–International HR Day
On why HR should be gathering evidence and identifying systemic trends that cause disability discrimination, not just coaching individual managers.
There’s a common approach to disability in the workplace that goes like this: when a disabled employee has a problem, HR supports their manager. They coach the manager on disability. They provide training. They try to help the manager understand what the employee needs. The problem gets positioned as individual and interpersonal. The solution is individual and interpersonal.
This individual-focused approach misses something crucial. If one manager struggles with disability accommodation, perhaps it’s about that specific manager. But if multiple disabled employees have problems in the same team, if there’s a pattern across the organisation—high turnover of disabled people, grievances about disability discrimination clustering in certain departments, disabled people concentrated in certain roles and absent from others—that’s not a manager problem. That’s a system problem. And HR’s job is to identify it and fix it.
What Evidence-Based Practice Looks Like
Professional HR practice is supposed to be evidence-based. That means looking at data. What roles have disabled people in them, and what roles don’t? Are disabled people promoted at the same rates as non-disabled people? Are they concentrated in certain teams or roles, or distributed across the organisation? How long do disabled employees stay before leaving? Is there a pattern?
It means looking at grievances. Are there patterns in grievances about accommodation, about access, about disability discrimination? Is there a particular team or manager where these grievances cluster? Is there a particular type of grievance that comes up repeatedly? That’s evidence that something in the system needs to change.
It means looking at what triggers problems. Are disabled employees regularly denied flexible working? Is there a systemic issue with how the organisation handles absence related to disability? Are there practices in place that inadvertently disadvantage disabled people? These might not be intentional. They might just be how things are done. But if they systematically disadvantage disabled people, they need to change.
From Individual Coaching to System Change
Once you identify systemic issues, you fix the system. If there’s a pattern of disabled employees in one team struggling, you look at what that team is doing. Is it the culture? The workload? The structure? You change it. Coaching the manager individually doesn’t address whatever structural condition is creating the problem.
If there’s a systemic issue with adjustment requests taking too long, you don’t coach individual managers about being more responsive. You change the process. You automate what can be automated. You make clear timelines. You assign responsibility. You create accountability. You make the system faster for everyone.
If certain roles have no disabled people in them, you ask why. Is it the role itself that inherently excludes disabled people? Or is it how you’re recruiting, assessing, or supporting people in those roles? You change what needs changing. You don’t just accept that disabled people aren’t suitable for that work.
This is harder than coaching an individual manager. It requires looking critically at your own practices. It requires change that affects everyone, not just accommodation for the person with the problem. It requires HR to take responsibility rather than pointing to individual managers.
Why This Matters
Individual manager coaching can help. But it doesn’t fix systemic discrimination. It doesn’t prevent the next disabled employee from having the same problem. It doesn’t shift the burden from disabled employees to the systems that need to change.
Professional HR is evidence-based because evidence reveals patterns that individual approaches miss. It reveals systemic discrimination that individual interventions can’t fix. If HR is only coaching individual managers, they’re not doing their job. Their job is to ensure that systems are designed to include disabled people, and that when patterns of discrimination emerge, the system is what changes.