Empowering people with disabilities is good business sense
People with disabilities bring many qualities to businesses: their resilience, ability to solve problems and appetite for new ways to do things are just some.
On December 1, 2023
“People regularly order a donkey to drink”, says Najla Curiel, a barista at Shell’s sign language café in the Netherlands. She laughingly explains with her hands that the sign for cappuccino and donkey are almost identical.
The coffee bar is a bright, busy venue for staff. People use a video touch screen that shows them how to sign for each menu item. The experience puts baristas and customers – those who hear and those who don’t – on an equal footing.
“People want to learn how to speak to us. They remember how to communicate with signs after doing it a few times and I love serving them,” says Curiel, whose deafness was caused by a virus when she was one.
This was my first visit to the café in Shell’s offices in The Hague and my first experience of using sign language. On my third try, I succeeded in ordering an espresso. The experience gave me the tiniest of glimpses into what it must be like for people with disabilities to work in places where they are a minority, and where they might feel they have to try harder than others to be included and accepted.
Bringing down barriers
International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which falls on December 3, recognises the significant contribution that people with disabilities can make to society. It highlights that it is the barriers to access that typically prevent people with disabilities from fulfilling their potential.
These barriers can be physical, like the absence of ramps for wheelchairs or computers adapted for use by people who cannot type on keyboards. But people with disabilities also encounter barriers in the minds of people who doubt their ability to contribute fully in the workplace.
Globally, there are 1.85 billion people with disabilities. Together with their friends and families they present a consumer market bigger than China, according to the Valuable500 group of companies who are working to accelerate the inclusion of people with disabilities through business.
Shell is a member of the Valuable500 and aims to become one of the world’s most diverse and inclusive organisations. In 2022, Shell began asking employees to voluntarily self-identify whether they had a disability or long-term health condition so that it could gather insights that will help make the workplace a fair and level playing field for all.
Employing more people with disabilities is clearly the right thing to do, but there’s also a strong business case for inclusion.
Businesses that champion accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities attract their loyalty as customers and their talent as employees, according to a 2023 Accenture report. This is because diverse teams can bring a wide range of skills and insights that lead to more innovation and provide a competitive advantage.
“Companies that embrace best practices for employing and supporting more persons with disabilities in their workforces have outperformed their peers,” says the report.
Nurturing skills for the future
The café in The Hague isn’t the only Shell site staffed by people with disabilities. At the Shell service station on Senapati Bapat Road in the industrial city of Pune, in the west of India, employees with speech and hearing disabilities operate the forecourt for one shift a day.
“I was trained and given flash cards and an order-taking board to communicate with customers,” says Vijay Algade, a pump attendant. “I have always wanted to interact with people and I am succeeding despite being deaf.” Algade’s job is to fill fuel tanks. He is now also learning how to change a vehicle’s oil, but he has loftier ambitions: “My goal is to become a manager at a Shell fuel station.”
The response from customers visiting the busy Pune site was so positive that Shell now also runs a “silent shift”, as it’s become known, at a service station more than 800 kilometres away in Bangalore.
Employing people with disabilities is only a starting point. Businesses also need to nurture their skills and talents and offer career opportunities, says Leonam Branco, legal counsel for Shell's oil and gas production operations in Brazil.
In 2018, Branco developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and is the same disease that affected renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Branco is a member of Shell’s Global enABLEment Coalition, which works on improving inclusion for people with disabilities and helps them to thrive professionally.
“People with disabilities in the workforce have overcome physical, emotional, and professional struggles to get there,” says Branco. “If you need to solve a difficult business problem, wouldn’t you want someone in the room who has struggled all their life and always found a solution?”
