RAW FILE
2016 USBLN
19th ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE
ORLANDO, FLORIDA
SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
GLOBAL ROUNDTABLE II - CORDOVA 2
1:30 P.M. ET
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This text is being provided in realtime format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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ANKA WITTENBERG: Okay. Ready? Okay. I think it would be great for us to get started. Is this working better? Is this working better? Hello. Yep.
Okay. I would love to get started. I just need-- the technology here. Do you know where the tech guy is?
Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I would really like to get started, and-- are you sure you can hear? I'm not sure about the technique. Can everybody hear me? You can't hear, right? Do we have somebody from the tech here? It's hard to hear. We need the-- I am so close already. No, I just had it in. We'll get there. Okay. Let's try it again. This seems to work. Great. Thank you so much for helping out here.
So I would love--
> LETTY: We're getting ready to start.
ANKA WITTENBERG: Thank you, Letty.
(Laughter)
Sorry. Very key and precise. I really like that one. It's usually me with my German blondness, you know.
So I would love to welcome everybody back from lunch. I think it was an extremely interesting session, and a couple of topics up there with regards to technology, how is the technical transformation also going to have an impact to everybody's life, but that's not what we will be focusing on today in the afternoon.
If I just recap a little bit what we did in the morning, we really started with Tony sharing, again, you know, the story of what has been going on in regards to legislation here in the U.S., and he reminded us again to ensure that we are doing our homework here as well.
Now, me being a European, all I can do is repeat here, but what we did then also was to share more of a best practice and what other companies are doing abroad and how we can ensure that the impact we have we really can share and we can learn from each other. And I just remember Patrick and I had a -- at the lunch at the break a short discussion again because we, for example, had started an inclusion summit in India, and I think if more companies do this -- and here I also come back to Judy, you know-- I think this is where we can really have a huge impact, and that is also what we're going to be focusing on today in the afternoon, and if I say the afternoon, it's actually a good hour that we have, and it would be very nice if we can really focus on getting some tangible outcomes here.
Now, if we look-- we want to really ensure that we can do more of a best practice sharing of what everybody's doing, and what you see here is the different questions that we have, and we will have facilitators at each table to facilitate the session, but the afternoon here is also to give feedback, to give feedback to the USBLN to see where the USBLN could help and support the corporate environment to have more impact and ensure that we really use the resources we have in a very impactful way.
And with that, I would love to hand over because I think you're the best person to help us understand the logistics and really take us through that. Thank you.
LETTY: Thank you, Anka.
ANKA WITTENBERG: Thank you so much, Netty.
LETTY: So welcome back. This one is really loud. I think I'm going to have to hold it this way. Welcome back to the afternoon session. We're really looking forward to getting your input, and one of the things I wanted to share with you is based off the comments and recommendations and points of discussions we have that afternoon, we're going to use that information to pull together a white paper that we will then distribute to everyone that's participated in the morning session and in the afternoon session. So definitely share your thoughts with us that afternoon.
The logistics are really simple. Every table there is a question, and we have a total of five questions, but every table will have the opportunity first to take a few minutes and discuss the question that pertains to your particular table, so Table 1 will address table -- Question 1, et cetera, and then we'll come back together and have -- provide an opportunity for the table reporter/recorder to share the discussion that you've had at your table and then open it up to feedback from the rest of the room, okay. So first is an individual table discussion, and then we'll open it up to a broader room discussion, and we'll be capturing those notes as well. We have a total of five questions, and we also, for those of you who might be a little nervous about being a reporter/recorder, we have some preselected folks to help us. Question 1, Table 1 is going to focus on has your company -- has your company put in place policies, processes to address disability globally, and what are the challenges that you're encountering? All of you have two sheets at your table with all of the questions, so be thinking about those.
But Table 2 is going to focus on how are you increasing the level of awareness in your company globally to work with people with disabilities?
And then Table 3, which is right here in the middle, is going to focus on do you have policies and processes to hire people with disabilities and how -- how are these being communicated?
And then Table 4, way back here, is going to focus on employee resource groups and business resource groups, what are the challenges that are surfacing.
And then Table 5 is going to focus on what kind of outside support would your company need in order to create a more inclusive work environment and how can USBLN support you?
Okay. What I'd like to do is acknowledge the folks that are at each table that are our coordinators, so we have Debra Perry, so Debra, if you can hold your hand up. Oh, Debra, thank you. So we have Debra Perry at Question 1. Izzy Hodge we've got at Table 4. And then Beth Butler we've got at Table 2, and then Andy is at Table 5, and our special facilitator-- no, just because I asked her at the last minute and she's an amazing trooper -- is Chris Crespo who is from EY who will be working on Question 3. What we're going to do is take about 15 minutes to discuss each one of the questions that is assigned to your particular table, and then we'll do a report out. Okay. So the time now begins.
(Breakout session at tables)
LETTY: There's a lot of really great conversation going on, but I just want to give you a two-minute warning to start getting ready to report out. Thank you.
(Continued breakout session at tables)
Okay. I think we're at the time. Are you guys doing okay? Do you guys need more time?
> Yeah, one minute.
LETTY: Okay. One more minute.
Okay. I'm hearing that the-- the noise level go down, so that means you guys are ready to report out.
Okay. So we're going to -- to keep things moving-- keep things moving along, we wanted to give you each a chance to report out, and of the particular table finishes reporting out, then we're going to give you a little -- a couple of minutes so that if you hear something or don't hear something you think we should include and capture to share that, okay.
So each table will have about five minutes to report out, and it's okay if you take a little bit less time. We're going to ask you to report out the major things that came up for you. So we're going to start with Question Number 1, which was: Has your company put in place policies and processes to address disabilities globally, and what are the challenges that you're encountering? So we have the top two or three things that are coming up?
> Put this together quickly in my head. We had representing companies, we had Cisco and Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo is just getting started in their global initiatives, but Virginia, our representative, has had experience at GE and other places. And then we also had Cisco represented, and you heard some about Cisco this morning and the things that they're doing, so I won't repeat all that.
I would like to talk a little bit about the issues that we discussed, the policies and processes.
Wells Fargo is getting started. One of the things they did in getting started was they hired an expert. They brought in Kathy Martinez. Many of you may know her name. So one of the things they did, one of the initiatives they did to get started was brought in Kathy, and then they started looking at partnerships and programs they could get involved with. Although it's not a -- a global one, they got involved with the White House initiative to hire veterans, and this brings some exposure to disability and to the organization that just can be used elsewhere.
Wells Fargo, you may have the question I had, we haven't seen you too many places. They're 97% in the U.S., and they're starting to expand to the Philippines and India, so when you go to Delhi, your Wells Fargo will be there, quick commercial for free.
Let's see. So that's some of the things. Now, we talked -- you heard about Cisco this morning and some of the things that they're doing, and the things that Cisco found is-- one of the challenges is okay, policy is a great thing, but it doesn't always drive behavior, so in order to drive behavior, you have to do some other things, and one of the things that they found and that Judy also talked about in her experiences is partnerships. You have to develop local partnerships with local organizations that work with people with disabilities.
And then we talked about how difficult that can be, and Pat-Pat, right, from Cisco was talking about how it's different in every country and every location. You -- they were hoping they'd get one basic approach they could take everywhere, and they found, well, the principles, such as partnership, might be the same, but the practice of who you get to be your partner and what kind of things they bring to the table and what kind of things you have to bring to the table, that's going to be different, depending on the country, and it reminded me of the conversation this morning about culture and being in different countries, so some of those things are going to be different.
But generally, one of the ways to deal with the challenges was partnerships, getting involved with other programs. I think those are pretty much -- oh, we talked a lot about other challenges, but we didn't quite get to the point of how to deal with them, but that accessibility is a big challenge. Safety can be a big challenge, and not just when you think about disability. In many countries you go to, there are not good safety practices in those factories or workplaces already, and--
> For anybody.
> What was that?
> For anybody.
> For anybody, right. Judy brought up things where she's seen that people with disabilities don't have the same kind of access to vocational training that others may have, so therefore there's inequities built into the system of getting people with disabilities trained. We also talked about how people with disabilities are also invisible to recruiters, even if they have been through training or schooling, they don't always -- they're not always seen by recruiters, so while Judy may go there and as a well-known disability rights advocate people will show up and she will get 50 or 60 people who have college degrees in China--
> India.
> India, okay. India, China. The point is then Virginia might go and she's not going to get those people showing up because they're discouraged, they don't feel people want to hire them, or they're not getting the information. They're just not getting the information. So this is, again, where your local organizations and partners can be very effective.
I think I'm pretty much done, but if I left anything out-- and we also had NIPON organization join in, and Judy is from the private sector. Anything I left out?
LETTY: Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Did anybody have anything else that you think we should make sure we capture as you heard Debra talk?
> I just wanted to reinforce a point. You know, we made a very prescriptive and deliberate attempt to hire people with disabilities in a lot of these markets, and the single biggest challenge that we ran into is sourcing candidates, so she made the comment about people are invisible. That's sort of how it manifests itself, but the biggest single challenge is sourcing candidates in these other markets, and that's where the whole partnership piece comes into play.
LETTY: Thank you very much. So on Question 2 we had how are you increasing the level of awareness in your company in order to work with people with disabilities?
> Yeah, I've been elected scribe and if I can read my writing.
My name is (Inaudible) Wright and I'm working with Northrop Grumman in their endeavor here. I don't remember the names -- I remember Bloomberg, okay, and I don't remember all the names-- JPMorgan, AT&T, and Facebook and United Technologies was at all table, and we talked about organizing an accessible office. You said two points, and we're going to have trouble with that.
(Laughter)
But organizing an accessible office and creating a single application that's accessible for everybody, okay, and that was -- that was it. We also talked about drafting questions for hiring managers when you're dealing with accommodation issues so that -- and that's -- of course, that's hiring managers all over the world, and so if there's issues relating to getting a person moved from one place to the other and what are those issues, and that was also done through an awareness campaign.
One of the suggestions was to have -- we scoured -- I know AT&T, they scoured the YouTube for accessibility videos that were used, like short clip videos to educate, depending on what it is. We brought up the issue of the Cloud here and the Cloud does not read screen reader, and the company had decided to go with the Cloud as their central base, and now it's not -- it's not entirely accessible, and so we've got to get the product -- we've got to get the product teams early to look at that.
Different products according to different countries, that was constantly a challenge when we were dealing with it. ERG subgroups, so if you have-within a company you have visually impaired people, JPMorgan, what did you say, you had 240,000 employees and they had quite a few different ERG groups and subgroups, so they could always go to them to ask for answers if they needed answers.
Obviously, the -- having an accessibility, disability influence office, separate office, was real important, whether it was under HR or Business Management or whatever.
Working with -- and this is back, again, to what this table said about partnerships-- working with national organizations, central organizations, or local organizations to be able to access information that -- what do we do? You know, and we can go to these local organizations-- consumer organizations that have a tremendous amount of support that they can bring. Did I miss anything?
> (Off microphone)
> Yeah, the Empathy Lab, and that was really cool because it was -- one of them was to go in different countries, like they -- the example used was a phone where in some countries they still have the old flip phones and they don't have any other phones, and so when you're dealing with accessibility and visual impairments, you go there, and, you know, you look at what we're working with and how do we work with people and their visual imparity?
And then the last thing on the Empathy Lab concept was to get people to work alongside of a person that -- I know Beth talked about her visual imparity-- to work alongside with her when she was in her previous company because now all of a sudden they could see things that they never even thought of before, so...
LETTY: Thank you. That was really good. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Does anybody have anything else from the greater audience that you'd like to add or any suggestions or questions for the group?
> I'm loud.
LETTY: Okay. Sorry. We'll make you louder.
> I'm Greg with McKesson. One thing we're doing from an awareness perspective is we partnered with Cornell University. They have a just-in-time Disability Inclusion toolkit which comes with a very reasonable fee and is open license within your active directory, like anybody with the email address can access it, so it's built as a just in time tool for your managers, but your Human Resources groups can use it and access it as well, but it has disability etiquette, it has awareness, awareness policies, interviews and dos and don’ts. It's a checklist. It's a pretty functional tool for a reasonable cost. I think it's a two-year license once you purchase it. We're finalizing our customization now. We'll roll out shortly, but we're hopeful it's a very usable tool. (Off microphone)