This weekend is the 30th anniversary of the ‘UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities’, which is why we want to tell you about Jen Rooney. More specifically, we want to share Jen’s story about her experience with disability and how she’s using it to help organisations create more enabling working environments for those with disabilities. We think her story is a must know for every leader and all those working to bring about workplace inclusion. So here we are sharing our conversation with Jen…
Imagine stepping outside your front door to find the light so intense you are forced to return inside. That’s how it can be for Jen Rooney. But it wasn’t always this way.
Jen had a skiing accident while an undergrad in Canada, which left her with a brain injury. Month after slow month passed before she began to recover. Until one day, she eventually felt well enough to re-pursue her plan – to move to the UK, study for her Master’s and work.
All was going well, until a few years later when she hit her head again while on a weekend hike. The pain from her original injury came back with a vengeance. This time her road to recovery was far longer and some of the damage beyond repair. “At the start I couldn’t even think. It felt like my brain couldn’t function. I sat in a dark room, doing nothing for months.”
While Jen did gradually make progress, the ordeal forced her to ask herself some tough questions. What am I going to do now? Am I ever going to be able to work again?
She wasn’t sure, but she knew if she could work she wanted to put the lived experience of her brain injury and disability to good use. “I didn’t want it all to be for nothing,” says Jen.
“I wanted to be the hare not the tortoise, but each time I pushed too hard, I ended up going backwards. The idea of going slow to go fast, that the tortoise ultimately wins the day, that’s appealing to me.”
Disability in the workplace
While diversity and inclusion are a priority for many business leaders and HR practitioners, Jen speaks confidently when she says disability remains the forgotten relation. “It’s just not talked about in the same way as other areas of inclusion.”
And while Jen’s a firm believer that every area of inclusion is essential, it’s disability and mental health she’s made the focus of ‘The Wellbeing Tortoise’, due to their lack of prominence and her brain injury, which has impacted both her physical and mental health.
“Having not been born disabled, I’ve noticed how the media portray those with a disability as incapable, which just isn’t true across the board. Sadly, this portrayal breeds widespread bias; that people can’t thrive if they are disabled or aren’t competent if they have a mental health problem.”
These myths drive exclusion, making it rare to see or hear about leaders with a disability or a mental health issue – not just because they aren’t appointed to these positions, but because those who are often conceal such elements of their identity. This not only hurts those excluded, but the businesses excluding them.
One single step can transform what disability at work looks like
Yet there’s something simple every leader and line manager can do to immediately make a difference: Ask, implement, and respect reasonable adjustments for those with a visible or self-declared disability.
“It’s such an easy step and win because when a disabled person has their adjustments met, they can work at their best, develop in their career, become a leader and be a visible role model to others in their organisation.”
That visibility isn’t only vital to others who are disabled, but to all those with a skewed view on what disability looks like. “That single, simple, step prevents so many subsequent issues from ever arising,” Jen continues. “I don’t need to convince you to employ someone with a disability if your experience of disability in the workplace is positive.”
Yet while it sounds straight forward, Jen has found reticence within businesses in giving disabled people the reasonable adjustments they need to thrive.
Offering a personal experience of working for an employer where she asked for such an adjustment – five minutes off an hour to rest her brain – their curt response was: ‘No, that’s too much of a time-waste.’
“It’s so frustrating because I never waste time,” says Jen. “But I need those five minutes to make my other 55 minutes productive. Without that adjustment, I can’t do my best work and then we’re into this downward spiral that reinforces negative stereotypes of disabled workers.”
Upending these misconceptions is what drives Jen and The Wellbeing Tortoise. “There’s something rather unique about improving disability inclusion. Building more inclusive workplaces takes time, work, and dedication. But what I’ve noticed about disability inclusion is that managers love that there are little, yet impactful, things they can immediately do.
“By meeting someone’s adjustments or asking about their access requirements, for example, you feel you are making progress because the positive improvement is immediately visible,” says Jen.
Illustrating her point, she shares an example of a team who improved their overall productivity, and the wellbeing of a self-declared autistic colleague, simply by asking if there was anything they could do to make things easier for them. The tiny adjustments they subsequently made – like signalling in advance on teams calls when they were going to share their screen, scroll or switch slides – had no cost and no impact on them, yet the benefit to this autistic person (who struggles with sensory overload) was enormous.
“When you realise how easy some of these things are, you automatically begin to think ‘what else can I do to help another colleague?’, and so the journey towards inclusion begins,” says Jen.
And that’s her goal – to help others challenge their perceptions of disability and mental health so they can start to make those tiny adjustments that begin to transform the workplace.
