Inclusion Beyond the Employee Badge
When most organizations talk about disability inclusion, they’re picturing their employees. Which makes sense—after all, programs usually start with talent acquisition and onboarding. But here’s the problem: if your inclusion strategy stops at the edge of your org chart, you’re unintentionally leaving people out.
Think about how many people interact with your company on a daily basis who aren’t technically your employees.
- A freelance consultant logging into your internal systems
- A food service worker in your cafeteria
- A job applicant navigating your hiring platform
- A visitor walking into your office for a pitch or interview
If your systems aren’t built with them in mind, then your inclusion program isn’t inclusive. It’s exclusive by omission.
Inclusion Begins Before Day One
For applicants, the inclusion experience starts before an offer is ever extended. Can they access the job portal? Do your forms work with assistive tech? Are your job descriptions written in plain language?
If someone needs to disclose a disability just to apply—just to get in the door—that’s not equitable. That’s conditional access. And it’s a friction point that pushes talent away before they even become candidates.
Now extend that logic to everyone else in your ecosystem. Vendors, contractors, guests. People who may not have a company login, but still walk through your doors. Do they know how to request support? Are you giving them the same respect, the same forethought, that you give your employees?
Inclusion isn’t a department—it’s a design. And your design needs to serve everyone who experiences your company, not just the ones on payroll.
Support Can’t Be Selective
You’ve probably invested in things like accommodations, training, and onboarding support for employees. But have you ever asked what your facilities team is doing to support third-party vendors? Or if your legal team has reviewed event contracts to include accessibility options for guests? Or whether your recruiting partners know how to support candidates with disabilities from the very first interaction (of course we do…but what about your other recruiting partners)?
The gaps are subtle—but they’re everywhere.
True support systems don’t rely on people knowing how or when to speak up. They don’t require requests or disclosures to activate. They simply work—by default, by design, by intention.
That’s the goal of Phase 3: to build a sustainable, holistic approach that doesn’t require constant reminders or reactive fixes.
Your Checklist for Expanding Access and Support
Start by walking through the journey of a few non-employee personas:
- A job seeker
- A contracted janitor
- A guest speaker visiting your headquarters
Where are the access barriers? Where would they get stuck, confused, or excluded? If they had a need, would they know how to ask—or better yet, would they even need to?
Then, embed those answers into your systems:
- Include accessibility guidance in vendor onboarding
- Provide clear signage and QR codes at entrances for accommodation requests
- Ask about support needs in event registration forms
- Add “accessibility lead” as a role for major company events and office walkthroughs
Inclusion isn’t just a value. It’s a responsibility. And the people who show up in your workplace—regardless of their badge or contract status—deserve to feel like they belong.
Final Thought
The difference between a functional inclusion program and a transformative one often comes down to reach.
It’s easy to build systems for people you’ve hired. It takes leadership to build for everyone else. But when you do, the impact multiplies.
You create a culture where no one has to ask to be included.
Because the answer is already yes.