Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Joshua Wintersgill Of ableMove On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability
An Interview With Eric Pines
Be guided by your intuition
Don’t compare yourself to others
Stick by your values every day
Learn to say no
Become a master at prioritizing the real priorities
As we all know, over the past several years there has been a great deal of discussion about inclusion and diversity in the workplace. One aspect of inclusion that is not discussed enough, is how businesses can be inclusive of people with disabilities. We know that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. What exactly does this look like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about the “How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Are Disabled “.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Joshua Wintersgill.
Joshua Wintersgill is an award-winning entrepreneur, technologist, speaker, lobbyist and campaigner. He founded easyTravelseat following the difficulties he faced when travelling as a wheelchair user and wanted to make travelling safer and more enjoyable for disabled passengers.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
In 2017, sipping a Corona and reading a book by Simon Sinek, called Start with the Why by a pool in sunny Tenerife caused a shift in my mindset. A realization of the systemic barriers I face traveling by air as a wheelchair user and how I could make change that would positively impact how wheelchair users board on and off an aircraft was the start of a new beginning that would lead me to getting investment from the Founder of easyJet Sir Stelios Haji-Ianonou and his easyGroup business.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Courage
Failure
Vision
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work-related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
Margins have been a challenge, especially in the medical space. Wanting to keep manufacturing in the UK is costly, and keeping retail costs low whilst giving distributors and resellers the right margins has been a struggle, almost impossible. Therefore, we decided to move to Latvia reluctantly and subsequently to Turkey for most of our products. After looking at trade deals on imports and production costs, we have been able to make substantial improvements to our profit margins, which are now starting to show in our P/L. It’s always a worry moving manufacturing, especially abroad, but having trusted sources and quality control procedures in place plays a crucial role in making that jump aboard.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
I am currently working on a project to develop a new design of seating equipment, and once the testing has been finalised and the product patented, then we can start to talk about it. I am extremely excited about this as it could revolutionize air travel for people with seated postural disabilities. We should be able to talk more about this early in the New Year.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about inclusion. Can you tell our readers a bit about your experience working with initiatives to promote Diversity and Inclusion? Can you share a story with us?
We have plans to expand ableMove in Europe and partner with people who themselves have disabilities, which has already begun. We also have brand ambassadors who do invaluable work to support and to promote our products which they use, through their social media channels and blogs, who document their travels using ableMove products and equipment which helps them daily. It’s a great way to champion disabled influencers and reach our audience in a fun and dynamic way.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
Creating and fostering an inclusive work culture is vital not only for employees’ career development but also their personal progress as individuals. Mentorship is a great tool that a lot of businesses seem to have abandoned. For people with disabilities in particular, having that support gives them confidence and encouragement to speak out about their difficulties or if they are struggling to decide which next steps to take or to progress in their role.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what this looks like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Can you please share a few examples?
In my view, reasonable accommodations include wheelchair-friendly premises, widened doors and ramps for easy access, personalised training and support that meet the employee’s needs, for example flexible working hours for doctor’s appointments, providing equipment to assist them in their role, personalised benefits, allowances etc. which are all legal, reasonable adjustments under UK law so I hope these will be adopted in the US.
Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? If you can, please share a few examples.
Having a representative for disabled employees should they need to raise issues that HR aren’t in a position to address, implement company-wide training to weed out bias and to create more empathy and understanding.
This is our signature question that we ask in many of our interviews. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started My Career”?
- Be guided by your intuition
- Don’t compare yourself to others
- Stick by your values every day
- Learn to say no
- Become a master at prioritizing the real priorities
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
“Put can’t in your pocket and pull out try” — a life quote given to me at the age of 4 by my wonderful Nan.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
We have actually just started a movement that will impact 16 million disabled people in the UK — it’s called Rights on Flights — visit www.rightsonflights.com
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Visit our website — www.ablemove.co.uk, follow rights on flights on social media. Or follow ableMove Uk
They can find more information about the ableMove Ltd brand and products on my website. They can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up to date with my projects and campaigning.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Joshua Wintersgill Of ableMove On How Businesses Make… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.