The Return on Disability Group

CASE STUDY ALERT! A digital 'thing' that is compliant with WCAG is often still a terrible experience for disabled people. Why? Because "accessible" is based on a technical standard, not the experience of customers. But now, as financial services firms slowly shift competitive focus to include customer experience in addition to the interest rate gap, customers with disabilities are becoming muses for better design. The Return on Disability Group helps financial services clients focus on great experiences. Check out the details on how we do it! #casestudy #customerexperience #disabilityinclusion

Happy to see industry media picking up a customer experience focus! According to Mark Winward, Head of Research at The Return on Disability Group, simplifying processes leads to better design and outsized returns. This not only benefits customers with disabilities but all customers. Accessibility is just a small subset of delight when tied to experience. Let's continue to prioritize customer experience and reap the rewards of effective and inclusive design. #CustomerExperience #Inclusion #DesignThinking

Consistent across The Return on Disability Group studies is that it is people, not “stuff” that most determines the experiences of People with Disabilities (PWD). This is true for both consumer and employment experiences. For consumers, interactions with customer service staff tend to be key drivers of experience, while in the workplace, it is interactions with managers, colleagues, and customers, usually in that order, that largely determine whether a career is perceived as positive or negative. As part of our quarterly research program, our research team lead by Mark Winward, conducted two parallel surveys: one assessing the workplace perceptions and experiences of PWD, and another examining the attitudes of people managers on topics of workplace diversity and PWD in the workplace. As part of the first survey, PWD were asked to rank the largest barriers to openly discussing disability in the workforce. The top-ranked barrier to discussing disability was the perceived attitudes of managers. This finding is not surprising, given the influence of managers on career trajectories. The second ranked barrier was attitudes of co-workers.

[CASE STUDY] As regulators and political leaders react to media amplifications of passenger experience failures, it is becoming clear that there is a lack of focus on the customer in global aviation. There are real reasons for this. Hyper-competition. Complex systems. Disability charities and "advisory" boards acting as (poor) proxies for passenger demand. Profit-seeking entities - airports and airlines - must reset from 30 years of layered "regulatory spaghetti". Step back from chasing shiny objects and engage in proper customer research and design/systems thinking. Ask us how. At The Return on Disability Group, we do this every day. (A hint to regulators...you can nudge this along too. For the benefit of passengers and a critical industry in the global economy.) #aviation #airlines #airports #pwd #disability

New research shows that despite 27% of the North American population having a disability, many people with disabilities (PWD) are unaware of others with disabilities at their workplace. The Return on Disability Group's survey of PWD employees reveals that only 45% of respondents knew of other PWD who discussed their disabilities at work. This leads to a lack of engagement, that not only leads to poor retention but also reduced productivity. Companies must prioritize engaging their employees with disabilities, especially at management levels, to retain top talent and maximize productivity. Let's focus on engagement, not just self-disclosure, to delight employees and ensure success. #PWD #disabilityinclusion #productivity #employeeengagement 

What do you want? A simple, yet rarely used question in business. We are learning that this is true of materially all businesses relative to their customers and employees. This is acutely true for customers and employees with disabilities. In the past decade there have increased attempts to deliberately hire people with disabilities (PWD) as part of public and private workforces. This goal, driven by a combination of regulatory requirements and desires for more inclusive working environments, often leads to suboptimal policies in attracting the best talent from the disability marketplace. As part of The Return on Disability Group process, our research team led by Mark Winward, surveyed 1,004 PWD in Q1 2022 to better understand their demands relative to their careers. The implications of this research are clear: to ensure firms are able to hire PWD workers, they must counterintuitively move away from targeted hiring processes, or the idea that a focus on inclusion or accommodations alone is sufficient to attract talent. Instead, firms should focus on what makes a great employee experience: the potential for success, compensation, and a focus on providing employees with the tools needed to succeed in their role. #insights #design #GoToMarket #disability

[CASE STUDY] When brands view disability as a part of consumer demand, everybody wins. Consumers win, because experience improves. Shareholders win, because net revenue grows. Managers win, because they innovate and get paid for doing so. Employees win, because they observe their company serving everyone. People with disabilities win, because they are delighted as both customers and employees. Here's the thing. To get this right, brands must build these demands into core product design. Not “adaptive” this, and “accomodated” that. PWD tell us that they want the core branded experience and they “just want it to work”. The good news: designing from disability can be leveraged to improve experience for all customers. Our team was engaged to create such a design consensus while maintaining ease-of-use solutions for all. Through extensive user testing over a two-year design process, The Return on Disability Group created a set of design “guardrails” to foster the creation of user-centered design concepts throughout the product design lifecycle. Key to the creation of these guardrails was reframing accessibility as a means of customer attraction rather than one of accommodation. Embedded in the design process of these guardrails were a series of prototype review facilitation, focus groups by PWD users, and the delivery of custom design models. Along with more customer transactions, increased revenue, and improved customer service experience for all, the end-product received the CES Innovation Award, New York Design Award, and was a finalist for the Edison Award. The “guardrails” process was later exported to other product streams, further increasing revenue. #insights #design #GoToMarket #CPG #disability

Introducing Dr. Michael Gresalfi. Michael joins The Return on Disability Group as a Strategic Advisor to power our expansion into the United States. I love this picture, taken in our new Toronto office last month. We are discussing the needs of airport and airline clients in the US, and the quagmire of managing through archaic regulations to focus on passenger experience. It captures Michael's passion and focus. Formerly, a member of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's senior staff within the Washington DC area for 23 years, Michael is a proud service-connected disabled veteran. He has provided national security related strategic planning, policy and operations advice and assistance to a wide range of federal agencies and national security programs, with a focus on preventing, protecting, and/or responding to WMD threats and potential attacks on both the Homeland and national security interests. His responsibilities have included developing strategic plans, leading Interagency working groups, and facilitating partnership strengthening activities between federal agencies, in coordination with the White House’s National Security Council. Michael is the co-author of the September 2013 publication "The Rockets' Red Glare" a best-selling techno-thriller novel available in both hard copy and as an eBook on Amazon. Previously, he was Senior Advisor within the DOE’s Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation and concurrently the Senior Advisor within the DOE’s Office of Emergency Operations. He was the co-chair of the Department’s Countering WMD Working Group.

[NEW RESEARCH BRIEF] On December 1, 2023, Statistics Canada | Statistique Canada released its first findings from the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD). A key headline from this release is that the frequency of disability in those aged 15+ in Canada increased from the 2017 survey, from 22% in 2017, to 27% in 2022. Three items stand out. First, disability rates are increasing fastest in working age, or soon to be working age, demographics. This means the engagement and investment in employees must be tailored to reflect the demands of top talent, 20+% of whom have a disability. Second, the increases in disability in these key demographics are likely to be less visible, being predominantly tied to mental health. The most critical implication, with increased demographic size comes increased consumer demand. As disability rates increase, an inevitability due to both raised rates in younger ages and an aging population, the need for companies to design experiences to delight this demographic is essential for growth. The official prevalence of disability is now aligned around 27% in the US and Canada. What say you, European Union? See the below research brief by The Return on Disability Group's Research Team, led by Mark Winward for more detail and a link to the survey.

[CASE STUDY] As customers shift to digitally dominated banking relationships, financial institutions must move beyond “accessibility” testing…fast. Simply meeting WCAG standards does not translate into a delightful (or even a usable) experience. In fact, our team is learning that “a thing” may be perfectly “accessible”, yet the connective tissue (service, process and execution) results in a clear experience failure. To analyze and address these issues, The Return on Disability Group research team, led by Mark Winward, conducted a 30-day “secret shop” – recruiting PWD to use the banking app over the month-long period. Each user kept a detailed log of every transaction/interaction. These users engaged with the app as they normally would, without any assistance from RoDG. This allowed the team to uncover user insights without introducing any bias from researchers. Leveraging insights from actual PWD users, RoDG assisted the client to shift their design thinking from mere compliance to instead maximizing customer experience – and thus revenue – throughout their digital design ecosystem. #insights #design #GoToMarket #banking #disability