Accommodations for Invisible Disabilities
How You and Organizations Can Offer a Helping Hand
Accommodations and Practices
First, it is important for a company to be open and understanding towards disabilities. If they are open about disabilities people will feel safer to disclose them. Creating an open environment is more than just being friendly and sympathetic. It is also about managing expectations (Prince, 2017). Hypothetically, if a job description is thorough and clear about what will be needed from an employee they may be more likely to disclose about their invisible disability. A person who knows their disability will impede upon them being able to fulfill job obligations then they are less likely to apply.
When employees feel that their disability does not affect their job they do not disclose it. But, when they feel that it does impact their job they feel the need to disclose. Part of not disclosing under normal circumstances was a general feeling of privacy and the disability not being anyone else's business (Norstedt, 2019). This further provides proof that good practice is to create good expectations for employees. People with invisible disabilities are not to be shamed or shunned for them. This is simply stigmatization. Instead, openness from the beginning is preventative of invisible disabilities becoming a problem and allows people nondisclosure if it makes them more comfortable.
Do not stigmatize people with invisible disabilities. This helps people feel welcomed in an organization. Invisible disabilities is a wide category of aspects associated with people. Different cultures may have different ideas about what certain disabilities mean. However, it is important to be aware of these stigmas so people do not feel threatened by disclosure. One man felt a stigma due to being a man with fibromyalgia because it is more commonly associated with women (Norstedt, 2019). This is an intersection of how disability and gender work. In some people's eyes having a "womanly" disability makes people feel lesser when they want to appear masculine. If a company is not inclusive and does not create and understanding and welcoming culture then it will again prevent some people from disclosing.
Organizational Interventions
As with other major changes in an organization the higher ups are very important in the starting process. One intervention managers can use is to help create awareness. October is the diversity awareness month and a great place to start (Papini, 2020). Awareness is a major stepping stone in creating the future. It is square one. If people are aware of invisible disabilities and begin to see them as real rather than imaginary then change can occur.
Part of creating change in an organization is how a disability is viewed. This can help end the discrimination people with disabilities face. Members of organizations should be educated on specific disabilities in certain environments. What is considered a disability in one area may not be considered a disability in another. This view considers a disability a person and environment mismatch. It is called the International Classification of Functioning model or the ICF-model (Vornholt et al., 2018). This means that someone with a disability is not inherently "bad" and helps to remove the stigma by removing the negative essence of disability in all cases. Instead, it views a person as disabled only if they are in an environment that is not well suited for them. Most people can relate to a situation where an environment has impacted their ability to perform which should help encourage sympathy and understanding.
References
Norstedt, M. (2019). Work and Invisible Disabilities: Practices, Experiences and Understandings of (Non)Disclosure. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 21(1), 14–24. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.550
Papini, J. (2020, April 2). Supporting Invisible Disabilities in the Workplace. Retrieved from Association for Talent Development.
Prince, M. J. (2017). Persons with invisible disabilities and workplace accommodation: Findings from a scoping literature review. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 75-86. Retrieved from https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-vocational-rehabilitation/jvr844
Vornholt, K., Villotti, P., Muschalla, B., Bauer, J., Collela, A., Zijlstra, F., Van Ruitenbeek, G., . . . Corbière, M. (2018). Disability and employment – overview and highlights. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 40-55. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2017.1387536