How to keep employees with disabilities from leaving your agency
"To have a good program for accommodating persons with disabilities, you need leadership buy in," said Karren Brummond.
The government is pretty good about hiring people with disabilities. But sometimes not so good at keeping them. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did a detailed study of what it takes to retain people with disabilities. Here with more on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin the social science research analyst in the EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations, Karen Brummond.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin This is a study you do regularly write to monitor how much people are staying that have disabilities that get hired by federal agencies.
Karen Brummond So it’s not like our annual report where we do it on an annual basis, but we write a variety of topical reports on various subjects, whether it be on the lifecycle in employment of persons with disabilities in federal workforce, or the use of Schedule A employment for persons with disabilities. We’ve also written ones that are more about race and gender. We cover all different topics.
Tom Temin And so the challenge is keeping people, once you hire them, I guess that’s true for all people, including people with disabilities. But interestingly, you found some variables. You reduced this to four variables that you said were, quote, significantly associated with fewer voluntary separations. And what were those variables?
Karen Brummond We were looking at retention of persons with disabilities in fiscal year 2020 to see what variables out of a wide variety of policies and practices were associated with fewer voluntary separations. So removals. There were fewer voluntary separations of persons with disabilities at agencies that had compliant, reasonable accommodation programs, that had compliant programs for personal assistance services requests. And that had published their procedures for personal assistance services requests on their public website, and the one about processing requests and having a compliant procedures for that applied to whether they had established it as of 2019 and as of 2020.
Tom Temin So putting it another way, if you’re going to hire people with disabilities, you have to be prepared with the compliance systems and the accessibility features that you need to be able to accommodate them so that they can work fully, and feel like they really belong.
Karen Brummond Absolutely. For people with disabilities, they often need accommodations to work. Not always, but sometimes you’ll have someone who acquires a disability while they’re working, and to keep them working for you, you might have to provide a reasonable accommodation. In addition, this can be more of a psychological thing where persons who see that the agency is dedicated to having compliant procedures are going to want to stay at the agency even if they don’t actually need those accommodation.
Tom Temin And this raises another question, and that is the federal government is the source of regulations and rules for accommodating people in government, and in the private sector with disabilities. It sounds like there are agencies that are not compliant in the first place.
Karen Brummond We have a high level of compliance with our required policies and procedures or EEO programs. However, there are certain variables that you see lower compliance on and higher compliance on. We definitely want the agencies to be complying with the regulations as we’re seeing here, they can be effective in improving EEO.
Tom Temin Sure. And as a social science research analyst, would you then say you could derive from your results that if leadership in management cares about this, then the compliance and the full ability to accommodate people will follow and then you’ll have those fewer voluntary separations.
Karen Brummond I would agree with that statement. To have a good program for accommodating persons with disabilities, you need leadership buy in. So the more you have leadership buy in, you’re also going to have a more welcoming environment for persons with disabilities and other employees.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with Karen Brummond. She’s a social science research analyst in the Office of Federal Operations at the EEOC. And what was your research methodology? What did you compare and contrast to come up with these findings?
Karen Brummond So we’ve looked at 156 policies, procedures and practices that federal agencies should have in place over three years to see if it affected the 2020 number of separations of persons with disabilities. We use some complex statistical methods, specifically binomial regression if you’re into that details.
Tom Temin Some of us are.
Karen Brummond So with that, we were able to see controlling for the number of employees at the agency and the separation rate of all employees at the agency. We were able to see whether these policies, procedures and practices were associated with better retention.
Tom Temin And have you given this feedback to the agencies involved? Do they know how they’re doing?
Karen Brummond We do on a regular basis do technical assistance visits with the agencies to make sure that they’re following the required policies, procedures and practices. The specific ones that we’re recommending here, we’ve just published this report, so we’re going to be doing a greater emphasis on this with more agencies, especially as we have found that these are the most effective practices for retaining persons with disabilities.
Tom Temin And associated with the report, you’ve got a really easy eight point list of how to improve EEOC and retention for people with disabilities. And as you mentioned, the top of the list is top leadership commitment. But top leaders come and go. So you probably have to go a little deeper than that. And you mentioned accountability, including goals to help guide and sustain efforts. What does that exactly mean?
Karen Brummond When we talk about accountability for staff to have some transparency so that people are actually tracking what’s going on, and then with accountability, you also want to see that when something is going right, people get rewarded when something is going wrong. People are told to find out why it’s going wrong and improve upon it.
Tom Temin And what about the workforce that is there of people without disabilities? Probably they can help this effort also.
Karen Brummond Absolutely. You need a supportive environment for people who do want to stay with an employer. So if the colleagues are supportive of persons with disabilities and understanding that they’ll need accommodations, it’ll be a better workplace for everyone.
Tom Temin All right. And what other advice do you have? What else should agencies do? Sounds like they need to invest a little bit sometimes in technology.
Karen Brummond Yes, definitely they need technology. For accessibility many people need certain technologies like screen readers, for example. They also will need to make sure they have interpreters for persons who are hard of hearing or deaf. Other things that they can do is having mentoring programs for any disadvantaged group. Mentoring programs have been shown to improve employment for persons who are either have disabilities or also other historically disadvantaged groups.
Tom Temin And there is at least one new requirement in the whole effort of regulations around people with disabilities that people should know about.
Karen Brummond In 2017 EEOC passed, while we update our regulations through a final rule titled Affirmative Action for Individuals with Disabilities in Federal Government. Among other things, we start requiring that agencies provide personal assistance services for individuals who are qualified for the job and had disabilities and specific needs or personal assistant services. Since we found this to be an effective method in retaining persons with disabilities, it’s really great to see that we’re putting these regulations in place and they’re actually effective.
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Tom Temin
Tom Temin is host of the Federal Drive and has been providing insight on federal technology and management issues for more than 30 years.
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