What is it more important...

Good morning, everyone. This is Danielle and Christy from ND Visionary Partners and various other brands. So we are here talking to you about what is more important in your business, because Christy did a webinar the other day, and I'm gonna let her give us a little background on that in a second, but Things that make us really think, especially when you're bringing in HR and just the company cultures that exist currently out there. So Christy, tell us a little background on why this is coming up as part of a conversation.

Absolutely. So earlier this week, I presented at the Golden Key Academy webinar on invisible disabilities, what you see, what you don't see does cost. cost you. And as we were unpacking what they are and what, what companies can do to help maximize personal effectiveness, I was sharing my own personal story of— I, so I have what's called vocal cord dysfunction. When I'm exposed to perfumes, fragrances, scents, anything like that, they'll lock up. I can't breathe. I could pass out. It's not a fun moment. And as I was sharing that, I disclosed to colleague, and the colleague said, well, I don't care, I'm going to still wear perfume, you have to figure it out. Fast forward, I was moved to a different side of the building by myself because that was the accommodation that they could make, despite the fact that there was a policy in the company to not wear perfumes or strong scents. And so that, that this came up in a great discussion of, well, how can, you know, if I'm asking for an accommodation or asking for a request to support me so that I can actually Mm-hmm. Perform my job duties and work, but I'm asking somebody else to do something, to do something different than what they're doing. What is— isn't that, you know, isn't that kind of conflicting and unacceptable too? And so I was like, wow, this is a really good conversation we need to have because not every company has a policy around perfumes or things like that. And so how does one person's need for working effectively exist When somebody else has another preference?

So my first answer, when Christy and I chatted about this yesterday during our meeting, was if it's part of policy, then policy needs to be adhered to. Like, no, to me, that's a no-duh moment. I mean, is that my autistic brain going, hello, it's written policy, people. The person that was not following the policy should be following the policy, and company needs to Enforce it. But what happens when it's not policy?

Right, right. It's—

I—

it was— it was— I mean, it was— for me, it would have been better, honestly. I mean, encourage a conversation. Just encourage a conversation instead of panicking. It was like— I mean, I mean, the— our HR person wasn't co-located in the same building, so I could— I could hear his deer-in-the-headlight look while I'm asking this question and having a moment. And, you know, I, my, my immediate response is just how, like, find out what each person is thinking and feeling and find a way to find a solution that can meet the needs and decide, does this need to be a policy? Does this need to, does this need to get institutionalized so that other people are also benefiting?

And this comes up a lot, especially in the invisible disability world. There are policies that exist and aren't enforced. There are policies that don't exist that need to be put in place. But what happens when it could hurt somebody feel— somebody's feelings? And I think right now in our current corporate culture, that tends to be leaned on more than somebody's physical distress, unfortunately. And in your case, that's actually dangerous.

Yes, it is.

Yeah. Like passing out, you could pass out, hit your head and die. I mean, and, and unfortunately, that's not an exaggeration. But we know of, and you were telling me about, you know, somebody who's allergic to onions and garlic or something and can't attend company dinner functions because of it.

Not even just dinner functions. They have a corporate event and they're catering and she, you know, and she, it's anaphylactic airborne allergy to onions and garlic and being told, well, just don't show up. Versus changing the menu or trying to find an alternative solution. It is tough. I mean, the one thing that she pointed out to me, I thought, wow, it's a great conversation. She said, well, what if somebody is in a wheelchair and will you accommodate them and make sure that they can get there? And the answer was yes, of course we would. Well, then why are we not giving the same weight or the same consideration for other things that are— can be physically detrimental for the person and we're choosing to over-index for the comfort of other people? of folks for a menu or for perfume or anything like that. It's— it just seems like we're behind the times.

We are definitely behind the times. And, and it— just so you know, when it comes to ADA laws, if, if Christy as an employee wanted to take the perfume thing to the ADA, you want to know what she would— she would win. Because that is a reasonable accommodation, and it was already part of HR policy.

Okay.

And it wasn't being followed for a disability. Peanut allergies, that's a really common one, and most people that have a peanut allergy are deathly allergic, anaphylaxis.

Shock.

Or worse. And most company schools are now peanut-free zones.

Exactly.

Anything that causes that same type of reaction should be treated exactly the same.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It just feels like though some things are becoming more mainstream and able to be talked about, and some things are just still kept under the surface and not knowing, or not— or perhaps, Danielle, not even making that connection that you're making, that treat this the same as this. They're very similar. So let's, let's put them in the same bucket because it has the same implications.

And granted, most people aren't great with pattern recognition. So that is very much— as a neurodivergent individual, it is something that I instantly have because it is one of my superpowers. And I do want to call it a superpower because it has come in handy many, many times and saved a lot of money for companies because I have good pattern recognition. This is why bringing in specific consultants to talk about these things is so important as a company, because people You don't see what you don't see. You don't know what you don't know, and you don't have a process for things that you don't know and you don't see. And that's why a consultant needs to be brought in for these types of things, because you should have ADA compliance for every single thing, especially if it exists for a peanut allergy. It should exist for perfume and onions and garlic and all across the board. If you have a lift to get around stairs or an elevator for somebody in a wheelchair, then why is somebody who is neurodivergent who needs to be able to pace in a cubicle not allowed to do the same? These are things that it does not make sense why companies aren't providing that. And it comes back to— and we, Christy and I, have to have this conversation all the night, all the time— personal effectiveness. Why aren't we looking at employees' personal effectiveness?

I think it's just that it's— I think companies just feel that it's too hard and that if they open that can of worms, what is going to pop out? It's, you know, remember the Chock Full of Nuts can that the worms popped out? I think that companies are really afraid that if we start to look at one, things are going to come out of the woodwork. And I've also heard companies also afraid of what if people are going to start saying that they have an invisible disability or disability And they don't. And what do we have to do there? So they're thinking dollars and cents and legal costs, from what I'm hearing.

Yes. So let's talk about the cost of not providing for those with invisible disabilities. So there are so many ADA cases out there, so many ADA cases. I have a client, and it's not even on the ADA website yet still, who won millions of dollars because she had a manager that refused to let her take notes.

Yeah.

Does that sound ridiculous? Because it is.

It is. It is. All of us take notes. All of us take notes. Come on, all of us take notes.

Seriously, she just took them because of amazing pattern recognition and amazing deep attention to detail. Took really detailed notes, right? Okay, isn't that a plus for your team? Hello, put this woman in charge of taking notes for everything so everybody stays on task. This is not a difficult conversation, but there are other ridiculous ones. Like, um, there is an ADA case out there where someone before never even was hired by the company, and because they wouldn't accommodate for— it was something for— I don't remember.

In-person interview, is that the one? Yeah, yeah, because the auditory processing, they couldn't, they couldn't have a Zoom or a phone call, so they asked us to come into the office. Yeah.

I think they won $275,000 or something like that.

It never even worked for the company. I know, I know.

That's one of my favorite ones to bring up. I'm like, your lack of being able to have any understanding of what's going on out there is costing your company money.

Yeah, yeah.

Or losing you money. And not just necessarily costing you extra, but it's losing you money because If you aren't providing accommodations, and I really hate that word, and that's why I love how you talk about personal effectiveness, to maximize somebody's personal effectiveness. If you have somebody who's taking care of a sick parent, a sick child, whatever, and you aren't allowing them to come in a couple hours late once a month, well, for doctor's appointments and stuff like that, and you're, you're being a big pain in the butt about it, you're decreasing that person's personal effectiveness. By at least 50%, if not more. And that decreases your productivity as a company.

Well, so actually last night I went to a gratitude dinner and met a very lovely gentleman that was sharing about his experience. So, and it's considered, it's covered under invisible disabilities. So he had bouts of cancer and part of the treatment was removal of thyroid, which means you have to have constant medication. But until you get that medication regulated, you're— it can be an emotional roller coaster, right? And so he requested those accommodations and said, by, you know, by the afternoon when, when the levels are different, moods are going to be unstable, and asked for just some simple things like front-loading the day or other things like that. And, and at the end, I mean, his story is— It's so powerful. It's a sad but more often seen case that they let him go because of the mood swings instead of accommodating or helping him to figure out the right schedule or move meetings earlier than 3 PM and all of that stuff. Easy things that companies can do. And he's such, he's such a valuable member of the HR community and does a fantastic thing. And that was just a loss. Like, they— I really, I really feel for the company that they didn't think, let's lean in and help him because he asked for help. He's, he's one of the few that actually does.

Things like that just blow my mind because that is bad managers. That's a bad manager, not Yeah. Not— there's nothing beyond that. And that's where we come in, and the Visionary Partners comes in, and we take a look at the company culture first and then train that company culture and create a better company culture for your employees, for your managers. Because the manager having to fire somebody, there's a cost to getting rid of an established employee. Of at least their full year salary, maybe even double that, because you've got to hire somebody else and train them. And it takes about 9 months to a year to get them on board and working at the same level. So you're probably losing 2 years' worth of one employee salary because you wouldn't let him work earlier in the day and still do the same amount of work. He wasn't asking to change the amount of work he was doing.

Nope, he was not. He's not.

Just hours.

Just hours. Well, and that's, you know, for us at Next Conversation Consulting, we look at the similar things too, because, you know, you talked about the ADA, but we look at also like the Fair Labor Standards Act and how jobs are categorized, where it's interesting that there are a lot of salary-exempt employees, meaning exempt from overtime. You don't have to pay time and a half, all of that. And it's— you get— you're actually compensated on the body of work. Not the number of hours that you work. And that's how they define it. And so what we end up doing is treating a lot of employees like, well, you didn't put in the hours or this or that versus how much work you actually did, which is encompassing of your role. And so that's, I mean, that's the biggest thing that we see. We kind of help try to shift that perspective a little bit and look at what's being done.

And we look at it from an invisible disability perspective. We really hyperfocus in on invisible disabilities, obviously ND, neurodiversity, Divergency is, is one of our specialties here. But we really take a look and say, how much are you decreasing your company's overall productivity?

Yeah.

How much can we increase it just by proper training and proper understanding of what invisible disabilities need? And again, it's not about accommodations. And companies hear that at first and they get very, like, worried that we're going to cost them a ton of money. Hiring us The last company we did stuff for, and it was a very small company, but last company we did stuff for, we saved them 40% in accommodations costs.

Wow.

Just by training managers.

Absolutely. Well, and then we—

40%!

I know, that's not just for training, and that's ROI on the training. And so what we do is we bring you in and partner with you, and we bake that into their leadership development training. We bake that into all All the performance management, we bake that into succession planning so that the way that they think and talk is part of and not a thing that stands alone and an extra training you have to take. No, no, it's part of how you are as a leader, how we promote leaders, how we reinforce leadership, all of that.

How we train our leaders because a lot of leaders are fantastic employees and the reason why they got promoted to leadership. But leaders are built, not born.

Well, yeah, it is. Yeah, we work with leaders and with everybody as they're making those mindset shifts. If you know, once it's, it's a whole different way of thinking once you start leading people and leading people to lead people and then leading the company. And if you don't understand what comes with that, you don't understand what you have to do to help the people that, that are, that are working with you and alongside you, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And 40%, when I say 40% savings, I, I know that I've worked with other companies where we've saved them way more. That's just the newest one on the top of my head because it's there. But accommodations usually cost companies very, very little, very, if anything at all, like allowing your employee to come in at 5:00 AM and stay until 2:00 PM versus starting at 9:00 AM and having to work till 5:00 PM. They're still doing the same amount of work. They're probably increasing their effect— you're increasing their effectiveness by allowing them to work whatever it was they asked for. You're also decreasing their need for mental health support, as much mental health support, as many sick days and all of those things by allowing, accommodating by a little bit. We're not asking you to change the hours. We're not asking you to change the workload in most cases. We may be asking you to balance the workload slightly differently across your team, but— Not change what's getting done, ever.

Absolutely. Well, and even using— Danielle, to your point, some things already exist that companies are already paying for and their resources not even being leveraged, like in meeting protocols, sending agendas in advance or turning on closed captioning, turning on transcriptions, allowing it to be recorded so someone can look at it again afterwards and make sure that they understand what was said. Those things exist. They're— some of them you don't even have to hit a button. They're already going to be at your fingertips. You just change the setting and it goes.

You're already paying for it.

Exactly.

It's something you're already paying and not utilizing properly, which, um, allowing, like I said, an employee to use their own noise-canceling headphones in the office. I don't know how many clients I've had There's no reason why anybody should have to request an accommodation for using their very own noise-canceling headphones.

Sure, I know.

Why, why is that an accommodation that anybody has to ask for?

Well, nowadays, with most of the offices being cubicle environments, um, even those who don't have invisible disabilities are doing the same thing because they need the focused time to think, and hearing everybody's phone calls, conversations really limits their ability to do it. So It's becoming more and more prevalent to see the, to see the full headsets or the earbuds, or just so people can get the work done.

And I had to write an accommodation this week and have our therapist on team, therapist sign off on it for using noise-canceling headphones in the office. I was like, are you kidding me that we even have to ask for this? This is ridiculous.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm dumbfounded. I'm dumbfounded. Yeah.

But most companies have things like Zoom, Teams, Microsoft Teams. They're using all of these tools that are perfect for those with invisible disabilities because they increase everyone's personal effectiveness. And by increasing personal effectiveness, you're increasing your bottom line as a company. And that's why we come in and we talk about these things. What is more important?

Exactly.

You in an outdated Yep. Wrong thought pattern on what an accommodation is, on what policy needs to be, on not accommodating for disabilities, allergies, things like that, or actually doing it right and being unfortunately a better company for it and one of the few. Because are we seeing more issues with companies than we are seeing companies that are doing it right? Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope someday I get worked out of a job that I don't have to consult like this anymore, that companies just get it. And the fact that we've had DEI for 20— okay, more than that, 30-something years, and we still need those types of policies in place tells us that that was ineffective and we need to change how we're doing things.

Absolutely, absolutely. And a lot of some of the conversation that popped up on the webinar this week was asking if Certain things are just US-based. And so yeah, a lot of this is the US, is how here in the United States we look at things, and from our laws, our regulations, leave, leave, leave the borders, and it's much more open, and it's much more inclusive, it's much more embracing invisible disabilities, disabilities, it's just people. And just how do we maximize personal effectiveness?

Exactly.

How do we get to that? That way of working.

So I had this conversation last night with somebody, and they are actually somebody who is currently working overseas. They are in South Korea right now. Um, her husband's in the military, and she carried her job over to South Korea and working in a corporate in South Korea, which I just find very cool. And I had to ask her this question. So what type of— because she's in HR, so she was the perfect person to ask this question of. She's like, nobody needs to ask those questions. We just provide that. We ask, what do you need this month to make you better at your job? And she said, and we have an employee whose mom is really sick and going through, through cancer treatments and stuff. We gave her variable hours without her even asking. Somebody heard, brought it to HR. We gave her variable hours. This is the body of work that you must get done in order to keep your job. We don't care when you do it, how you do it, and you must be available to your client, your caseload, during work hours. That was it. That was all she was told.

Wow.

Can you imagine being told that here?

Oh no.

I've never heard of that happening in the US.

Oh no, no, no, because nobody's going to disclose to a coworker that they're struggling with something. They're going— because they don't want to have that stigma, because they don't want to be treated less than or looked on of like, oh, we've got to accommodate. We just have to change the language. Mm-hmm.

I mean, this woman didn't even MS.

I know.

She just got it.

I know. I'm— oh man, uh, that— well, that actually gives me hope that, that we can get there. 100% hope that it's possible. We just have to take the cue of those who have gone before us and are doing it. Mm-hmm.

And, and there are other countries doing it. There are other spaces that do it. There are companies here in the US do it. I know I do this here, and D. Vigenère NDL Loud, we— every single member of my team has a disability, some of them visible, some of them invisible. I have a profoundly deaf person on my team, so we have changed some of the software we use to make sure that there is closed captioning on everything for him. We have people who are autistic and ADHD. Obviously, we're all neurodivergent, so we have agenda builders and we have closed transcription and closed captioning on even for the rest of the team. And Nobody is expected to work. I have people that work at 3 AM. It's great. Go for it.

Exactly. Yeah.

Does it take a little bit extra work for me as a manager? Yeah, tiny. Like tiny bit. But now that we have protocols and everything in place, there's, there's no issues with that.

Exactly. As long as— I mean, at the end of the day, that's the key is finding the middle ground of So they're working at 3 AM, cool. When can you tie off with them and meet with them and finding that mutual time that works for you? That it doesn't— I mean, my email signature says my working hours may not be yours. Don't— please don't feel obliged to respond if this isn't your working hours because of that, because I do work different hours, off hours, when I'm more productive, when I'm not productive. And, you know, I'm sensory— I've shared with you, I'm sensory neurodiverse. So sometimes if I've gotten overwhelmed from all of the calls and the meetings and all of that, I'll just take some time away and then I come back to it when things have resolved. And you just have to, you know, if I would have to do that 9-to-5 thing again and not, you know, not have my own firm, it would be rough because 9-to-5, trying to pack it all in, it's a challenge to begin with because of the workload, but then it can be a challenge because of all the other stuff in the, sometimes in the work environment.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And it's simple things. They were simple things. We already had Zoom. We just had to turn closed captioning on. We already have transcription software and all of that. We just had to turn it on. It was a checkbox. All of these things are very possible. And I'm a very, very, very small company. There are a total of 8 of us. You know, there aren't a ton of us here. And I'm still accommodating every single employee the way they need to be accommodating. If I can do that as a tiny, tiny startup, HP, the HPs and Siemens and Philips and all of those companies can do the same thing.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you and I, when we get together and meet, we, we both turn on our— my Fathom, your Otter.ai. They're going in the background, they're taking our notes, and they automatically, automatically send us the notes, the transcription, everything, including our action items, which is lovely, lovely feature.

I love, I love that. Without that, I would fall apart, I swear. But there are things that companies can do. And what is more important? Honestly, the question that I like to ask a company is, what is more important, your bottom line and the profit you're bringing in?

Yeah.

Or you disappearing in the background?

Yeah. Well, I mean, in my— so I, I post, you know, this question was posed when the question was posed, um, earlier this week. You know, my response was, I said, well, what is more important? The fact that I'm passing out, I could pass out, and I'm not doing any work, zero work, or what's more important, this person's comfort or strong desire to wear perfume? What is most important to the company at that point? And I would say, you know, for me, I, I guess it's just that it's a little too black and white for me because of You know, I'm the one on the receiving end. I don't think that, you know, personal preference of perfume should trump somebody actually physically falling over and not being able to do anything for the rest of the day. Because the thing I forgot, I never mentioned to you, is that it also triggers an immediate migraine. And if anybody has struggled with migraines, they are no joke because you are out for the count. And so, you know, no breathing and a headache, not a good combo.

And again, it's a simple answer: adhere to the protocol that already exists in that particular case. And that just blows my mind that a company just— it's already policy.

Hello?

I don't understand.

I know, I know. But assume it wasn't policy. Like, what is the most— then what is— then what becomes the most important thing, right?

So the thing that becomes the most important thing is if you have anything else that's a similar policy, then you must follow suit and follow the pattern. Like, and that's not just my pattern recognition, that's from a legal ADA standpoint that needs to be followed. And again, so many companies just don't. If you have questions, if you are in HR, if you are a manager, if you own a company, big, small, medium-sized, whatever it is, and you have questions about this conversation or other conversations you hear us talk about here at Envisionary Partners, please let us know. You can reach out to Christy and I below. We are always happy to have these conversations. And we are going to be having a lot more. Christy's going to be joining me once a month for conversations. Well, maybe more than that. We may drag her into some more conversations here and there. I hope that you have an amazing day. And I hope you got something out of this. What is more important to your company? I want to hear from you.