Employer, researcher and practitioner share tips for creating inclusive workplaces for students with disabilities
By: Christie Zeb (she/her)
Did you know that nearly half of students registered with disability services opt out of work-integrated learning due to their disabilities? To help combat this issue, Waterloo’s Work-Learn Institute’s (WxL) shared strategies to support accommodations and increase accessibility.
On September 24, WxL hosted the webinar — Future-Ready Workforce series: supporting accommodations for inclusive workplaces.
Speakers included Anne-Marie Fannon, director of the Work-Learn Institute; Karolina Kural, global diversity, equity and inclusion, manager at Kinaxis; and Mitch Bewick, co-op student experience manager, accessibility, Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE), University of Waterloo.
Barriers faced by students with disabilities
Successful work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences such as co-op, can significantly improve post-graduation employment outcomes for students with disabilities. However, these students are less likely to participate in WIL programs and often face barriers when they do.
Some of these barriers include:
- Disclosure: Deciding when and how to disclose a disability is difficult, often due to fear of stereotyping. One student shared, “I don’t tell my employer I have ADHD because of the preconceptions about how people with ADHD work… it’s just safer not to because there’s a lot of stereotyping.”
- Hiring and recruitment: Job descriptions, interviews and onboarding processes can lack critical information about inclusivity. “For co-op students who are scanning through hundreds of job postings, this lack of information can be the critical decision point when they self-select out of applying for your position,” says Fannon.
- Support: Support systems are an area of concern, as many students feel the available resources are inadequate. “I just don’t know who to go to about accommodations. I don’t know if it’s Human Resources (HR) and nobody’s really told me who I would talk to make a request,” a student explained.
Strategies to increase accessibility
Beyond the legal requirements, increasing accessibility and making the workplace more inclusive can help employers become a more desirable place to work and can attract top talent.
Here are some strategies to increase accessibility of your workplace:
1. Set up inclusive hiring and recruitment processes
Creating an inclusive recruitment process starts by offering transparency to help students know what to expect. If you have accommodation practices for your interview, highlight them and provide a contact they can reach out to for requests and questions.
“At Kinaxis, we trained our talent acquisition team to provide accommodations. To make it easy and consistent, we added information about accommodations to every e-mail template that goes out to candidates from our system,” said Kural.
2. Create welcoming onboarding practices
Effective onboarding is crucial for setting up students for success. A warm and informative onboarding can significantly impact a student’s comfort level and overall experience, especially for those with disabilities.
“Once you've decided what students you're going to hire, send them all a welcome e-mail with details about the first day of work and who they'll report to. Then, when you’re going through your onboarding activities, identify what flexibility exists within your workplace. Also clearly outline the process and the steps for requesting accommodation,” says Fannon.
3. Educate your workforce
Building an inclusive workplace requires educating employees about the barriers faced by people with disabilities. You can take it further by encouraging them to play their part in minimizing these barriers as individuals.
“One of our first steps at Kinaxis was educating our workforce on how best to support colleagues with disabilities and neurodivergence. We offered an educational session to our HR team on creating accessible content. Our leaders were trained on neuro-inclusive management practices,” says Kural.
4. Create an inclusive work environment
Disclosure of disabilities can feel highly personal and daunting. Kinaxis provides its co-op students with a list of adjustments they can make to their work environment without going through a formal process that might require disclosure.
“We want employees to know they can request noise-cancelling headphones or take frequent breaks without needing formal approval,” says Kural.
5. Use surveys to identify accommodation needs
Surveys are valuable tools for understanding the barriers students with disabilities face in securing employment and during their work terms. Kinaxis uses annual employee surveys to compare the experiences of employees with disabilities to those without, using the results to set future goals for inclusivity.
Similarly, Waterloo’s Co-op and Experiential Education (CEE) department administers a co-op student experience survey to all students on recruitment and work terms. This survey provides insights into student satisfaction and highlights barriers they might face, helping the team tailor support to meet their needs effectively.
Creating inclusive workplaces for students with disabilities requires more than accommodations, it demands a shift in mindset.
We need to move beyond applying accommodations to fix inaccessible experiences and instead focus on creating accessible environments from the start.