Inclusive research cultures and workplace environments: Creating change for inclusion

Christina Lee (she/her) is a Research Associate for Knowledge Exchange for the Disability Matters project at the University of Sheffield. 

On 30th April, Disability Matters held the second knowledge exchange workshop as part of phase 7, Transforming EDI Through Disability. The theme for this online knowledge exchange workshop is "Inclusive research cultures and workplace environments". We welcomed disability researchers, EDI teams, funding bodies, professional services colleagues, and senior leaders to explore How does disability transform research cultures and workplace environments? 

Recruitment and employment

The first speaker was Dr Armineh Soorenian, Research Associate for the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Cultures (WAARC) project at the University of Sheffield. Armineh’s latest three year Leverhulme-funded research project “Depathologising research culture” will explore how we can create a more inclusive, creative and diverse university through engaging disability, neurodivergence and research culture. Dr Sophie Phillips, who was unfortunately unable to join us at the workshop, is a Research Associate for WAARC and leads priority area 3 on Collaborative Inquiry. Read more about Sophie’s work here.

WAARC brings together researchers, professional services colleagues, and disabled people’s partner organisations. In priority area 1: recruitment and employment, Armineh conducted interviews with 30 staff members on their experiences of recruitment and employment. In these interviews, a number of key concerns were raised. Participants reported that the lack of accessible resources on career development and training further reduced opportunities for disabled people. Ableist assumptions about impairments and low productivity also presented major barriers to employment and career progression and made it difficult to establish work relationships. 

Reviewing the findings from WAARC, Armineh argued that we need to build a work culture that desires and welcomes disabled people. Participants recommended that workplaces should develop inclusion policies that target these problems, such as allocating protected time for disabled staff to work towards promotion, providing one-to-one support for funding applications for disabled staff, and allowing extra time in projects to account for time needed to tackle delays caused by structural ableism. Armineh concluded with a provocation to use disability as a tool to challenge ableism. Fostering an inclusive work culture means moving towards interdependence and finding new ways of being in the work community. How then can we use disability as a tool for collective action to create accessible and inclusive workspaces?

Invisible labour and the ideal worker

Our second speaker was Dr Hadar Elraz from Swansea University, who co-led the “Gender and mental health conditions in UKHE: Reorganising inclusion in contemporary academia” project with Armineh, funded by EDI Caucus (EDICa). Through 60 semi-structured interviews with participants on work-induced mental health experiences and focus groups with HR equality managers, policymakers and REF leads, the project revealed how institutional structures, cultural expectations, and workload distribution contribute to mental health challenges. Echoing Armineh’s presentation, Hadar highlighted how persistent stigma around mental health conditions and ableist norms of the ideal worker impacted career progression, particularly those with intersectional identities who are migrants or have caring responsibilities. 

Mental ill health is not associated with someone in a leadership role, who is often expected to be polished, shiny, and abled bodymind. Those on precarious contracts are weary of disclosing since it is hard to know what the consequences are on their careers. Women staff members tend to perform more invisible labour and pastoral and administrative work than male peers, and therefore have less time to do research and build their profiles. The gendered workload intersects with the gendering of responses to the disclosure of mental health conditions. Women who disclose mental health conditions at work report being patronised and seen as less competent by senior colleagues. Institutions tend to ignore structural conditions that cause stress, and instead frame institutional failures to manage safety at work as a failure of the individual to adapt. To move towards inclusion, Hadar suggests, institutions and funding bodies need to recognise and address the invisible labour and gendered workload done by women. This includes addressing the structural causes of employee mental health by shifting the responsibility back to the employer. 

Following Hadar’s presentation, questions were raised regarding the hierarchisation of disabilities and the differences in institutional responses to mental health conditions and visible physical disabilities. With fluctuating mental health conditions, it is harder to convince others that their conditions are “real”. Mental health conditions are poorly understood in the workplace and colleagues and managers do not know how to respond to them.

Labours of inclusion

Our final speaker was Dr Claire Graf, an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in human factors, safety, and policy implementation from the University of Edinburgh. Following the previous presentations, Claire looks at how we measure inclusion and implement policies effectively. Claire proposes that inclusion can be understood as the reduction of labour on the disabled person and measured in units of effort (kcals) and time (mins/hours) of additional labour done to access spaces. Framed in this way, inclusion is when there is either a true reduction in the labour the disabled person does for access, or when the labour is done by the system instead, e.g. estates check the lifts work, rather than the disabled person, or a mixture of both these methods.

Claire argues that only systematic change can lead to reduction in inclusion labour. If access is possible only thanks to the goodwill of an empathic line manager in isolated cases, it means that the system is not working. To reduce inclusion labour, we need good policy that is needs-based, not diagnostic or medical evidence based. But good policy also needs good implementation and resources to ensure that there is a reliable chain of action when something goes wrong or needs flagging/reporting fallback. Inclusion is more cost-effective than retrofitting access or fighting court cases and will make processes more efficient in the long-term. Claire’s suggestion that inaccessibility for disabled people is a warning sign that a policy is not working beautifully echoed Armineh’s prompt question, and shows how good inclusion policies can improve the workplace for everyone.

Training for inclusion

A running thread throughout all three presentations was the question of how to apply research findings and implement policy consistently, and whether we need to mandate training to achieve systemic change. In the open discussion, it was noted that inclusion is a resource issue. A good line manager should be responsive to staffs’ needs regardless of whether they are disabled, and best practices in management are already inclusive practices. Like teaching, being a good line manager is a skillset that requires training and practice. Rather than one-off or annual online training modules, mandatory training should be interactive and include experiential learning where participants can acquire and repeatedly practise the skills of being a good inclusive manager. Training should be developed in collaboration with disabled staff and embedded into the workplace. Using disability as an opportunity to rethink work shifts the narrative of disability as burden and opens up new ways of reimagining communities of care in the workplace.