Welcome to Rise Up, AllBright’s celebration of diverse careers, diverse experiences and diverse women in the workplace. Curated by our community, for our community, this is a space to champion the incredible work achieved by all women. This week, we hear from founder and CEO of Representnation, a diversity and inclusivity consultancy, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion Strategy Consultant at England & Wales Cricket Board, Sam Phillips. Sam joins us to share how both businesses and individuals can do better to become allies, through opening the conversation around disability awareness.

Research by Scope shows that nearly half of disabled people (48%) have worried about sharing information about their impairment or condition with an employer.

So, what can be done to make workplaces more inclusive for people with disabilities? This week, we hear from one woman on how we can start having the conversations and taking the action needed to achieve disability-inclusive workplaces.

Sam Phillips began her career in advertising, and led the famous Wonderbra ‘Hello boys’ campaign in the 1990s. She then went to work at ITV to set up the company’s marketing department, before going to magazine company IPC and then working at Omnicom for 15 years.

She founded Omniwomen in the UK, with a mission of driving the number and seniority of women in business, across all of Omnicom’s agencies in the UK. “I kept doing things that would now come under D and I,” she says. “I was born and bred in Croydon; when I went to school, half the people looked like me and half the people didn’t, and I thought that was normal. And then I went into business and I was like, 'this is really strange. Why is everyone white?’”

She began to speak more and more about disability on panels and in her work. “The reasons for that are personal, in terms of my eldest son is disabled,” she says. “He has Down’s Syndrome. He's amazing, he’s brilliant. 

“And when I started to look into what he could do for a living, because I was determined he was going to work, I discovered that 86% of adults with Down’s Syndrome who are capable of employment, couldn't find jobs because people like us wouldn't think about giving them employment.”

Her work in diversity and inclusivity got spotted by the government, and she also took on a role as the advertising sector champion for disability. In 2020, she decided to set up her own business, Representnation, a diversity and inclusivity consultancy, and is currently working with the England & Wales Cricket Board as a consultant.

Diversity and Inclusion discussions often still don’t include disability. Why is this?

Statistics show that 54% of boards have never, ever had a conversation about disability at board level. So that's a really key reason why things aren't moving, because if you don't discuss it, it's not on the agenda, and you’re not going to move it forward.

I think there is an assumption that people with disabilities are lesser than; that applies to an awful lot of the Diversity and Inclusion realm, but it’s particularly key in this realm. And there's data that shows some people are so worried that they will get it wrong, or are so scared of speaking to someone with a disability, that they just don't speak to them at all, because that's easier. If you pick that back, it comes down to a real lack of education. Why do we not, in schools, educate people about how to speak to someone who's deaf, how to speak to someone who's blind?

There's also a perception that if you're going to get people with disabilities into the workplace, that is going to be very expensive, but the average cost of adaptations is £80.People often think about disability as being the archetype of someone in a wheelchair, when only 4% of the disabled population are in a wheelchair; 80% of people with disabilities have an invisible disability. So that's an interesting thing because companies get scared, yet they've already got loads of people with disabilities in their workplace. Often those people with disabilities won't talk about them in the workplace because they think they're going to get judged, or because they think they're going to be considered lesser than. So it's often easier for them to adapt to fit the norm.

What are the biggest challenges for people with disabilities in the workplace?

Covering adaptive techniques used to reduce visibility of a disability is very real. So what you have to do is make sure the culture is accommodating of that. A really important thing is to ask people when they start in a business, ‘is there anything that could actually help you to work better here?’

So if, for example, you are a person with autism, that gives you the ability to then say, ‘please don't put me in the corridor space, I work my best by a window’, or ‘I really work better with a pair of headphones’, or whatever it might be. So you start to normalise that conversation, but disability conversation is not yet normalised.

And that's a problem, and it’s essentially going to become more problematic when we all go back to the workplace, because coronavirus has impacted the disabled community more. There is so much fear amongst people with disabilities about going back to the workplace for all sorts of reasons, including whether social distancing will be respected at the office properly afterwards.

Most people don't know the word ableism, but they know the words racism or sexism. Ableism is a thing. It is very real, so much so that some people can have a genuine fear about coming out and saying that they are dyslexic, or they've got Crohn’s. It’s easiest just to hide it and to use your work arounds. It's not a conversation that happens.

What can workplaces do to try and start those conversations?

First of all, normalise the conversation. One of the things that I did at Omnicom was to set up an employee resource group around disability, with the focus being on ability. An absolutely key thing that changed everything was that at our opening session, four CEOs of businesses stood up and talked, pretty much for the first time, openly about their disability.

That changed everything. Because if you've already got leaders in your organisation who have got disability – one was deaf and had an organ issue as well, one had Crohn’s, two were hugely dyslexic – it changes the conversation. I think when you've got people in the organisation, encouraging that openness and saying, ‘we want you, we appreciate you, what else could we do that can make the world better and easy for you’, it helps. You need to educate your population, your workforce. Disability awareness is not done nearly enough in business.

But also, to get people into businesses in the first place, what you really need is the appetite to do it from the leadership, top-down, and you need to make sure that your employee journey processes are appropriate for people with disabilities.

What can employees do to be better allies to people with a disability in the workplace?

The first thing is to actually understand what allyship is. Lots of people think it’s being generally supportive, but it’s not, it’s an active thing - it’s a verb, not a noun. So what can you actually do?

An example is, in the same way as you might look at a shortlist and say, ‘why are there no woman on it?’, you can look at it and say, ‘why do we only ever interview people who are able-bodied?’, or ‘have we looked at our application processes? We ask people to write a lot of stuff, so, that would preclude everyone with dyslexia’.

The key thing is to make everyone feel that they've got voice, that they can make a difference. Be that person who, early on in your career, hires somebody who is different, because the likelihood is that you will benefit and that they will thrive.