Apr 4, 2021
This episode features a conversation with Caroline Casey and Neil Milliken. Caroline is the founder of the Valuable 500, which is a Leadership Initiative to make sure CEOs buy into disability inclusion and that disability and accessibility is part of the global agenda. Neil is the Global Head of accessibility at Atos. His role is to deliver better technology for customers and employees embedding inclusive practice into the processes of the organization. Neil delivers strategy and services working with a wide range of clients helping them to develop policies, processes, and technology solutions to meet the needs of their staff and customers. In this episode, they discuss how to engage the C-Suite to drive accessibility, how to influence board and senior executives to recognize the business value of accessibility, the role of top management in defining and managing the organizational strategic accessibility plan for all aspects of the employee and customer experience, why KPIs matter, and more.
Transcript:
HOST:
Please welcome Caroline Casey and Neil Milliken.
Caroline is the founder of The Valuable 500 which is a leadership initiative to make sure CEOs buy into disability inclusion and that disability and accessibility is part of the global agenda.
Neil is the Global Head of Accessibility at Atos. His role is to deliver better technology for customers and employees, embedding inclusive practice into the processes of the organization. Neil delivers strategy and services working with a wide range of clients helping them to develop policies, processes, and technology solutions to meet the needs of their staff and customers.
Today they will be discussing How to engage the C-suite to drive accessibility. They will touch on how to influence board and senior executives to recognize the business value of accessibility, the role of top management in defining and managing the organizational strategic accessibility plan for all aspects of the employee and customer experience, why KPIs matter and more!
NEIL:
Caroline, welcome, and thank you for joining us.
Diving straight in, Valuable 500 does require this CEO commitment, but you make it easy for organisations to engage because you are not actually asking for too much to begin with, because you want to set the barriers to entry relatively low. You are talking about board reporting and a single commitment, and ideally, most of the companies have at least one of these things that they are already doing. That approach has attracted some of the world’s largest organisations to join, which is fantastic, but what do we now need to do to raise the bar?
CAROLINE:
A few things with that one, as of this afternoon, just before I
came on, we are at 394 companies around the globe, and that’s
companies that employ over 1,000 people, and we represent 31
countries, 56 sectors, and I think it’s just under 14 million
employees. It is incredibly powerful. So, the question
is: What do we do with that power, right?
So, the Valuable 500 was originally established to get the attention and intention of the CEOs. It’s like the missing piece so that we could scale some of the great accessibility initiatives, leadership, and actually disability business inclusion that exist in a business, and the reason we’re not seeing accelerated change, or the joining of the dots or the scaling is because the leadership wasn’t necessarily aware. And you know, we had a stat that said that 54 percent of our leadership and our C-suite, around the globe had never had a discussion about disability.
So, our job was to originally break that circuit with a critical mass of 500. Now, we are nearly there. So, our job now which we will announce in about a month will be how do we activate this community led unsupported by the CEOs and what we provided for them is a transformational change program and that change program will look at three internal aspects of the business that we want the CEOs to ensure there is movement on. One is around leadership itself, the second is about culture and the third is brand and then we are going to ask the community of the 500 to really use their collective influence to change the appalling situation around the lack of research and data, representation particular business and disability representation and lastly reporting because it is a dastardly state of affairs. So that is the transformational program. Do not think that now they are in the community and we've got them in, that the CEO no longer becomes accountable, they do, they must stand above the program of work each company will do. So, the CEOs often have absolutely no idea, or the leadership have no idea, what this, what really good looks like. And I would never push a CEO, with the exception of maybe a few, onto a stage. People like Christopher Panowyk, I’d ask you and who are you referring to and who are your partners. And it is one of the reasons, the IAAP, are very much one of our partners in phase 2. The businesses are looking to each other to know who you are working with. And it is the right experience, it is the right people, and it is the right partnerships that we need to start highlighting, because then we will see the work being done correctly.
NEIL:
Like you already highlighted there are very few people in positions
like myself, or Daniel A. Flurry, or with direct access to the CEO.
That does need to change because the complexity of the programs
that we are going to have to run if we will be successful is
immense and requires this kind of really serious amount of
corporate oversight and influence and power within an organization
for it to work because it is great to give someone a title but if
that is the title without real power and influence and ability to
make stuff happen then the programs will fail. So, I think its…
CAROLINE:
And the right financial investment. I cannot name – we've had three
requests, in the last, since last Monday and I mean really big
organizations and one is about the biggest event in the world. They
came to us saying we really want to be the most inclusive and most
successful event and Company, where do we go? The very first thing
that we will push back on and say, “well number one are you
prepared to invest in this? Number two, are you prepared to have
the person to whom will run the program have direct access to the
leadership? Because, if you are not prepared for those two things
do not bother.” We must absolutely invest in visibility with the
leadership, and you must invest financially, and you must develop
your team right through the organization and that pipeline of
expertise and you need to bring that talent into your business and
that is where we make the link between employment and the
intelligence in the business. Do you have that intelligence in your
business, do you have people with different lived experience, who
have skills around accessibility to help formulate the strategy and
deliver for you? So, they are quite surprised and come back and say
“OH!” You’re like, “Ya, this is big move stuff, this is really
different to the conversation we had before COVID”.
NEIL:
A CEO sponsored initiative, where you’ve got someone that’s
appointed, who needs to be accountable and, therefore, an
expectation to have some kind of measure of success and be able to
demonstrate that success, so this is something that the SLiA
program has been actively engaged in and what KPIs should we have
internally for our programs, how do we measure these things. I
think this is work that some of us has done within our own
organizations, but we wanted to look at how we can harmonize this
and there will always be sector by sector stuff that will
differ. What works in a tech business might not work in a
manufacturing organization, but what are the KPIs. Also, not just
how do we as accessibility professionals look at KPIs because we
want to look at much greater granularity than the CEOs. What do you
think are the things the CEOs are wanting to see and also, what can
we educate them as to things that are important to see, rather
than, because sometimes they might be interested in the wrong
things?
CAROLINE:
You as a community the first most important piece for me, is you
are the only people because you’re the people the expertise needs
to set one standard, honestly, and I understand we need to have the
differentiation between industry, I get that, but it really is you
guys coming together and you telling us how and what are the things
that we need to see. I cannot tell you because it's not my area of
expertise, but we can help bring you is this community, this
enormous, very unique community, first time built in the world, is
that will you tell us what it is, you know better. So, that is the
first piece. The second piece from our side of the house is we have
to really help business understand and this is where the leadership
are listening. This is really about risk proofing our business.
This is taking it from niche to normal. The horse is bolted, we are
off, right now. What the CEO and board need to understand is the
delivery or the effect, direct and indirectly, on the shareholder
value of their organization and on their brand and on the CEOs
personal brand if they do not get this right. Now, what we also
explained to CEOs and leadership, we do not expect you to know it
all. We expect you to admit you do not know it and go out and get
the help and go out and invest in the advice. Like you have done in
other issues. When that lands, Neil, that is the biggest barrier
right now because there is still is competing agendas that a
business has but the issue of accessible and inclusive design
touches every aspect of every agenda and every function and every
part of the value change and that is the piece the CEO needs to
understand and what I am saying is the opportunity with this, in
this community right now, is you are the most powerful people
because of COVID and businesses now are wanting to avoid what
happened with Domino, for an example. Before COVID and now with
COVID they are like, well and that is what we need them to
understand. The measurables, the KPIs you need to deliver to us. We
need to open your head and you tell us what to measure.
NEIL:
I want to talk a little bit about transparency as well. I think
this is important to talk about, as you said, our successes, our
failures. We are really proud within my own organization of our
corporate social responsibility programs. We report on CSR,
sustainability, decarbonization, and we do this in a way that is
combined reporting. So that means, we do not just report our
financial results we include all of these extra financial measures
in our annual report, and that has a material effect on our share
value. The stuff that we are doing, actually, really does influence
the value of our company.
As a company that grows through acquisition, the stuff out in
public now, talking about who we are buying next. The impact of
these programs on our share value impacts our ability to grow.
However, for the most part, all of these metrics and all of these
indices, GRI, CDP, all of these major Dow Jones sustainability
index. They have a little section about disabilities which should
effectively, doesn’t give you any metrics, just says “tell us some
nice stories”.
CAROLINE:
This is one of my passion points. And you know this. This adage,
what we do not measure does not get done or Paul Polman, who is the
Chair of the Valuable 500, “what we measure we treasure” he says. I
am absolutely incensed when people say, “oh but it's just so
complex" and “it’s just so difficult”. Internally we talk about
representation of employees who have a direct connection to
disability. We use the legislation as a reason not to. And, when
we've seen companies like Channel 4, Microsoft, and MNS actually
get around that with anonymous census. This is about intention and
it's one of the tools that we will be bringing to the Valuable 500
community and asking them all to do is an anonymous census around
this. We can hack this problem. The second one that absolutely
drives me mad is how can we say we believe in sustainability if we
don't believe in inclusion and how can you say you believe in
inclusion if you do not do disability. The staff that are always
buying around with, with the Valuable 500 is 90% of our companies
claim that they are committed to inclusion and diversity but only
4% consider disability. And maybe that is a very low figure, but
how do we know otherwise because we are not seeing any reporting
and if you look at diversity and inclusion indexes, in 2018
Makenzie did the Global Report on Diversity and Inclusion. Was
disability there? No. When you can touch with them you asked “why,
why was it not there?” and they said disability is not a driver of
business. Wow! That stuff really bothers me. When we did the
Tortoise Index which was founded by James Harding, it was really
hard but they put five metrics to begin with and that makes me
excited because if we can get these metrics in, if we can start and
I'm not saying they're all right, but if we do not put them in
because it's too hard to get them all right, we are going to self
perpetuate the problem. If you look at what the fortune companies
are doing now with move to measure around racial representation we
need to do that and we need to do and we need to do, and we need to
do, so it is one of the big passion projects of phase 2 of Valuable
500 is there will never be a sustainability index, a responsibility
index or a diversity and inclusion index that it is acceptable
anymore, not to have disability metrics.
NEIL:
And you know I'm fully behind this too because it is one of my
passions is sort of the economic of accessibility and
sustainability. They are intertwined. These are really important
things. The examples set by the Tortoise Index is important. We
need to continue to work on getting our influence as users and
contributors to these other indices to make them understand the
importance of reporting on these things and then that helps us
benchmark and helps CEOs benchmark as well so not only does it
actually give power to us as the strategic leaders in accessibility
because suddenly the measure of what we are doing impacts on value
of the organization, but we can measure ourselves against other
organizations and then you can objectively say when someone asks
you “who are doing this well”, you can say, "By these measures X
company is doing it well, Y company is doing it well in this
aspect." So on and so forth and at the moment, all we are doing is
giving people anecdotes and I think we need to move well beyond
anecdotes to evidence based stuff.
HOST:
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NEIL:
We have a question which says we got the buy in at CEO level, but
the rest of the C-suite wants to take a more measured approach,
they are sceptical of business benefit, this is reflecting what we
just talked about. So, how can we as the accessibility leaders help
broker that and approach that bureaucracy and unblock the C-suite
blockers? And I understand why there are these blockers and I have
addressed them myself and there are an awful lot of initiatives
going on in an organization, at any one time. Someone in the
C-suite position is going to have lots of plates spinning, so it is
really making, I think, make them clear of the benefit to them and
shaping what their contribution can be that fits in with what their
trying to do in the business so that we are not loading them up
again or working counter to what else they are trying to do in the
business. I think those are some of the things we can proactively
do, but are there other things that you have seen that also work to
melt what one would call the permafrost of middle management?
CAROLINE:
Firstly, in the shadow and the light of the leader, and of, leaders
make choices, and those choices create cultures. It's not my quote,
but I steal it every time. If the leader and this is why the
Valuable 500 exists, one of the reasons, if the leader does not say
I care about this then, the rest of his or her C-Suite is not going
to give a hoot about it because they want to shine in the shadow,
and the light of the leader, that, or in the light of a leader. So,
the first part from our perspective for phase II, it is not the
CEO, it is the CEOs responsibility but under each of those buckets
of reporting, leadership, and culture, and brand, the CEO needs to
give us access to the CMO, the CHRO, the CTO, everybody. The CEO is
making sure his C-suite team, his leadership team will deliver for
her or for him to make sure that the work gets done because you are
absolutely right whoever is just said that. But the CEO goes yeah
and then it goes to the CHRO it gets shoved under the table. So,
the next phase of the Valuable 500 is trying to crack that, for the
CEO, for her team, to make sure she has the support and backing of
her C-suite. And I think that is really, really important because I
have unfortunately seen when a CEO leaves office and you think you
have this Valuable 500 company and then suddenly it's gone. And
that is discretionary and that is what bothers me because
discretionary is not strategic. The last piece I would say, once
again for your skill area and for the strategic level which you
operate, accessibility is not about disability. It is about
everyone, and I think that is starting to land now so when we take
it just out of the box where it has been tagged with for quite some
time, disability and maybe stretched to age, it is now about
everyone. It just has to happen, like health and safety has to
happen in a business. It is that simple.
NEIL:
I think there was a comment about McKenzie previously where they
have not done disability as diversity, but they've done a lot on
age. And there this both crossover and disconnect between how
businesses and analysts view the aging society and disability. If
we live long enough, we will all become disabled
(Laughs).
CAROLINE:
That is true!
NEIL:
And we are all, for the most part, COVID aside, living longer so
this will happen to everyone. When we have discussions at my
organization with the public sector and governments, they are
understanding this and understanding that they need to do stuff and
plan for this. As service providers, as companies providing stuff,
consumers, who are the people that have the money? It’s older
people, they are much more likely to be disabled, therefore yes, it
is a business driver. What we do need to do is make that mental
connection for businesses between age and disability and business
opportunity. I think that there is some work to do there, but I
think that is progressing somewhat. I think the work that you are
doing and that the work with the ratings agencies and a lot of the
marketing work, it feels very different now to how it felt two
years ago. There is engagement, there is an understanding that
it has to be done, and it is almost like watching people that
hadn’t engaged before suddenly roll their sleeves up is enormously
gratifying. I think, it’s not just happening in my organization or
in the Microsoft’s, or the Salesforces, but there are more and more
organizations taking those steps, recognizing that it is something
that they can no longer pay lip service to and ignore. There is
legislative reasons for doing it, there is profitability reasons
for doing it, there is organization, cultural reasons, lots and
lots of reasons but it has become compelling and they have realized
that.
On the other side of that, that is actually driving a different
issue which is a skills gap. It is something that IAAP is here to
help address but there is a real shortage of skills in the people
that can run the organizational programs. A bit like we had the
real shortage of skills in people that could run sustainability
programs 10 years ago and actually finding people that have the
right balance of both technical skills and the ability to navigate
complex organizations. These big organizations that are your
members, are very complex. It is difficult and even at a lower
level finding the technical skills to get the people to do the
technical expert work, is a challenge. How can we engage with the
wider community both in education, and vocational training to start
bringing up the skills? Some of them will require specialists but
we also need to do it in the wider education field. Is that
something that CEOs can influence? Or is that something that we
need to go to our government partners?
CAROLINE:
Of course it is, did we not see this happen before? When we started
seeing the digital revolution happened and you saw companies like
the big Googles in this world and the big Microsoft in the world,
invest in the skills of countries and their education systems. I'm
living in a small country, we have some of the biggest tech giants
in the world (Laughs) And have very, very big premises and very big
offices here for lots of reasons. Therefore, that is the way in
which they were able to say that this is a pool of talent, do they
have the skills and training that we will need to give them jobs?
So yes absolutely! This is my point. Who are the most powerful
leaders of the planet right now? It is not politicians, right? We
know that. The most powerful leaders on this planet are business
leaders, let's be honest, when they come together, they can
actually make anything happen.
We know the technology is there and we certainly know the
intelligence is there, the desire is there for so much of this. The
biggest opportunity and the biggest barrier to any of this is the 6
inches between our ears. That is about accessibility. It is the
intention and the will to do this and to see it as a long game, to
see the full pipeline, Neil, you are absolutely right. If every
business, right now said “OK, this is it, front and centre, we're
going to invest in it”. Do they have the people to fill the
positions? Do they have people coming up to fill the positions? I
do not imagine they would. It really is the influence and powers in
the hands of business, and they do affect policy, they do affect
the UN, look at UN Global Compact and you think about that. They do
have the chance to affect the education system, and the pipeline
coming up and they should be investing in that pipeline and that
should be where their philanthropy is and many of them do
that.
NEIL:
The question from Rob as well which is saying he is four rungs away
from a CEO but what approach would you take to getting involved, to
be able to advocate?
First of all, the stuff that we just talked about but maybe you go
and find the person that you know influences them. Do you think you
have a better chance of having a conversation with their number 2
or their direct management team that can influence them and start
building that relationship? I know I had to go through multiple
tiers of relationship building in my organization to be able to get
to the point where I could go and directly talk with the CEO. And
now we directly report to the board. And that did take
time.
CAROLINE:
And not look like a threat to someone else.
NEIL:
Absolutely, you have to frame it in a positive way. This is of
mutual benefit; it always has to be about mutual benefit. Risk
reduction. You can talk about the penalties and risk but it is
about doing this reduces the risk, it is a benefit to us as an
organizations, it also can be profitable, it will make us more
usable, blah, blah, blah but framed it in a language and wrap it in
the topic that is important to that individual and that might be
different from the person in the leadership team that reports to
the CEO than the CEO but once you start having the conversation
with that person they can tell you what floats the boat of the CEO
and that's how you start progressing those conversations. It
is definitely a long game, and you have to be prepared for a few
knock backs along the road. That said, as Caroline previously
stated we are in a far, far better position at the beginning of
2021 than we were even midway through 2020. Things have changed,
there is a recognition amongst leadership of humanity of their
workforce, of vulnerability of their colleagues. The understanding
of the need for flexibility so businesses are having to invest in
changes and infrastructure. Now is the time to strike and say,
"While you are doing this make it accessible. We can help you be
more effective; we can help you engage your employees remotely."
Listen to the language talked and play it back to them with an
accessibility message.
CAROLINE:
The other thing I would say is don't underestimate the leaders of
all these businesses trying to do the simple thing of going on
these platforms whether they have a visual impairment, a hearing
impairment, a dexterity impairment, which most of them don't, they
are struggling, and for the first time they are going oh, ask them
to take off their glasses and do it you have a whole other thing.
There is kind of an experience our leaders maybe not have had to
have before and that is where you can fill that gap, that is the
sweet spot. Go in with the confidence. You have something to offer
and not just as a quick fix but strategically to offer this
business and it has been proven because the businesses that had
already invested in this were the businesses that thrived
throughout COVID.
NEIL:
Can board members also influence CEOs?
CAROLINE:
What I would say, is board members are probably in one of the most
unique positions. If you are a board member, sitting on a board
saying “Where do we stand on accessibility? Have we done an
accessibility audit? What is our performance around disability
business inclusion?” No CEO can tell you that they are not going to
give you that information. That is a board member's right. So, yes,
use it well.
NEIL:
I can absolutely tell you that our board do influence our CEO. It
gets back to me that they have been asking questions, so if you
happen to have a relationship, by all means develop relationships
with board members too, find your path, it will be different for
each business but absolutely, yes, if the board is interested in
this topic make use of it because they absolutely will influence
your CEO.
CAROLINE:
Can I take that from you, because having sat on boards if I ever
get an email from anyone in the company as a board member, I have
to bring that to the CEO and I would, so that is very good play,
thank you.
NEIL:
I think it has been great fun chatting and I hope everyone in the
audience has found this useful. I hope that you will join us on our
journey towards strategic leadership.
HOST:
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