Biases and misconceptions towards people with disabilities
Prejudices and cognitive biases affect the integration of people with disabilities in the workplace. Despite all the awareness campaigns, some of these prejudices persist in people's minds, limiting access, slowing down performance and accentuating inequalities. Here is an overview of the main negative remarks attached to the employment of disabled employees.
How many times have I heard wonders regarding the possibility of trusting a disabled person to perform a job? But only a handful of jobs are unconditionally incompatible with all forms of disability. Air Force pilots are perhaps the only ones I can think of, actually.
Now, hiring a visibly impaired person for an exposed position, such as the welcome desk, can be very militant: it signals the company's dedication to put skills and abilities above anything else. The focus should not always be on disability and what someone cannot do. Instead, we should start looking at capabilities, what people can do, what they bring to a team, and their extra value to an organisation.
Disability is indeed neither a skill nor a definition of someone's personality. Therefore, it is not what a recruiter should look at first.
The adaptation of workstations sometimes requires the purchase of specific equipment : a screen, a seat or adapted work software, for example. But this is far from always the case. This idea of the potentially exorbitant cost of adaptations is linked to a lack of understanding of what disability really is in the workplace.
Many people think of wheelchairs, blindness and deafness, but forget that 80% of disabilities are not visible to the naked eye and that 85% are acquired in adulthood. The situation of disability in the workplace is first and foremost the after-effects or consequences of an illness, physical wear and tear caused by repetitive movements or accidents at work, or people with cognitive or learning difficulties (the famous “dys-” family for dyslexia, dyspraxia, etc.).
In most cases, accommodations are based on common sense and organisational adaptation or features already offered within the company, such as an automatic vehicle. For example, people with diabetes need access to a private rest area to be able to check their insulin levels and do their injections out of sight, just as they appreciate regular working hours. People with walking difficulties may need staggered hours to avoid rush hour in public transportation. People who have limitations regarding the load that they can carry should be exempted and placed in a position where they do not have to move anything around. It is when people need a complete change of mission in or outside the company that the most expensive costs might occur.
Sometimes, a lower level of performance is a direct cause of a disability. More often, it is just a matter of skills. It is terrible that one person should represent a group.
In all companies, some employees perform better than others for countless reasons, not all of which related to the disability situation, quite the contrary. Questioning the recruitment of men in general simply because one man has underperformed in the position held is unheard of. For women, depending on job level, the same is slightly more questionable (the idea that women have a lower performance level than men still persists in some minds). But with people with disabilities, a failure, a shortcoming, a bad experience quickly becomes a generalisation.
Some types of disability require a change in how performance is measured: we might as well know it and integrate it right away to prepare everyone's mind. But in most cases, disabilities do not affect a team's performance. Sometimes, they even boost it in various ways (remotivation, solidarity, flexibility around working methods, etc.).
Behind this statement lies fear. Fear of difference, fear of what we do not know which makes us less comfortable. Fear of not knowing how to behave. It is the lack of habit that fuels this fear. If we were used to working with people with disabilities, if we saw people with disabilities more often in all spheres of our society, our businesses, media, political circles, etc., we would never ask ourselves this question again. Instead, we would know that integrating a new colleague, whoever they are, requires time and adjustment. It requires time to get to know one another, define new habits, and design ways of working together within a group, as we aim at a collaborative achievement.
Florence Alix-Gravellier
Bronze medalist at Beijing Paralympic Games in 2008, Florence Alix-Gravellier reached world number one in wheelchair tennis in doubles (2005) and world number two in singles (2006). A 6-time French champion, she is a graduate of the Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies and holds an MBA in Sports Management. A manager of strategic projects in large companies, she is now an author, speaker and Vice-President of the French Tennis Federation.
