Is your company as inclusive as you think?

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Picture a manager who is genuinely proud of her company’s inclusive workplace policies and organizational culture. As a matter of fact, she helped shape them and has never had an employee or coworker tell her that anything wasn’t working.

Down the hall, one of her direct reports has an invisible chronic illness that flares up unpredictably. He has never filed an accommodation request or disclosed his disability status, and is worried that doing so will be ambiguous, uncomfortable, and noticed by the wrong people. Instead, he chooses to manage everything on his own.

Both experience disability inclusion very differently within the same workplace, but only one of them is ever asked.

The gap no one is measuring

Across Canada and the United States, persons with disabilities remain significantly underrepresented and overlooked in the workplace. In Canada, nearly seven in ten employed persons with disabilities or long-term conditions experienced at least one barrier to accessibility while at work. Most organizations would be surprised by that number, because most organizations measure disability inclusion by asking themselves.

Almost all leading corporate disability inclusion assessments, such as the Disability Index (Disability:IN), the Disability Smart Self-Assessment (Business Disability Forum), and the Disability Inclusion Blueprint (National Organization on Disability), are built using organizational self-evaluation. This process usually involves asking select HR teams, senior leaders, organizational groups, and other representatives to rate their company’s policies, practices, and initiatives.

These top-down tools produce useful data and have led to meaningful progress and measurable improvements in corporate disability inclusion but structurally struggle to capture employees’ voices. Annual workforce engagement surveys also do little to address this, as they are not built with disability in mind. As such, a high engagement rate can comfortably coexist with a workplace culture which makes disclosing a disability feel unsafe.

Ask any company how it’s doing on disability inclusion. Next, ask its employees the same question. Do you think the answers would match?

Research into this topic has consistently shown that legal compliance alone is insufficient, and that managers and organizations play a key role in translating disability inclusion commitments into day-to-day experiences for employees with disabilities.

A company can have flawless disability inclusion policies but obscure accommodation resources and indifferent executive leaders. On paper, the organization may get a perfect score. In practice, the employees may get nothing.

To share or not to share

Another key barrier to assessing corporate disability inclusion is the disclosure gap. A Boston Consulting Group survey of nearly 28,000 employees across 16 countries found that while most organizations report four to seven per cent of employees as having disabilities, actual self-identification rates were significantly higher at approximately 25 per cent. The reasons for this pattern are well understood. Many employees with disabilities have decided that the costs of disclosing, such as perceived stigma, discrimination, impact on career progression, and confidentiality concerns, outweigh the benefits. These persistent employee concerns are not just fears, but documented workplace realities.

Moreover, employees who do not feel safe disclosing cannot access the accommodations they need, limiting their ability to perform and increasing attrition. At the same time, employers cannot make accurate inclusion decisions with insufficient employee data. While tools such as the Institute for Work & Health’s Decision-Support for Communicating about Invisible Disabilities that are Episodic (DCIDE) can help organizations close this gap, conventional top-down disability inclusion assessments are still limited by relying on companies to report their own data.

Asking the other question

This is the gap I set out to address when I developed the LEADS Framework for Disability Inclusion, a bottom-up, employee-centred disability inclusion framework that supplements existing organizational self-assessments with employee experiences. LEADS is spread across five domains: Leadership Support, Equity in Opportunity, Accommodation Adequacy, Disclosure and Dignity, and Systemic and Cultural Inclusion.

Responses are collected completely anonymously, reported only in aggregate, and answered by all employees regardless of disability status. Based on these responses, each domain produces a score that runs from critical to exemplary, along with guidance for presenting findings and an action plan to senior leadership. Employee experiences are often far more telling than any self-assessment: an organization might discover that most employees don’t know its accommodation process, or that the employees who used it found it slow and undignified, or that experiences differ greatly between employees by office location or disability status.

LEADS is grounded in U.S. and Canadian policies, relevant international standards, and peer-reviewed literature. It is free to use, openly available, and can be administered by employees, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), and/or inclusion leaders with no costs and with no third-party involvement.

What organizations, leaders, and employees can do now

Organizations such as the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) and the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work (CCRW) urge employers to treat accessibility and inclusion as strategic priorities rather than compliance obligations or case-by-case accommodations.

For organizations, the most immediate step is a simple one: add employee voices to your current disability inclusion assessment process and highlight it as a priority. This does not require replacing the tools or measurement systems you already use. Instead, it requires supplementing them with employee-centred approaches to ensure that your organization is really delivering on inclusive outcomes for employees with disabilities.

People leaders do not need to wait for a survey to start closing the gap. Beyond workplace policies, managers and HR who embrace their accommodation processes and proactively and transparently show their commitment to disability inclusion play a key role in translating disability inclusion commitments into employee experiences.

Disability Employee Resource Groups and employees themselves are likely the best positioned to capture the truth, as they sit closest to the people whose experiences are hardest to measure. Research has shown that employee groups such as disability ERGs play a direct role as facilitators of disclosure for employees with disabilities.

None of these actors can do it alone, and that is precisely the point. A truly inclusive system must permeate the entire organization. The manager proud of their inclusive workplace and the unseen employee it was meant to support are both telling you something. The question is whether your company is set up to hear both of them.

Visit the LEADS website to learn more.