Companies are increasingly seeking to manage their working environment in a way that maximises mobility, accessibility and usability for disabled people. The goal is to become a ‘disability competent procurer’, which means using suppliers that enable an organisation to realise the potential of its disabled applicants, employees and customers.
Purchasing power
The business case for accessibility is undeniable: there are more than one billion disabled people worldwide, many of whom have significant spending power. In the UK, one in three customers aged 50-64 has a disability. And these are not the dispossessed: 80 per cent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of the over 45s. Holiday Inn is in no doubt that its successful bid to host the Olympics was strongly reinforced by its long track record of investment in welcoming disabled customers.
Turning to employees, up to 10 per cent of first class honours last year were awarded to disabled graduates. In fact, Barclays reports that its disabled graduates are of a higher calibre than their non-disabled counterparts.
Corporations are also at legal, operational and reputational risk if they do not plan for and meet the needs of their disabled employees and users. In 2010, three visually impaired American women filed a class action complaint against two Walt Disney companies alleging that their theme parks, hotel and restaurant websites were inaccessible and therefore in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Courts around the world are starting to take action. Late last year, Canada’s Federal Court found that a blind woman had been denied equal access to government information and services for the public on the internet. Widening its judgment, the court said that this discrimination was representative of a “system-wide failure by many of the 146 government departments and agencies to make their websites accessible”. Concluding, it found that the government had a constitutional obligation to make its websites accessible for disabled citizens, setting a time period of 15 months for this to be achieved.
Such legal challenges indicate that the expectations and aspirations of disabled people are changing worldwide. They expect to be recruited on the basis of their capability, allowed to develop to their full potential in work and, as a consumer, to have the same right of access to goods and services as any other valued customer.
Disability affects every aspect of a business and that includes the procurement process. Legal compliance is actually a high-risk strategy, if companies are only doing it because they feel compelled to do so by law. Business, however, is learning that best practice delivers genuine business benefits. The recruiter who is not distracted by an applicant’s stammer, but recruits on their capability to do the job, becomes a better recruiter; the building that works for the disabled user will work better for all users.
The cost of most workplace adjustments is minimal. In the UK they are estimated to be under £100 per employee for non-premises work. Lack of disability know-how in organisations, however, can be more of a barrier. Often, a company’s outsourced suppliers lack the “disability competence” needed to enable the company to enhance productivity and improve the customer experience consistently. Large corporations, in particular, struggle to deliver efficient adaptations for their employees and customers when they outsource the delivery of various elements of these processes to multiple facilities and IT management suppliers.
Disability competence
A thin line separates ‘disability competence’ from ‘incompetence’. Procurement professionals need to work through their strategies, understand what can go wrong and what suppliers need to know and be able to deliver — or they risk making serious mistakes.
A lack of thought and planning shows a lack of respect for disabled people, as this example illustrates. Wheelchair users leaving a meeting on disability rights in Europe were made to wait at least an hour in a concrete basement before they were allowed to leave. The unacceptable delay came about because the building’s outsourced security guard had to call head office to request an extra guard before the on-site guard was allowed to leave his desk and open the only door that enabled wheelchairs users to leave the building.
Mistakes also cost money. A global corporate, which prides itself on its public reputation as disability competent, opened a new 30-plus storey building. The original design specification included two accessible electric doors on each floor, but the contractors decided this was unnecessary. The cost of retro-fitting the doors ran to some £6m — the decision to cancel them in the first place saved just £1m.
At Employers’ Forum on Disability (EFD) the approach is to help organisations deliver the business benefits generated by the best practice it calls ‘disability confidence’. The EFD enables its members to understand and adapt for the people they employ — and for those who buy their goods and services.
In recruitment, for example, this means removing the barriers — physical, technological and attitudinal — that needlessly prevent the many talented people from applying for jobs. In the workplace itself, reasonable adjustments to how work is carried out, as well as to the built environment, maximise everyone’s contribution and potential.
The EFD takes a holistic approach, mapping out end-to-end processes, step by step, to diagnose what gets in the way when a corporation sets out to recruit, employ and do business with disabled people. It works with its members to find cost-effective solutions to removing those obstacles.
Although it continues to work with a group of multinational corporations to explore how best to enable disability competent procurement, the EFD reports a puzzling inconsistency in FM performance from firm to firm and from site to site. Much procurement is inefficient and therefore costly. For example, while wheelchair users happily work at the top of a Canary Wharf skyscraper, FMs in an equally modern building ban their only wheelchair-using colleague from any floor but the ground.
Step forward, FM
FM providers have a direct impact on an organisation’s ability to recruit, employ and do business with disabled people. This is due to the department’s role in many operational and planning areas in an organisation such as: the area of space and workstation planning; building maintenance and engineering; the supply and installation of furniture; security and access for employees, customers and visitors, including emergency evacuation procedures; ICT products and services, including help desks; or catering and cleaning.
Disability competent procurement departments look for evidence that FM suppliers understand how disability affects employees and customers. They require proof that the supplier alone or, in a carefully structured partnership with other suppliers, removes obstacles that deny access to groups and makes speedy and effective adjustments for individuals. It is vital that the organisation and its FM provider work in partnership. The short checklist far left) can help procurement professionals to structure such collaboration.
The bigger picture
A commitment to developing fully ‘disability competent procurement’ should be part of a wider commitment to delivering best practice and engaging directly with people with disabilities, which, in turn, drives business improvement.
Research shows that high-performing companies have a named board director responsible for building disability confidence across recruitment, retention and career development; they also report on how products, services and the built environment are being made more welcoming and accessible to disabled employees and consumers alike.
Disability competent procurement is becoming ever more critical as organisations increasingly outsource key functions and processes to a complex set of suppliers. These then have a direct, often costly, impact on an organisation’s ability to employ and do business with disabled people. Time and time again the failure to make adjustments — which leads to legal and reputational risk, and undermines operational efficiency — is caused not by ill will, not by prejudice but by a procurement process that simply ‘forgot’ to require suppliers to respond efficiently to the many people who require organisations to adapt if they are to contribute to business success.
