ALT For software-engineer-turned-comedian Albert Han, fringe festivals offer inclusivity for performers who struggle to get gigs at other venues. He is producing a show for the Denver Fringe called “50 Shades of Brown” – and features seven comedians who are either African American, Asian or Latino. “Comedy is such a white male dominated art form. I wanted to provide a platform so people of color could demonstrate their skills,” says Han. He says that too often comedy venues care more about booking comedians who can sell tickets rather than trying to give diverse young voices a chance. “I saw the same thing in the tech world. I helped modernize the way our company recruited to make sure we hired diverse candidates.” In fact, Han is donating proceeds from his fringe production to Project Include, a non-profit dedicated to diversifying the tech industry.

ALT Screenshot description: Toxic corporate culture. A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior.

ALT Chart listing 4 harmful ableist myths and 4 truths. Text of chart is in the following tweets.

ALT We’re in a global pandemic and dealing with structural inequities as we move to remote workplaces. Reset your expectations of what people can accomplish and accommodate the changes our brains and our workplaces have undergone during this pandemic. Build alternatives to address the differences in how your workers want to communicate, what hours work best for them, and how they work best. Accommodate different ways to join meetings, make messages and processes simple, transparent, and consistent,

ALT and allow for customized schedules and interactions for workers, and allow these options for everyone. Understand how people want to work, how they want to communicate, and what hours are better for them. That may mean making mental health resources more accessible and paying for them directly for activities and time off, paying for physical activities and giving people free time. Provide better health care coverage for mental health care, care for transgender people, general medical coverage, flexibility of coverage if workers are out of state or move.

ALT If you give a day off, whether it’s paid time off, medical leave, a holiday, or a no-meeting day, make it a day off from meetings, email, accessibility. Build a real plan and system for employees to be able to have time off and actually take a break. Get rid of unlimited paid time off without minimums, which results in less clarity and less usage of vacation days, and no payments for vacation days not taken. Even a five-minute break during a long meeting can help.

ALT Haley Jones has run corporate listening groups as a consultant: “The biggest feedback that came up is people wanted folks with oppressed identities in higher up positions. They didn’t want to report to some older cis-straight white man that wasn’t going to listen, or was the one doing the harassing, which was actually the most common thing, or saying the racist things, or transphobic thing. What would be most helpful would be structural changes. And that’s kind of the feedback that facilitators often brought back, but [management] didn’t really want to hear that; they more wanted to hear self care things that people can do alone on their own time, not things [the managers] actually have to change.”

ALT Rebuilding culture. Fairness requires dismantling ableism and rebuilding trust. Dispelling societal myths and false assumptions is important. So is education on the systemic nature of ableism and solutions that are needed. Companies, managers, and HR teams need to trust disabled people and earn the trust of disabled people, so in turn disabled people can trust companies. Representation is key to fairness and dismantling ableism. Solutions and accommodations should be personalized and flexible to empower workers to choose what works best for them. There is no onesize-fits-all or global blanket solution. Accommodate all needs and accessibility as a default. Remove the gates that prevent all workers from getting what they need to do their work most effectively. Communicate better. Manage better with fewer meetings and more open information sharing. Again, more flexibility and individual level solutions are important.

ALT “It’s a weird moment of a premature and problematic push to return to the office, which threatens the wellbeing of disabled workers for whom remote work is a necessary and often difficult to come by accommodation. But it also fails to account for the ways that remote work wasn’t some silver bullet; a lot of the access issues and discrimination persisted, just in very different ways.” AZZA ALTIRAIFI

ALT “The onus of asking for accommodations is always on the person in our American setup of jobs. It’s almost never clear that kind of request would be entertained or accepted. Even to get the courage to ask for an accommodation in the workplace regardless of what it is, is really hard in our current setup.” EMILY ACKERMAN