio described. And the audio description itself is, it’s pretty cool, so.

Dionna Dorsey 9:40
Thank you, Marisa. And I just should note that I do want this to be a free flowing conversation, so like you all have already been doing, but if you’re, if there’s something that you want to jump in on prior to moving on to the next question, please, either just raise your hand. I’ll be sure to see you, or jump in naturally as you, as you have been. Also, just to note, we will also be sharing links to Dr. Marcus Collins book, most recent book, I don’t know if I can say, but you have another one on the way. Can I say that?

Dr. Marcus Collins 10:09
Yeah, I’m working on it.

Dionna Dorsey 10:11
Be sure to be sending links to those as well as, Inclusively, on The Creative Ladder too. Is there anyone else that you all is there anything else did you all wanted to add to this question here?

Dr. Marcus Collins 10:22
I just want to kind of underscore what Marisa’s idea about a perfecting mindset. I think that’s awesome, because the best environments are the ones when there’s ideological congruence, not just in sort of how we see the world, but in how we think the world should manifest, and in a world that that is more inclusive, leads to better innovation, leads to more diversity of thought, and therefore you get the diversity bonus. It’s all of these, these benefits that come from having heterogeneity around the table, which requires then looking at people and all their diversity and and making not just concessions, but making the proper accommodation, so that we can all be the best versions of ourselves, right? Like, you know, good seeds need good soil, and the perfect soil is that made for the perfect seeds or the perfecting seeds?

Dionna Dorsey 11:22
I love that. And Marisa, you’re, I mean, I’m absolutely a recovering perfectionist. It’s going to be a lifelong journey and battle for me. But some of your, some of your examples also made me think of the on ramps for for sidewalks. I can you. Can any of you imagine what life would be like in 2024 without an on ramp for sidewalks? Just can’t even imagine. So bravo, wonderful. With that we’ll move on to this next question, Sarah, again, I’ll start with you. Per the report, the demand and need for workplace accommodations for underrepresented talent continues to rise, which is driven by three key dynamics, individualization, education and work arrangement solutions. Do you believe that there are other key elements impacting the increase in accommodation requests for underrepresented talent?

Sarah Bernard 12:18
Yeah. So first, I want to touch on those three key dynamics of individualism, education and work arrangement solutions that we touched on in the report. Covid really brought to light some of the gross inequities that exist in society today. One of the things you know, traditionally remote work as an accommodation in pre-pandemic days was the most requested accommodation that those with disabilities on our platform requested, and in in previous days was most often denied. And and, you know, covid brought to rise, the brought to light, you know, the the rise of remote work, and it really flipped the open access to some of the jobs that those with disabilities had never had access to in the past. So when you think of that, it’s just changing workforce dynamics. But there’s also a lot of other forces at play, Millennials and Gen Z, we know there’ll be two thirds the workforce by 2030 this is, you know, generations that have grown up with personalization at their fingertips, and they’re demanding the same thing of their employers. Can almost think as accommodations as as you know, personalization, it’s a different way of working and and these are also two generations they’ve grown up in education system where, although the accommodations process is not perfect at all there, but people become a lot more accustomed to advocating for the things that they need, because there has been so much more education around mental health conditions and and learning disabilities. So again, two generations entering the workforce really advocating for themselves as they, you know, become employees. So this isn’t going away. You know, the request and self advocation for accommodations is going to continue to hit employers. Employers are going to have to adapt from the research that we did, which represented a wide, you know, range of backgrounds, almost 60% reported having one or more disability-related issues, with 20% having workplace accommodations, and this really brings you know, the theme of intersectionality and intersecting identities, they can lead to really compounded forms of discrimination, marginalization and lack of access to the support that really helps level that playing field. So although there’s a rise in accommodations requests being made, there’s you know, so much work to be done, as we’re talking about today. And I think that there’s, you know, across the workforce itself, there’s just a significant discrepancy between disability identity in the workplace and the percentage of really employees who are requesting those accommodations, as I shared, it’s only 3 to 5% you are disclosing that, yet it’s it’s a lot higher when you look at the national average of those with disabilities. So companies you know that are focused on flipping this narrative and starting to think about accommodations and support for their employees in a fundamentally different way there are going to be the employer choice. They will win the war on talent and and, you know, and continue to, you know, be the best.

Dr. Marcus Collins 15:31
Sarah, I think it’s well said, considering the fact that historically, I think accommodations, be it physical or mental, well being have all been seen as like a philanthropic effort, like a nice to have, like I’m doing this as an act of altruism, where, truthfully, it’s really a business imperative. It’s a strategic advantage. When we treat it as such, we change our perspective on what these things are and what it means for our companies and our businesses to function, we see this actually to our betterment, just like diversity writ large. Then when we think about it through that, through that lens, through that framing, then we start to apply more resources. We apply more of our attention, more of our efforts to to rectifying those matters, that those those challenges that keep us from accessing more talent to get to greater outcomes.

Marisa Hamamoto 16:34
I can’t disagree with anything that’s being said here. I truly believe that accessibility is a human right, not a luxury, and that needs to be the baseline of our society, you know, period, you know, with that said, early on, when I created infinite flow, you know, my dance company, which now has all kinds of I’ll say that, you know, just in my current professional dance company, I have dancers with physical disabilities, neurodiversity, deaf, blind, chronic illness, cognitive dissonance. I mean, we have a bunch of different disabilities, all represented in one, one little dance company and plus our community. One of the one mistake I made early on is, you know, I came with the mindset, okay, I need to provide access. I need to provide accommodations, okay? But I made assumptions about what they were instead of asking what someone needs. And so, you know, I think there’s, there’s this dance, you know, figuratively between, you know, companies being proactive in providing accommodations, but in collaboration with those that need them. So we want to always make sure that we center the solutions around those that need accommodations and not make assumptions. And I think the more there’s collaboration, communication, and that becomes an organic, natural thing. Likely, a lot of these solutions are going to be like coming up from those in the workforce, not necessary from leadership. But, you know, leaders need to make an environment so that their their you know, members and employees can collaborate, you know, and and bring forward what those solutions are.

Dionna Dorsey 18:25
I couldn’t agree more. Marisa, I’m a firm believer that when you center humans, you will essentially be the most successful in any endeavor. And here at The Creative Ladder, we work really hard to try to make sure that all of our partners are firm believers and actively practicing, leading from the bottom up, left and right, and not just from the top down. Thank you for sharing. Is there any Go ahead? Marcus, oh, we can’t hear you.

Dr. Marcus Collins 18:54
Oh, sorry, sorry, that’s sort of the biggest challenge in all of this is that we look at we look at people who work at our companies as workers, many times as like bots, as cogs in the machine, just like we think about people who buy things as consumers, not as human beings. Is the stripping away of humanity that makes it difficult for us to see people’s humanity and serve them accordingly. This is, I think, one of the biggest challenges we have in business that we don’t know people very well. We don’t see people for who they are very well, and therefore we make decisions that seems to be void of anything humane, and as a result, an ask to do such feels like an inconvenience, as opposed to Marisa would put it a basic human right. And it seems so obvious that, yes, the part that’s actually kind of maddening, I suppose. You know, I a lot of my I study culture and its influence and impact on human behavior, so I’m just like studying. Us humans, who we are. And the the biggest, sort of glaring realization for me always is that we know these things intuitively. They seem quite obvious, but the obvious isn’t obvious to someone points it out, and once they point out, we go, oh yeah, do that all along. Did you really know? Did you really know it’s this, this this anemia that we have with regards to seeing people for their humanity versus what they do, and we label what they do, they consume, they work, they watch, they download, they vote. So they’re voters, not humans, right? This sort of stripping away of the moniker that people use to carve out where they occupy or what they occupy in the social world, in all of their, you know, personhood. I think that’s a starting point just changing our language. Like, instead of saying the perfect place, a perfecting place, just a small nuance. These small changes change our perspective, then the world then changes as well.

Sarah Bernard 21:07
Also people are dynamic, like it’s and situate like, you know, disability, it can be permanent, it can be temporary, it can be situational. And people’s, you know, request for accommodations, or certain, you know, resources that a company can also be a permanent thing that they need all the time turned on. It could be situational because of something that they’re going with, and it could be temporary. And I don’t think when you thinking about what you just said, you know, when you think of people, think of like their workers. It’s like what they’re doing, but it’s not who they are and and oftentimes that is lost. It’s that changes. Things are fluid. And you know, the the support changes over time all the time.

Dr. Marcus Collins 21:54
When I get accommodation recommendations or requests from from students, I realized that my teaching actually gets better when I abide by those accommodations. Like, you know, they need more time they go, you know, yeah, why am I creating these time constraints? Like, what is it actually doing? Is anything ever like bound by this time? Is this sort of manufactured environment that does the orthodoxy for academia? So I do that doesn’t really help, right? And maybe I should slow down like maybe, maybe I should provide more examples that are are more tangible or tactile. Maybe it should be opportunities for for people to download the video because they can’t take their neurodivergence, allow them to sort of take in information in the moment, and then translate into notes, like all of these things, they seem so obvious, but if we kind of stop and actually just listen, take things in from perspectives that aren’t your own, the obvious becomes very clear, and we all benefit from it.

Sarah Bernard 22:56
It’s like agendas ahead of time we had someone who was like, they would just really help if I had an agenda head time and like hell, it helped me prepare a lot better for those meetings with my team. I was like, this is I’m getting just as much value out of this.

Dr. Marcus Collins 23:11
That’s right. There’s no tie down to agendas.

Marisa Hamamoto 23:15
Like, thank you, Dr Collins for bringing up time, because I feel like it’s this, hurry, hurry, hurry, go, go, go. We gotta get it done faster, you know, harder. I mean, I think that that mindset, you know, that gets this, this gets very toxic, and that’s where we start to, you know, forget to listen to each other. Forget to like, lead from heart, like we just get so caught up in trying to get things done. But yeah, you’re right. Why? Why do we have to rush now? I do believe in I do believe in deadlines and setting deadlines. Otherwise nothing gets done in a way too, and sometimes we need to set deadlines to accomplish things too. However, I do feel, the more and more I work with various various artists with disabilities, the more I realize, okay, how can we make time a thing that everyone can feel comfortable with so we can all do our our best work? I also feel, and this is just my personal opinion, I also feel like this younger generation that’s coming up is is even becoming more like, like they feel like they need to get onto that Forbes 30 under 30 list, or they have to get things done. They have to accomplish so much. You know, before they’re 23 there is a little bit of that culture that’s like, coming up and and I feel like, I feel like we need to shift that. I’m not in my 20s anymore, but, you know, but I would say hanging out with the 20s. Sometimes I’m like, guys just slow down. You don’t have to become a seven, you know, seven figure entrepreneur at 26 just because so and so did on some other, you know, university like I but I do feel like we need to, kind of, I think as leaders, we need to set we need we need to be our own example, right? We need to be a good example of not being the one that, you know, pushes for things to be done as fast as possible.

Dionna Dorsey 25:25
I love where this conversation is going, and it’s naturally flowing into a question that I had for a bit later, but I’m going to push it up and so I’d like for all of you to address it in a way that fits best for whatever your role might be. So employee, client, CEO, Professor, mom, dad, auntie, cousin, just human but, but try to lean into it in a way that makes the most sense for your your roles. Can you share a time when you may have had a difficult conversation with a manager, an employee, a client, a student, a family member, about access or accommodation, how did you handle the conversation and what did you learn from the experience?

Dr. Marcus Collins 26:12
I have an anecdote of sorts. It’s almost like the agenda example. I had someone tell me that in a conversation, this is as someone a direct report talking to me, saying that she had a very high anxiety, and when we have conversations that she finds herself tensing up, and it created sort of it created sort of hiccups in the conversation, like we weren’t able to have a fluid conversation because she was sort of being reactive to it. And my first instinct in all transparency was like, don’t be soft, come on. Like, you know how I was for me when I grew up, you know how I was for me when I was going through, you know, when I was in your your stage of your career, like my I got cursed out, yelled at I’m not even yelling at you. I’m just, you know, you should be just fine. Then I realized, you know, it’s like, well, just because that’s how I came up doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t mean that I like the environment in which I came up in in this industry was the ideal one, and we had this sort of sense of, sort of romanticizing our past, romanticizing, you know, experiences back in the day, in in we and we sort of put it on a pedestal that this is the ideal scenario. The truth of matter is, it’s not. And when I stopped for a moment as she was telling me this, I thought to myself, you know, there’s some times that actually I get anxious when I’m talking to my manager. And I’ve had built this muscle memory to sort of just take it, but it actually wears on me. It actually wears on my cognitions. It wears on my, my, my, my affects. I remember conversations I’d have with the manager that after the conversation, I’d be so out of sorts that was like, I can’t even do any work today. I can’t be productive. And I thought to myself that if I just make this small change in me, she would be far better in the organization, and the organization overall would improve. So I said to say that, like, just because, you know, you went through the trenches and you had to get punched in the face a whole lot. That doesn’t mean that everyone else has to. This isn’t like hazing. This is just trying to make every round better than the one beforehand.

Marisa Hamamoto 28:33
I’ll share an anecdote you know as well. So this is fairly recent. I had a fairly new dancer, you know, who you know, really respects our values around diversity and inclusion. And, you know, but she was, I was having a little bit of a challenge with her, and her always arriving late to rehearsals and events and so on and so then I and, but, you know, but she also has to drive quite a bit, you know, to get to our things. And so I just brought her up, saying, hey, you know, like, how can I support you about, you know, arriving on time, you know. And she said something along the lines of, well, there’s something called crip time. That’s, or that’s why there’s something called crip time and, and basically, I think she was, you know, playing on the fact that, well, you know, I come from a place of accommodating everyone’s access needs, and so it’s okay for her to be late, because I operate, operate from a place of meeting everyone where they’re at. So anyways, I slept on it, saying, Okay, how can I, you know, respond back to her, and I kind of went back to her and said, Hey, how can I set you up for success? I don’t know everyone’s needs accommodations. How can I support you? What do you need from us to set you up for success? And just asking that question, opened up a dialog. We had some back and forth. We came to an agreement, we tried out some things. We also said, Hey, we’re going to try this out. If it doesn’t work, nobody’s going to yell at anyone and get mad at anyone. We’re going to just, you know, make this a trial and error, but we’re going to all do the best possible. So again, kind of going back to, you know, what I learned from that is okay, you know, a I had to kind of step up as a leader and just be okay with being vulnerable, knowing that I am not perfect. And I always come back to when in doubt, lead with heart. When in doubt lead with heart. I don’t know everyone. I know what her disabilities are, but doesn’t mean I know what her needs are. And then, since then, I would say, not just with this particular dancer, but with multiple people that I work with, I said, Hey, let’s have an open line of communication. I’m not going to always be right, and I just want to make sure that we all can have a dialog comfortably. And the worst for me is when I get it wrong and someone just walks away and closes the door. You know, I’ve had a couple instances, and I wish I was able to have that dialog of, hey, I’m learning too. So anyways, so yes, when in doubt, lead with heart. When in doubt lead with heart, is kind of like my motto when I when in doubt.

Sarah Bernard 31:25
I’ll share one more. One of the hardest situations that we faced is, or that I did as a manager was when two employees accommodations conflicted with each other, so one and it was around flexible work hours. We’re a pretty flexible work environment here at Inclusively, we try to practice what we preach. But one employee really needed to begin their working day later for medical reasons, and it was causing frustration with another team member who, you know, it was a, it’s a role where it required a lot of collaboration. So it minimized the amount of working hours that there was overlap that they could have in a working day to collaborate. And it created just, you know, a frustration, because it just wasn’t getting resolved, tension over time. And I think, Marisa, what you said, it was it just took open and honest, you know, communication. When my co-founder and I were starting this company, I remember I heard this quote that has stuck with me, and it’s just proximity creates empathy. And I think when you open those doors to open up the communication. It was less about, you know, the frustration around why we can’t get these hours together, and it became more of like, how do we solve this together? And like, how do we make concessions or accommodations on both ends to make this work? Because neither one of them were going to be more productive in their jobs unless they came together and could collaborate. So it’s an interesting one, because I think as you build out more accommodating, more accommodating cultures, this is, you know, these scenarios will flare up, and I think it comes down to just ensuring that you’ve got really good communication in place.

Dionna Dorsey 33:17
I love what everyone has been sharing. I you know, as the co-founder and CEO of The Creative Ladder, I’m a bit older than the rest of my team, and so I’m experiencing some of the I like to call it like a generational gap. I like Dr. Marcus. I was, you know, I walked barefoot in six feet of snow to get to school, all of the things. But I, I, personally, one of my mantras is I really try to lead vulnerably. So I believe strongly in vulnerable leadership, and believe very strongly and trying to set up my team for success, as well as the entire Creative Ladder, Rising Leader community. And I want to also share that it’s always it’s an evolution. It’s, you know, like Sarah said, you’re going to try some things, some things are going to work, some things are not going to work. But I also want to note, sometimes it can be very expensive, but once you eventually get to the solution that works for the team, understand that that’s not a finite solution. It could change again in another six months. It could change in another year. It could change with the administrations. You know, things can just continue to change, and learning to be flexible, making sure that I’m partnering with with other organizations and teams that understand, again, focusing on putting humans and centering humans first, and making sure that we are continuing to partner with organizations like Inclusively, who’s also helping us understand more and based on, you know, the collaborative partnership that we had with this report, it was such an eye opening experience, and it’s helped me grow and in the last two months, or, I’m not sure when we first started working on this, Sarah? But sharing that vulnerability with the team, I think, has made us, spring. Thank you, Lisa. I don’t know what spring means either. Is that March, April, May. I don’t know what that means, but, but I say that to say that, you know, being vulnerable and sharing with the team, oh, I’ve been making mistakes here. I’m learning through this, this journey, please. You know, stick with me, and let’s find the solution now, understanding that it might not necessarily be the end all, that it’s going to continue to change and grow and evolve, that at times it can be expensive. You know, one of my gripes, last thing I’ll say is as a leader, sometimes I get really frustrated with the cost of some of these apps. But when I sit down and I understand what the apps are like, Grammarly, or I can’t think of some of the other ones, once I understand what the needs are, I try to take myself out of it and focus more on the team and their needs, versus saying I walked barefoot to school in the snow, you know. Just write it like, you know, we need zaps or we need x, y and z. So thank you all for sharing so openly and vulnerably there, I wanted to make sure that I was being open and vulnerable and sharing as well. That sort of leads me back to the report. Marisa, based on our report, near nearly half of the respondents requested, excuse me, who requested accommodations said the process was difficult. What do you think will help individuals with disabilities feel comfortable requesting accommodations, and how can we make the process less difficult and more feasible? We’ll start with you, Marisa, and again, we’d love to hear from everyone on the panel.

Marisa Hamamoto 36:58
Yeah, sorry. I’m thinking about walking in snow and bare feet right now. Get myself out of that for a moment here. So, you know my motto, you know, get my mantra. I like mantra better than motto. Mantra is, you know, when in doubt, lead with heart. You know, instead of trying to, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle, right? So Inclusively, you know, as a platform, that’s one part, you know, Dr. Collins, another part, Dionna, another part. You know, we all have, it’s a whole puzzle, you know. So we all have a part to play in this. But when in doubt, lead with heart and empathy is is big in this. What I do want to quickly ask the audience, because I do want to clarify access needs, which I feel like gets access accommodations rather which I think is a term that gets thrown around a lot. I want to kind of ask the audience who, if you’re comfortable, if you have dietary restrictions, please put that into the chat, you know. So if, let’s say we’re all planning a get together, party or an event, and, you know, out comes a an email says, Hey, what kind of dietary restrictions you have? Like, what would you put? Okay, we got vegan. We got a few answers coming in. So, but I’ll keep speaking, because I know that there’s a little bit of little bit of kosher, lactose intolerant, you know. So with access accommodations, this is not necessarily related to disabilities. We all have access needs, you know. For example, I have a cup of water right by me right now, you know, and this is like, I know that I’m going to be, you know, on a panel for an hour. I know I’m going to be speaking. I need water just so that my my throat doesn’t dry off. This is something that I have prepared for to meet my own needs. So this is also an access need. I am a morning person. Let me know if in the in the comments, if you’re in a morning person. I wake up at 4am in the morning. I do my best work, and when it comes to writing and things between 5am and 6am. Now, right now, I’m a little bit on a writing break, and so I get up at five and then go to the gym at six, not to gym, but go work out at six. But anyways, with that said, I’m a morning person late at night, like, don’t try to pass me an email or, like, some kind of application to fill out. I can barely, like, read at that time. But you know, we all have different parts of the day that we thrive, so that’s also an access need. So what are your access needs? Like, what do you need? What do you need to thrive in the work or thrive as a parent, thrive as a you know, whatever your roles are. Think about those things. We probably do a lot of these things on our own, and don’t even know it. Don’t even know it. Like, okay, this is embarrassing, admit, but I have very big calluses on my feet. They’re very annoying. You know, I’m a professional dancer, I have to take care of my calluses on a, I don’t know, once in every three days in order to keep my feet healthy. That’s also like, I don’t know, I guess you can call that an access need. But we all do things to, to to, you know, meet our needs. So if we start thought, thinking of it that way, we can be a little bit more empathetic when someone asks for a need that’s different from yours saying, Oh, let me relate that to me needing a quiet environment. I have noise sensitivity. I cannot be trying. I can’t concentrate and work in a very noisy environment. So okay, so and so has has a different, you know, accommodation need, but that’s like me needing a quiet space. So let me take a moment to listen to so and so and see what we can do to meet that need, you know. So, but anyways, we do have quite a bit of, you know, if you have an access needs, sensory processing related, I’m not plant based, but yes, we have, you know, again, and I asked about the food example, because sometimes I think, I think asking for dietary, you know, needs and restrictions has become a little bit more quote, unquote, normalized than access needs. And so if we start, I don’t want to say it’s want to say it’s the same thing, but we want to make it, make an environment that’s as comfortable asking for access needs as it is dietary restrictions.

Dr. Marcus Collins 41:32
That was the exact word I was going to use, normal. And that’s, that’s what drew me to this conversation, truthfully, is the cultural implications in all this, you know, to your point, Marisa, some things we need, we need access to, just so that we can show up and navigate life in a way that is at our best, at our highest fidelity. But those things that are quote, unquote normal, that is Orthodox, we tend to say, Yeah, of course, can’t get you water. Never giving a talk somewhere people go, can’t get you some water, right? Because they know, at least there is a shared consensus that that is necessary. The challenge is that accommodations, writ large have not become normalized, and not become a part of the orthodoxy is still seen as a special one off or a thing that we’re doing to accommodate a person, as opposed to persons. And if we make these things far more normal, that is far more a part of our shared beliefs and ideologies of what the world is, then you’ll see these things be much more akin to how we operate in all things that we do, in our social lives, in our in our work lives, in our communal lives, and everything in between.

Sarah Bernard 42:57
I love that. It’s normalizing accommodations when you think of how few people actuallygo through the Interactive Accommodations Process, compared to how many people probably could, or should, or could level the playing field for them, it’s because of, you know, a fear of stigma, sometimes, lack of education on like what accommodations could help them even be successful. I think, you know, to even go further on the question. I think a lot of times individuals may feel more comfortable going to their manager than to like HR with a question about accommodations. But even in that case, a lot of times the managers are ill-equipped. You know, they all they have is an internal internet with, you know, stale Wiki pages on what accommodations they have or they have access to Workday if they’re at a large company, to understand their benefits. Like, even as managers, you know, are ill-equipped to set up their team members for success. But I think for the companies that are normalizing accommodations, that are taking a more social approach to supporting employees, that are starting with the question of, what do you need to be successful, instead of, do you have a disability? Those are the types of companies that you should, you know, try to go to and support. And if you’re not at one of those companies, you know, find a group that starts advocating to change the narrative at your own company.

Dr. Marcus Collins 44:24
I even like the idea of liking accommodations to food accommodations, like my wife, she’s she’s celiac, she has an intolerance to gluten. And you know, we’ve been married for 11 years now, going on 12. So we were dating longer than that, and I remember we first started dating, I didn’t know very much about it at all. And anytime we’d go somewhere to eat, especially for going to a friend’s house, she almost treated as if it was, it was an, a nuisance, you know, that she was being, you know, she was not accommodating other people, which is odd, right? She’s like, well, I don’t want to cause any trouble, like, I’ll just eat later. And he’s like, you know, she would suffer in those moments just to be socially inclusive. But over the years, celiac has become far more normal, and therefore people actually accommodate for it. So the truth of the matter is that all of these things can be remedied. All of these challenges can be mediated, if we as a society just begin to normalize them. I think it starts with this kind of discourse we’re having now, just talking about them and relating them to things that we know intuitively things that we take for granted, ie having water when we talk for long periods of time.

Dionna Dorsey 45:47
Yeah, that that I love what you said there. Marcus, it really is, the more we participate in advocating for ourselves, the more we participate in advocating for the rest of the world, the more we evolve and the more convenient living is for all of us, very much. We just have a few moments last so I’m going to go into this next question, which you’ve already sort of started with, Marcus. I’ll start with you. What specific training leadership qualities and individualized support can managers obtain or use to properly engage their employees with accommodation needs?

Dr. Marcus Collins 46:23
I would say this is would be a bit abstract, but Sarah kind of already started, like empathy. It’s just empathy, right? Empathy, self aware perspective taking. The research I do primarily is ethnographic in nature, this is about the study of humanity, ethnoby and humanity and graphic is the study of right? So ethnographic in nature. And what we often say we’re doing ethnographies is that we have to find the familiar in the strange. You know, things are strange to us. Things are foreign to us, things that we’re not very familiar with we have to look at them and try to see ourselves inside of them, which is, again, why I like the idea of water when you’re giving a talk or your dietary restrictions, because we can get our heads around that. Because that seems quote unquote normal. That seems quote unquote Orthodox, right? But if we start to see the world through the lenses of other people. We see their humanity. We start to see ourselves in them. And though we don’t experience what they experience on a day to basis, we can we have a closer proximity, which gets us closer to empathy. And as a result, we go, Oh, this isn’t a Herculean effort to do this. We can make those changes. And sure, there’s, there are some resource allocations as necessary, but really, this is just about where we decide to allocate resources, because we’re constantly spending money on things, right? We, you know, we have a foosball table in the kitchen. Well, do we need that? You know, these things are all decisions that we make that we think are going to improve the culture of the organization. The truth of the matter is that serving the people is how we tend to the culture, and we only serve when we’re able to see the world the way they do and serve them based on what they need, not what we think they need.

Dionna Dorsey 48:17
Yeah, and I when we’re talking with our clients or potential partners, I should say, often try to remind them that the more they serve humanity first and center humanity first, the better their bottom line. And once they get that, it’s like, Oh, that’s right. Okay. Marisa, you next, and then Sarah, I’d like to finish with you. And if you also want to talk to us a bit about the Inclusively technology. I think that would be a wonderful way to sort of segue us into our Q & A from our from our attendees.

Marisa Hamamoto 48:51
Yeah. So I have two things to say. One is, so my dance company Infinite Flow we oftentimes go to schools. We believe that if children learn about inclusivity, then, and they grow up learning about how to be inclusive, then, then perhaps the system will change a little by little. So anyways, during the pandemic, we turned our elementary school assembly program into a 47 minute short film called ‘Scoops of Inclusion.’ I’m going to put the link in. I mentioned this because we teach kids about disability inclusion through building an inclusive ice cream party. Anyways, I’m laughing because this actually came from a real situation where you know our when we have, well, when we had a youth group, youth group, which is on break right now, when we had a youth group of of students ages, I think the youngest, and there was maybe eight, oldest was 17, of various disabilities and not and we decided to hold ice cream party, one of the parents went radically inclusive on making this ice cream party inclusive. And so I kind of took that experience and we kind of molded our school assembly. And so for anybody that’s interesting, it’s in the link right there, in terms of leadership training. And you know what we can do? I’m just going to come from a slightly different perspective, and then first start with saying that serving others starts with serving ourselves first. We as leaders, managers, whoever you are, we need to fill our cup so that we are well and we can lead from a state of abundance and not scarcity, and be able to lead with full body, full heart. This is I learned that less I learned this lesson a little bit on the hard side, hard way, you know, I would say I think I was leading from a place of empty, you know, having a cup empty. And it was, and I had to learn, you know, actually was during the pandemic that I came to the realization that I gotta shift something so wellness. You know, you know, again, yes, we need to learn how to be inclusive in the ways that we’re talking about, but you need to be whole and healthy and feel good and fill your cup so that you can lead from that place that’s full and not empty, whatever that is to you.

Sarah Bernard 51:22
I’ll add to that kind of my one point on the manager side is, you know, managers are not other, they are employees also. So to reinforce what you’re saying, it’s like a lot of times managers can benefit from accommodations as well. And you know, if you know managers are being vulnerable about that, and then taking the time to learn and apply some of those learnings. You know, with their team members, it’s just going to continue to reinforce inclusion across the company. So Dionna, should I share a little bit about Inclusively?

Dionna Dorsey 51:55
Yes, please do, thank you. I did send a message to Julie and to Tiffany Meehan seeing that we have any questions. So we have about seven minutes left.

Sarah Bernard 52:05
Okay, well, I won’t talk for that long. So if you have questions, put it in in the chat. But um, so our um point of view at Inclusively, is that every company should be adopting a universal approach to supporting their employees, and our purpose is really to unlock everyone’s value. We, most enterprises today, they’ve made substantial investments to advance employee relations, but they still find the majority of those benefits and resources that they’ve invested in go vastly underutilized by their employees. And on the other side, as it was proven in the data that we did for the research report with Creative Ladder, most employees today, they don’t know how to find the benefits, resources and accommodations that they need to thrive in their jobs. And you know, a lot of people are very unhappy with their work today, managers are getting burnt out. A lot of times, they’re getting hit up with a lot of requests. So our platform, which we call Retain. I’m sure someone from my team will drop a link to a video in the chat, but it helps solve a lot of these issues. And you know, an employee at any of our partner companies, we work with, companies like Salesforce, WPP, Delta, large enterprises, and employees who use our Retain platform, they can anonymously come in and search and discover what accommodations, benefits and resources that their company offers to them. Right now, that process is super disjointed, as I mentioned earlier. You know, say you’re dyslexic and you want to know what resources does my company have for me, you may check out your internal internet you may go to Workday. You may submit a ticket to ServiceNow, to get that request made, but you have to disclose personal details about yourself. And there’s no place for an employee to go to feel supported and really figure that that process out on their own. And oftentimes, you know to get support, you don’t need to self disclose personal details about yourself and employees should want for their employees to be set up for success. So our platform, it’s, you know, it covers every every type of disability. You can type in, I have dyslexia, you can say an autistic, anxiety, stress, depression, even you know English as a second language, divorce, anything about yourself, and find those benefits resources and navigate to those. One of, I think, the most amazing data points that we found recently that that is not in this report, because we just discovered it over the past couple of weeks, but it draws on a lot of the points that were addressed today. Dionna, I think you said, when you support your employees, it affects your bottom line. And one of the largest CRM companies in the world launched our platform earlier this year, and in just three months of them launching that 55% of the employees that signed up requested or selected Success Enablers. Success Enabler is what we call accommodations, benefits and support. So it proved our hypothesis that when you make this process, anonymous people will come and try to find and navigate to the things that can help them be successful, and that is in comparison to 3 to 5% of what people are you know, going through an Interactive Accommodations Process today in the US. But what was even more astonishing to me is I just assumed, because of so much in the media around the link between those who are neurodiverse and to STEM jobs, that people within IT would be the most likely to sign up and select Success Enablers. It was actually people from their sales department and the top accommodations were organizational tools, apps for anxiety and stress. So it just proved you know that if you support your employees, it’s going to have a direct impact on their revenue generating portion of your business. And just excited, you know, to have more companies come on board the Retain platform and continue to share these findings and data points on you know, how the workforce is changing in the future. So thank you all so much for pulling together this webinar. It’s been great.

Dionna Dorsey 56:10
Fantastic, thank you so much, Sarah. We have about two minutes left, so I’d love to give both Marcus and Marisa each 60 seconds to drop their parting thoughts with us.

Dr. Marcus Collins 56:22
I’m a firm believer in everything we know in the literature says that change happens through the discourse, through the conversations, through the rhetoric in which we enter said conversations. It gives me great optimism that this conversation is being facilitated here, and the hope, the prayer, God willing, Inshallah, that this reverberates into more conversations, so that the things that we’re talking about today will feel normal in the days, weeks, months, years to come.

Dionna Dorsey 56:55
Thank you. Marcus. Marisa?

Marisa Hamamoto 56:58
Yeah, piggybacking on that. I believe everyone is a changemaker. Is a type of changemaker, I should say. And we all have a part to play, you know, in this, in this, in this journey of creating a more inclusive and accessible world, and we each or have gifts that were born with, or we developed along the way that are needed to create a more inclusive world. And instead of thinking of this as a burden, it’s a gift to be able to do what we do. And guess what? Karma is karma, things that you do, you do, put out there and to make change, it will return back to you. You know, in some way, shape or form. So I just want to say, everyone has a part to play. And if you have gifts, we need your gifts. We need your gifts, and I and those gifts are going to change. So just want to say thank you to Inclusively and Creative Ladder for having me and and you can follow me on LinkedIn.

Dionna Dorsey 58:01
And we have maybe 20 seconds left. Thank you, Marisa, I do just want to say there was a question that arise, and it just said, how can we be successful in creative jobs? And I just, you know, we here at The Creative Ladder, we believe that the world needs what you do best. Be encouraged. Be your most authentic self. Advocate for yourself. Speak up and keep looking after each other. Thank you all for joining us. This was such an insightful conversation. Really, really, really grateful. Thank you again to Sarah, Marcus, and Marisa for being with us. To Matt, excuse me, Matthew and Rebekah, thank you to Julie and Tiffany for setting us up for success today too. Thank you all enjoy the rest of your day. Bye, bye.

Marisa Hamamoto 58:42
Thank you.