Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Cornelia Gamlem Of Gems Group On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability
An Interview With Eric Pines
You don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to know where to find them. You need to know who to ask. My standard response to inquiries became, “I don’t know, but let me find out and get back to you.” I gained a great deal of respect from colleagues doing so.
As we all know, over the past several years there has been a great deal of discussion about inclusion and diversity in the workplace. One aspect of inclusion that is not discussed enough, is how businesses can be inclusive of people with disabilities. We know that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. What exactly does this look like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about the “How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Are Disabled “.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Cornelia Gamlem.
A passion for helping organizations develop and maintain respectful workplaces is the reason why Cornelia left an HR leadership role with a Fortune 500 IT services company to start her consulting practice. That led her on a journey to becoming a speaker and author. She and her coauthor have written five books together, and they are celebrating the 10-year anniversary edition of their first book, The Big Book of HR. You can learn more from their website, www.bigbookofhr.com.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
My entrepreneurial spirit led me to start my own consulting practice. Prior to serving in a leadership role, I held operational HR positions. Throughout my career, I worked with a variety of companies across many industries, was active with employer advocacy groups, and served in national leadership volunteer roles with The Society for Human Resource Management. Along the way, I met so many wonderful professionals who remain colleagues today, including my co-author, Barbara Mitchell.
When I was a child, my grandfather worked at Abilities, Inc., located on Long Island, NY, where I grew up. Abilities provided vocational training and job placement for people with disabilities. I still remember my grandfather taking me to a company picnic one summer. Through my wonderous childhood curiosity, I was fascinated watching all the differently-abled individuals. Little did I know where this experience would lead me.
Abilities was the legacy organization of The Viscardi Center. Later, in my HR leadership role, I worked with the Center’s National Business & Disability Council, which took a leading national role for the successful integration of persons with disabilities into the workforce. I came full circle.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Listening. Communication is key for success in many jobs. Often overlooked is the ability to listen. Interviewing for a job at my corporate headquarters involved speaking to a number of HR leaders. The feedback that I got when I was selected for the position — and I thought I was the longshot candidate — was that I listened to the proposed situation or problem before I offered a proposed solution.
Pragmatism. In line with the subject of disability inclusion, I assisted colleagues’ efforts to make appropriate reasonable accommodations. Taking a pragmatic approach, I coached them on identifying the essential job function(s) for which someone needed assistance, and on interviewing individuals with disabilities to determine the specific assistance they needed to perform those functions.
Reliability. People want to know they can depend on you. This includes depending on you to answer questions, address concerns and follow through. I’ve always taken commitments seriously and take pride in the fact that people know they can count on me. I still remember an employee expressing gratitude that they could always depend on me, that I took them seriously, and that I followed through. At the time I thought, Well that’s my job!
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
Working in HR has always been a balance between serving the needs of everyone — employees and managers — as well as the organization.
Early in my career I had a manager who hadn’t followed our discipline policy, but presented me with fabricated documentation in his attempt to terminate an employee. When confronted, he admitted that the employee had never received the warning document — he had just created it. My boss had my back, and we denied the request to terminate at that time.
Another time a hiring director met with a staffing firm and accepted resumes from them without notifying HR. Almost a year later, we hired someone who responded to our job posting. This new hire was someone the staffing firm had presented. The staffing firm contacted me requesting their placement fee.
Caught in the middle, I had to confront both, producing the new hire’s resume which was different from the one the staffing firm provided. The employee’s statement also supported my position. He hadn’t heard from the staffing company in months and independently applied for the job.
It’s funny how gathering facts and evidence can support your position.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
People issues seemingly arise out of nowhere and just don’t go away. With all the changes in today’s workplace, it’s critical that managers handle them right. My co-author and I will be releasing a new book in March 2023, The Decisive Manager, that will help managers navigate the changing workplace and avoid legal pitfalls. We like to think of it as a guide from hiring to firing and everything in between.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about inclusion. Can you tell our readers a bit about your experience working with initiatives to promote Diversity and Inclusion? Can you share a story with us?
I had responsibility for a number of diversity programs for a Fortune 500 company. This included supporting our business units’ diversity hiring efforts — coordinating recruiting sources as well as community outreach and involvement across the company’s varied geographic locations. I also worked with our corporate procurement team to enhance our supplier diversity program. Finally, I coordinated and delivered training to our business units.
Moving on to my consulting life, I delivered diversity workshops to a number of clients and organizations seeking a better grasp on their efforts. Some training was broad in nature, while others were focused — such as generational diversity. Other organizations needed support implementing diversity initiatives. I helped them develop diversity mission statements and strategic plans, understand their business drivers, form diversity task forces in their organizations, identify the programs to include such as recruiting, community outreach, and supplier diversity, and measure the results. Tools were provided to help with their efforts.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
Imagine a world where everyone was alike. It would be boring. Where would all the creativity come from? Would you want your organization to be bland and boring?
The demographics of our population continues to change, and those changes extend well beyond race, sex, gender and national origin. Population changes result in market changes for an organization’s goods and services. If you don’t change to meet the market’s needs, your competition will. Other external factors driving change include new technologies, globalization, supply chain issues, the economy and laws, regulations and political forces.
The most compelling issue for an inclusive culture is the need to bring creativity into your workforce to respond to changing factors. Employees with different experiences bring different understandings of these changes. For example, employees from different geographic backgrounds understand the changing geographic markets. Younger employees better understand the changing technologies.
Bringing all people, especially those traditionally excluded, into processes, activities, and decision- and policy-making ensures equal access to opportunities and resources. Diverse teams that brainstorm issues related to new products and services can have very positive outcomes.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what this looks like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Can you please share a few examples?
A reasonable accommodation removes unnecessary barriers that prevent or restrict employment opportunities and enables a qualified individual with a disability to perform the essential functions of the job. Accommodations must be tailored to the individual employee’s needs.
Some typical examples include: adjusting work schedules or providing flexibility (allowing someone who suffers from severe migraine headaches to work from home regularly or intermittently); providing equipment or devices (a special computer monitor for someone who is visually impaired); restructuring a job (allowing a cashier with arthritis to sit on a stool rather than stand throughout a shift), or reassigning or exchanging tasks among staff members for non-essential functions of a job.
There is not a one-size-fits-all accommodation that will work for every type of disability. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in its ADA guidance, recommends an interactive process between employees (and applicants) and the employer to determine the most effective accommodation. Also, disabilities vary in nature (such as neurodivergent conditions) and not all disabilities are obvious requiring the accommodation process to become creative.
Employers are required to make a reasonable accommodation unless it will create an undue hardship on the organization (impose significant difficultly/expense, or alter the nature of the operation, for example). An undue hardship is not the employer’s preference for how a job is done. If it can be done a different way and be effective, they have to allow an individual with a disability to do it differently.
There are a number of sources available for consultation. The Job Accommodation Network (askjan.org) is a government funded resource. JAN counselors perform an individualized search for a workplace accommodation based on the job requirements and the employee’s needs. This is an excellent place to start. Also don’t overlook your state’s vocational rehabilitation program.
Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? If you can, please share a few examples.
With the current changes in the workplace, including more employees working from home, the issues around disabilities have shifted. There is an assumption that reasonable accommodations only need to be made if the employee is working in the employer’s physical work location rather than at home. However, individuals with disabilities who work from home on either a full or part-time (hybrid) basis may still need reasonable accommodations.
Consider the amount of video conferencing and meetings that are conducted today. This can have an impact on individuals with sensory disabilities — hearing or visual impairments. For example, someone with a hearing disability may struggle accessing video calls. Individuals with sensory impairments may need some type of assistive technology, such as voice recognition programs, screen readers, screen enlargement applications or closed captioning.
Can you share a few examples of ideas that were implemented at your workplace to help promote disability inclusion? Can you share with us how the work culture was impacted as a result?
I spearheaded and developed most of the material for a comprehensive program that included training for managers and HR professionals throughout the organization. This program brought about a request to consolidate outreach efforts to organizations that represent disability rights and to create a repository of reasonable accommodation examples and sources of information. Not only did the HR community begin to take an integrated approach, but line managers joined the effort leading to an increase in hiring of individuals with disabilities in many segments of the company.
This is our signature question that we ask in many of our interviews. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started My Career”?
- Policies aren’t written in stone. Early in my career, I stood up to an executive upholding the “corporate” requirement. After some discussion, he helped me see that finding a solution to what he was asking was not compromising.
- Ask why things are done a certain way. Don’t blindly accept “we’ve always done it this way” without understanding why. There were many times I showed reluctant clients how to creatively comply with what appeared to be onerous government requirements without creating barriers to their existing processes.
- It’s okay to say “No”, especially if you are in a situation where you can’t give the project or assignment your best work. After helping implement a new, out-of-town project, I was later asked to return to fix some problems. I explained that the timing, both personally and professionally, were not good as I hesitantly said no while bracing for repercussions that never came.
- The power of storytelling in conveying lessons. It’s not important to always stick to the script. As I deliver training, I naturally tell stories — which come out organically — to illustrate a point. Colleagues have pointed out how powerful my stories are — how they catch the audience’s attention.
- You don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to know where to find them. You need to know who to ask. My standard response to inquiries became, “I don’t know, but let me find out and get back to you.” I gained a great deal of respect from colleagues doing so.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
“We have to know where we’ve been to know where we’re going.” — David McCullough
I heard the late author and historian, David McCullough, say this during a speech at a conference. It caught my attention because it was something I always said to my colleagues — especially about our policies and practices. It’s so important to know not only what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it. What’s the precedent for setting this policy? Why did it work then and will it still work now? Knowing where we’ve been can help us shape a better path forward.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Accountability, or more specifically, taking responsibility for your actions. It is one of those things that is easier to talk about than to do. A lack of accountability is a systemic problem in our society right now.
Within the world of work, this must start at the top and flow down. Leaders have to reinforce the importance of taking responsibility by holding themselves accountable. Then they need to model that accountability to the staff. For instance, if they make an error or miss a deadline, admit it, correct it, and move on.
Leaders must set clear expectations and provide assistance, but then follow through with consequences if employees fall short. A hardline approach is not always needed. When a culture of respect exists, mistakes are treated as learning opportunities and a chance to grow, encouraging employees to take responsibility. If things don’t change, however, or mistakes involve egregious behavior, such as harassment, a more severe response may be necessary.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
A link to my website is included in my bio and I invite readers to visit it. There they will find my social links a contact form, blog, and information about me, my coauthor and all of our books. LinkedIn is a great way to contact and connect with me.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
