Disability & Job Accessibility

Joeita:
I am Joeita Gupta, and this is the Pulse. Each October we recognize National Disability Employment Awareness Month in Canada. We know that one in five Canadians lives with a disability, and we also know that unemployment and underemployment continue to be a reality for many people with disabilities. According to Statistics Canada, in 2022, the employment rate for adults aged 16 to 64 with disabilities was 65.1%. This still lags behind the employment rate for the general population, which is 80.4%. We've talked about needing to make attitudinal changes and no one denies that changing attitudes is the key to ensuring greater workplace participation, but I feel it's time to dig deeper and encourage employers to examine their structures, practices, policies, and processes, and root out ableism once and for all. Today, we discuss disability and workplace inclusion. It's time to put your finger on the Pulse.

Joeita:
Hello and welcome to the Pulse on AMI-audio. Before we go any further, I wanted to remind you that if you haven't already done so, please take a moment to like this video and subscribe to the channel. It's a great way to be notified about future videos and also, I would really appreciate it if you like what you hear on this channel and you see on this channel that you were to reach out and notify your friends and family and perhaps your coworkers as well, so they can also sign up. We post videos every week on a Saturday, and that's how you can stay plugged into the most recent goings-on right here on the program. My guest today is Max Brault, who is vice president, people and change, accessibility consulting at BDO Canada. He's joining me to talk about a couple of new initiatives organized by BDO Canada, and I'm delighted to welcome Max to the program. Hello and welcome to the Pulse. Thanks so much for joining me.

Max Brault:
Well, thank you very much, Joeita. Before I continue my speaking, I just want to give it a quick description of what I look like for our speakers if that's not a problem. So, I'm a middle-aged man with gray hair, a gray beard. I'm wearing glasses that are blue and round. I'm wearing a nice little pink shirt with a multicoloured bow tie. What you don't see is I'm sitting in an electric wheelchair and I'm sitting at my home office. It's a pleasure to be on today.

Joeita:
I'm so glad you joined us. You've really taken trouble... You're probably more dressed up than I am, to be honest with you. Max, tell us a little bit about BDO Canada and what is the mission and mandate of the organization.

Max Brault:
Well, BDO's mandate is like everybody else that's in the consulting world right now, and it stems from an accounting firm. There's about five accounting firms. You probably know the big five. The other four I don't want to really talk about, but we're one of the big five, and we have a branch within BDO that deals with just management consulting, and that's where I fall into. And our mandate with my team is to pretty much simply to help organizations, both governments, NGOs and corporations in understanding what they need to do to become accessibility confident with all the acts that are starting to happen. So, you've got the provincial acts and the federal acts. And the other mandate I want to be very clear about is that majority of the people who work in my unit are individuals with disabilities as well. So, we have a really good understanding of what they term lived experience.

Joeita:
And what is it that got you thinking more generally or broadly about workplace inclusion and addressing the unemployment and underemployment faced by people with disabilities?

Max Brault:
Well, I've been working in this industry now for about 35 years as an advocate for persons with disabilities. I have a stretch working for NGOs and then working for the federal government and now working in the consulting field. And one of the things that I've been noticing is that we've been doing the same thing over and over again in Canada. And to a certain degree, our unemployment rates have not been rising. And there's a saying my grandmother used to say to me when I was growing up saying, "When you do one thing and it doesn't work out, you learn from it. You do it a second time, who's the fool, you? Or do you need to go back and change what you're doing?" And I think we've been doing this for 40 years in Canada, and it's about time we start really changing how we employ, how we look at people with disabilities in this country.

Joeita:
One of the things I've noticed, and I've said this just to friends and family is that for all the talk about needing to address the barriers to employment for people with disabilities, it seems to me at least that those employment numbers aren't getting any better, and we haven't really seen a big change in at least the last 10 to 15 years that I've been following it closely. Assuming I'm not entirely wrong, why do you suppose that is?

Max Brault:
Well, I think it's straightforward to you. It is a conundrum, and we've been spending 40 years trying to educate corporations, governments about why they should be hiring people with disabilities. And one of the things I want to say to you is that, and to your listeners, is we did have a moment here over COVID that really had a profound impact for the community. And I'm not talking about the COVID staying at home, but what it really did is for the first time ever, and we saw this worldwide, is people working from home.

Max Brault:
And as you know, we've been asking to work from home for a long time, so we've proven that we could work from home, but I don't think the numbers jumped up as high as we expected. So, the answer I'm going to say is what you hear from a lot of people. I think it's just fear. I think it's fear of, is it going to cost too much? And if I hire somebody with a disability, am I going to be able to help them in being able to be successful? And what are the repercussions if this is not a successful employment? So, it really comes down to fear.

Joeita:
Fear on the part of the employer?

Max Brault:
That's correct.

Joeita:
Or is there some amount of fear on the part of people with disabilities as well? And I don't blame them, every time you apply for a job, you don't know what you're actually getting. Once you get in the door, if you're able to get in the door, it's anyone's guess how good your relationship with the employer will be, how willing they are to accommodate you. Is there a certain amount of fear that people with disabilities also have in terms of dealing with the employment process?

Max Brault:
Well, I'm going to base myself on some old stats, about five years ago, and these stats need to be updated. 35% of all HR hirings in Canada don't result very well for anybody. So, that's just a general statistical number if you work in HR. When it comes to people from disabilities, it's actually less, it's 20%. So, there's a disconnect there. 20% don't work out, which means the other 80% does work out. So, let's talk about that 80% that is working out and we don't. So, we're hyper-fixating on the 20% that doesn't, and it seems to cause a lot of fear.

Joeita:
Right, that makes a lot of sense. Going back to some of the engagement and some of the initiatives that BDO is working on, you have as part of your mandate chosen to collaborate with two nonprofit organizations to roll out some specific programs to deal with this oh-so-thorny issue of employment for people with disabilities. Can you tell us in a nutshell, which nonprofit organizations you chose to work with and how you managed to whittle it down? Because there are so many amazing not-for-profits that work with people with disabilities. How did you make a determination about which two you were going to partner with?

Max Brault:
Well, I'm going to be straightforward with you here. My business line's only been open now for about four business years. And from my standpoint, that's not a lot of time. It takes about a year for people to start knowing we exist, and then as the years progress, we start getting more people knocking on our door. We didn't actually go around and have a short list of, "Here, we want to work with this organization and that organization."

Max Brault:
What we did is we let a lot of organizations know that we exist and we want to work in partnership with a lot of organizations to understand the disability equation, and part of my philosophy here, Joeita, and I want to be very clear here, is that we want to work with any organization that wants to look at how to increase the situation of employment for persons with disabilities or look at one element of it, and we're here to assist and also help to find funding as well. And the reason why I'm really interested in doing this is because we as a corporation need to understand the accessibility world just as the accessibility world needs to understand the corporate world. And I think this is where we need to start really looking at both that kind of synergy with corporations and NGOs.

Joeita:
One of the partnerships that you've pursued and that we're talking about today is a partnership with the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion in Society, or IRIS for short, where you're collaborating to develop an accessibility engagement audit. Tell us a little more about that.

Max Brault:
So what they want to design, and we're working with them, is they want to design an auditing tool for employment. So, where organizations like a Rogers, a TELUS, or any other corporation of a particular size can go through this auditing tool and really understand exactly some key questions. They fill out the key questions, and then they get kind of an overall status of where they are. And where this is unique is that in BDO, we have a really big reputation within the auditing community, and we really wanted to work with IRIS because as you know, IRIS is a combination of various disabilities as well. It doesn't represent one particular group, it represents a handful of various disabilities, and we wanted to work with them because, and here's the reality of the situation, just because we're really good at auditing, we want to understand what we need to change in the auditing perspective to be reflective of that for people with disabilities.

Max Brault:
So, I'll give you an example here. About 10 years ago, the other minority community, the Indigenous population pushed back and said to a lot of people saying, "You need to have a different strategy on how to engage us." And then there was a lot of people who stood up and started producing some very strict engagement rules on how to engage the Indigenous community. And so, what we're thinking out of BDO and IRIS is this is one of the first examples of a very highly technical group understanding the particulars of the disability community. And at the same time, we're designing a tool for this community to utilize to go back to corporations. So, it's a really interesting conversation that we're having. In one degree, we're explaining to them how the auditing world works, and then they're explaining to my team, how does the disability community interpret these auditing rules and these questions? And so we're hoping, and I love this word, [inaudible 00:11:50], we will come up with an auditing tool that's reflective of the concerns of people with disabilities, but at the same time stays true to the values of auditing.

Joeita:
That's going to be tricky to balance. Look, I don't have a background in auditing, so you'll have to excuse me, but what exactly would this auditing engagement tool look like? So, you said it's going to be asking a series of questions. I know it's early days, but what sort of questions do you think you'll ask as part of this auditing process?

Max Brault:
Well, again, it's going to be a two folded-process. The first process, as we always ask for statistical information, how many people work in your organization. What's the percentage of people who have self-identified with disabilities? What is your self-identification process to identify people with disabilities? And then at the same time, an auditing tool only works when you start actually talking to the community itself.

Max Brault:
Remember, one of the fundamentals of all the acts that are starting to come out, provincial and federal, state, one very key point that you cannot, and you should not write anything without engaging the community. So, we're trying to figure out how to put that into this tool to say, "Now you need to go and actually talk to your workforce with disabilities and ask them some key questions," and that's where we're having some really interesting debates about how to word that, how do I ensure that the community feels safe about answering these audit tools? So I'm going to be honest with you, we're very much at the halfway point right now. We haven't tested this yet, but I'll definitely keep you abreast about what this looks like because we're hoping to have some eureka moments and then some time going, "This works. Let's move on."

Joeita:
But again, what aspects of an employer's processes or practices or structures are you going to be looking at as a part of this auditing tool?

Max Brault:
So, we're going to be looking at does the individual... Was there an onboarding process that was reflective of people with disabilities? Were you accommodated through the whole process to being interviewed and engaged to be recruited? Once you got the job, did you come in, were you set up with a buddy with a disability? Or not a disability, it could be somebody with a disability, it could be somebody that understands how to navigate the system internally, being mindful of their disability. Did you as a person with a disability get accommodated, and how long did that take? And to a degree, did that accommodation take? And then asking some cultural questions. To a degree, did you feel comfortable about being a person with a disability? Do you feel comfortable about continuing your work with a disability? Are you having a voice in the work you're doing? There's a lot of different kind of questions in different stages.

Joeita:
So it's mostly asking questions about the process, but you're not actually going in there and looking at different organizations and saying, "This is the process by which you're hiring, or this is what your website looks like, or this is how you're processing payroll, and this may or may not be the way that you're excluding people with disabilities." You're really trying to develop a question or a set of questions to establish whether employees with disabilities are being included and accommodated adequately in the workplace?

Max Brault:
So, here's something I need to explain about auditing so people really understand, yes, there is an auditing component where you go, "Does this number match this number?" That's the fundamentals of auditing, but there's another fundamentals about auditing that... The best way was pointedly explained to me was auditing is about giving a sense of comfortability to the organization that's being audited. And what I mean by that is we go in and we audit them, and then we come back and we go, "Here's the answers in which we got from the engagement of both your staff and senior staff, and here's the direction you're moving into, and here are some things you need to consider." So, it's about giving a level of comfort to organizations about, is the direction they're taking the right direction, or do they need to stop and take a different direction because they're missing the boat? So, it's about giving a sense of comfortability about what they're doing.

Joeita:
This audit engagement tool, I would hazard a guess, can be applied to a diversity of organizations. As you know, there are some that are very big national organizations that employ thousands of people, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you could have very small, not-for-profit organizations where you maybe have four or five people working together in a small office. So, do you feel that it's versatile enough... And you say it's halfway developed. Do you feel it's versatile enough to apply to all kinds of workplaces?

Max Brault:
I think we're going to have to come up with two elements to this auditing tool, to be honest with you. One's going to be for our employers for 100 and plus employees, and one for our employers that are below 100, but right now we're just trying to figure out, what are the key questions and what are the results going to be of those key questions, because again, it's like everything else. We don't want to be asking a handful of questions, and then the results, well, they're stagnant, so we got to test these questions and we're hoping that they work. But again, we're going to be going back to the community, engaging the community and seeing to again, what the results look like.

Joeita:
How are you planning to engage the community? I know we've talked about it, we've sort of skirted around the issue a little bit, but what's your plan for actually developing this audit engagement tool?

Max Brault:
Well, one of the really interesting things about this is that once we get it to a certain level where we think, "Let's go test it," we plan on calling a handful of organizations that we work with through my organization and say, "Would you like to test this out for us? Here is a few particular questions, and if we could just do some test rounds." So, we're going to be talking to some of my clients and going back to them and say, "Can you test this out for us?" And then the results will come back and we'll get an idea.

Joeita:
And when do you think it'll be ready by?

Max Brault:
Well, we're hoping to have this ready in about a year's time,

Joeita:
So, that's pretty ambitious to get. It seems like a lot to get done in a year's time, but I'm sure you have a handle on it.

Max Brault:
Well, thank you.

Joeita:
The other project that you're working on is a research project that I'm really intrigued by in collaboration with the CNIB or the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, which looks at the federal government's procurement process. Why is it so important to look at the procurement process?

Max Brault:
Well, here's something your viewers don't know. I would say about a year and a half ago, one of the unique things that a large corporation that BDO has, and I'm going to make assumptions that most of the large corporations have this, is we have our internal research team. So, let's say pick company ABC, we want to go and approach company ABC, and we want to do work for ABC. I go to a branch internally and say, "Can you get me all the statistics about this company?" And then I've got a profile on this company. I can also go to this group and say, "Here's a bunch of key variants I want to understand about what's going on in the world. And I use some of the pillars from the act: employment, client services, built environment, and procurement. I asked, I think, about eight questions to this group, and they spent about two months gathering all the statistics, looking at everything that's going on in this country, around the world. They pulled me out a profile on each one of my questions. When it came to procurement, I got zero, and that's the story.

Max Brault:
And I don't know why. And when I look around and I talk to TD Bank, which TD Bank has been doing a phenomenal job on procurement, and I go and talk to Canada Post, they're doing a phenomenal job on procurement. That's it, trying to find organizations out there that are doing work on KPIs for procurement is really difficult to find. And so, there's not a particular standard that we could look at one and go, "They got that nailed." And look at another one go, "They got that nailed." We don't have enough variance to be able to really understand how to design procurement policies or directives that really infuses accessibility.

Joeita:
So, where does the CNIB come into this process and into this research?

Max Brault:
So, they approached us because they were getting funding to do this research, and we recently did a lot of work with PSPC on understanding two very important things. The first thing is understanding what kind of procurement people with disabilities usually provide services to. So when you look at the government, the government sells everything from military arms, like military-grade stuff, to buying pencils, and everything in between and even services. And so, we went through an exercise with them about, where does the bulk of businesses run by people with disabilities or people with disabilities offering services, where is that [inaudible 00:21:25] working group? And then we did an exercise with them on finding out, what are the percentages of organizations owned or run by people with disabilities? What does that look like in Canada? So they approached us saying, "With those two research you've done, we would like to get on board about procurement."

Max Brault:
One last thing I want to say is on top of BDO really well-known for our auditing team, we're also really well-known for our procurement team. We have a team of people who specialize in procurement that help governments and corporations and NGOs about how to design and build their procurement styles. So I thought it was really vital, again, for this team to understand the language of accessibility, to understand the impacts of accessibility in the procurement system. So, as they are understanding the situation and getting a better sense of how to do this, they're able to provide it back to their clients and say, "Keep in mind, you need to make this accessible," and this is what we just recently learned. So remember, I'm always talking about how we both help each other. Community helps me in understanding and my staff understanding the accessibility side, and we hope to teach the accessibility community a little bit about corporate Canada as well.

Joeita:
And so, I'm just trying to wrap my head around this, when we look at the federal procurement process, what are some of the considerations from an accessibility point of view that need to be taken into account when you are designing a procurement process for an entity as large as the federal government?

Max Brault:
Well, the reality is that 90% of the work that's done or the 90% of the procurement that happens, it goes through something called buy and sell for the federal government, if we're just going to use them as an example. So, you have to make sure right from the get go that buy and sell is fully accessible for somebody who's blind, somebody who's neurodiverse, and a whole other multitude of disabilities. And then you got to make sure what they call an RFP or an RFI, which I'm trying to remember now is basically accessible, which is basically-

Joeita:
Like an RFP is a request for proposal?

Max Brault:
Thank you, it's a request for a proposal, and you got to make sure the request for proposal can be read from somebody who's blind. And prior to this, I hate to tell you it wasn't. Now, they're starting to make it happen, but the other part of the process as well, Joeita, I got to make sure is that people who are trying to make it a better world need to also be supplying their proposals in an accessible format back to the government as well. It's a multi-phase approach.

Joeita:
And so, you just mentioned that the CNIB approached you, what precisely will the research look at then? Is it being conducted in phases? Who are they talking to? I know they're not going to know what their conclusions are, but what is it that they're hoping to find? What is the hypothesis that they want to try and prove or disprove?

Max Brault:
Well, they want to find two things. The first thing we want to find is, are people looking at the procurement system in a really cool way? And here's something, I don't know if your community knows this, if the community fully understands this, but as of December of last year on December the 30th, all federal jurisdicted organizations, particularly governments, needed to make their plans public. So, you had all the federal government agencies making their plans public. On June the 1st of this year, all organizations with 100 more employers had to make their plans accessible. So, what we're doing is we're data mining. We're going into those plans and seeing what they're doing from procurement. Are they doing it? Are they addressing it? Do they have ideas? That's the first thing we're doing. The second thing we're doing is we're talking to the Post Canadas, we're talking to the TD banks, we're talking to our friends in the UK and Australia and United States, and we're trying to really understand what kind of KPIs and what kind of indicators we could put into this.

Joeita:
What is a KPI?

Max Brault:
Basically, a KPI is basically key principles of indication. So, it's basically things that when you're looking at a proposal, for example, you're going, "Do they address this, this, and this? Are they explaining this, this, and this?" That's what KPIs are.

Joeita:
Well, and this research, will it be ready also around 2024, or do you have a different timeline for that?

Max Brault:
Sadly, it's actually probably going to be in about nine months' time. For final lines in the report now as we speak, we're hoping to have something that we could start debating in November and December with the team, and then hopefully produce something decent quality by sometime in the next year.

Joeita:
Probably next spring or summer, nine months would probably put you next summer. So, that sounds really promising as well. What do you hope the key takeaway, or what do you think the most immediate impact of the research on procurement is likely to be?

Max Brault:
Well, what I'm hoping is we give some indications to corporations and to the federal government on what they need to be doing to start addressing the accessibility issues that we all know exist in procurement, and really understanding the fundamentals of rate from the start. Again, if you can't access the website, like you were saying for employment, but it's the same thing with procurement, if you can't access the website and you can't access the RPs, how can you get involved?

Joeita:
That's a really good point. Well, Max Brault, we have to leave it there. It's been a really interesting conversation. It's the first time that I've actually gotten into the nitty-gritties of a conversation about workplace inclusion and accessibility and really try to understand how the principles of auditing can help to make sense of that. So, thank you very much for joining us today.

Max Brault:
It was my pleasure.

Joeita:
Max Brault is vice president, people and culture accessibility consulting at BDO Canada. Well, that was an interesting take on employment and workplace inclusion, definitely off the beaten path. I enjoyed it. I'm not sure how much of it... It's one of those interviews where I'll probably have to go back and re-listen to it myself to be perfectly honest with you because auditing is not to my strong suit. But with that said, it was a really fun conversation and I like to push the boundaries of what I understand as well. So, I hope you found that interesting. Leave your comments down below. Of course, if you're listening on YouTube or drop a comment if you're listening to the podcast, but if you would prefer not to do that, you're always welcome to write us an email. Write your feedback at ami.ca. You can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545, that's 1-866-509-4545.

Joeita:
Don't forget to leave permission to play the audio on the program. If you are still on X, formerly Twitter, you can find us at AMI-audio, use the hashtag Pulse AMI. A lot of people work really hard to bring you this program. Our videographer today has been Ted Cooper. Jordan Steeves is our video editor. Marc Aflalo is our technical producer. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for podcast at AMI-audio. Andy Frank is the manager of AMI-audio, and I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the rest of your day.