Claire Harvey is a Paralympian who was captain of the Seated Volleyball for Great Britain at the 2012 games and now brings her fire and skill to the global world of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Vodafone. “Lots of my learnings from sport cross-fertilise my thinking about business” she says with a grin when we chat on Zoom, warning that her dogs “may go mad if the postman comes.”

Harvey has always been sporty. “I came from a big rugby family and played rugby union when I was a kid, in the women’s team because there was no girls’ rugby. So, when I acquired my spinal cord disability, the natural thing to do was to look to sport to fill that gap in my life. I was lucky in terms of timing in that it was around the time that the UK was starting to gear up towards London 2012.”

Claire went to a have-a-go Sports Day, and tried lots of different disability sports, but says: “If I'm honest, I didn't really want to do them, because I didn't want to have a disability. I didn't see disability sport in a positive light at that point in my life”. But that all changed when she discovered sitting volleyball. “I was rubbish, but I loved it. It's a team sport. It's super-fast. It's super physical. And up until elite level you play able-bodied, disabled, all genders, all sizes, all ages, all disabilities, all together.” It was important to Claire “not to feel segregated in a corner”, a theme which recurs often during our conversation about inclusion in business. Since then, she has taken up Paralympian athletics and “was due to go to Rio but I broke my hand, but I still play volleyball for Great Britain.” 

As we talk it becomes clear that when Claire talks about accessibility, she means creating a level playing field for everybody, whether that is on the pitch or in the office. When it comes to Vodafone, she is a great believer in a “glocal” approach. “How do you have a global impact with a local relevance and feel? How do you enable people to fully participate and get to the same outcomes, while recognising that the route to those outcomes might need to be very different, whether that’s about geography, disability or any other of the inclusion strands?”

She stresses it is important not to put disability in one bucket, but to “recognise that different disabilities have lots of different needs and barriers to overcome, that this isn’t about ‘saviour-ship’ but about showing people's potential and enabling them to fully participate. I'm not limited because I have a spinal cord injury. I'm limited because society wasn't built around someone with a spinal cord injury. So, it's about how we move the infrastructure rather than try and fix the person.”

At Vodafone, she explains, “we have inclusion standards around how to run meetings and events, or display information. We run like that all the time, irrespective of who is there.”

What does that mean? “At the start of every meeting we have a slide that reminds people how to put the closed captions on so they can be read in different languages. Colours can be changed to help those who are neurodivergent and our slide templates remind people not to make inferences from pictures which some might not be able to see. And then, very practically, we encourage slides to be shared before the meeting to help those who access information in a different way e.g: reflective thinkers who need more time. And we’ve introduced the Sunflower scheme too (you’ve probably seen it in airports); so people can have a backdrop which says: I have a non-visible disability. If you do X that will help me participate in the meeting.”

Claire confides that she hates the term ‘hidden disability’, “because it implies you are the one hiding it”. She also has a problem with the Disability Discrimination Act, which talks about employers making ‘reasonable adjustments’—"that sounds so grudging, like if we have to, we will but… it is so much the wrong attitude”.

She believes that the recession, and also the recruitment squeeze, is acting as a spur to organisations to be more inclusive: “Organisations are beginning to realise that people are their strongest and most valuable, but also most expensive, assets. So why on earth would you have someone in your organisation who isn't fully participating when a simple adjustment could fix that?”

 When it comes to inclusion Claire is adamant that everybody comes to work with different barriers, “often we see the obvious ones, like someone is in a wheelchair, but we forget about the hidden ones”. These can be everything from neurodivergence to social class. I suggest that it can be difficult to talk about these things, that there is a huge fear of saying the wrong thing.

Claire nods and makes two brilliant suggestions. Her first is “switch from managing diversity to practising inclusion. So often, we wait until we know there is a person with a disability. This is silly because 65% of those with disabilities don’t declare it at work, so just because you don't know there's someone with a disability, it doesn't mean there isn't. So, you really want to avoid the easy thing of bolting something on and do the hard work of unpicking what you already do and embedding inclusion. So often we trade comfort for performance, we don’t want to have the difficult conversation, so we go for the quick fix. But what feels like the quick fix in the short term is messy in the long term. People are messy. Disability is messy. You can have two people with the same disability who have entirely different needs, so that bolt-on is going to be an endless activity. So, you are better off not managing diversity but embedding an inclusive mindset into the everyday.”

And the second thing? “Don’t make it about disability. Make it about participation. Every manager should start every one-to-one by asking: “How do I help you fully participate? How do I help you feel like you belong? How do I help you be your best?” That will bring up conversations about disability, but also so many other things, and it means you don’t have to have a separate conversation about each strand. It makes it about high performance, and that is what this is really about.”

Indeed!