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Trauma-informed practices and approaches are becoming a hot topic within the career development field. Trauma-informed approaches allow career practitioners to create a greater net of support for those we serve, while trauma-informed employers contribute to creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce. Unfortunately, workplace accommodations for people with disabilities are lagging in fully implementing trauma-informed approaches.
Consider the following: 63% of Canadians will be exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event in their lives. In 2022, 35% of employed Canadians with disabilities required accommodation to work, of which 42.5% required accommodation for mental health-related needs. So, I have to ask: are workplaces making accommodations for individuals with disabilities with a trauma-informed lens?
The following article is an intro to trauma-informed employment and accommodations for career practitioners, employers and other inclusive employment stakeholders.
The foundations of trauma-informed workplaces
Employers can start by understanding and integrating these three pillars of trauma-informed approaches.
Awareness
Seek out information about trauma and how it can affect your employees. Learn about how prevalent trauma is for people in all areas of their life. Promote education and understanding in your workplaces in addition to positive mental health and wellness initiatives. Start with this short video to understand how prevalent trauma is, and how it can impact those around you.
Recognize the signs
Familiarize yourself with trauma responses and learn the signs. The Crisis & Trauma Institute suggests the phrase “shift judgment to curiosity.” This can be very powerful to destigmatize trauma in workplaces. This can also assist employers in fulfilling their duty to inquire if a worker requires workplace accommodation.
Increase engagement
Engage with community resources such as the Canadian Mental Health Association to identify, support and learn about trauma. Share your learnings within your networks and foster a sense of belonging and acceptance for conversations about trauma.
From understanding to action
Keeping these tenets of trauma-informed practice in mind, I offer the following recommendations for employers and HR professionals to create a more trauma-informed approach to workplace accommodations.
1. Education
Familiarize yourself with disability accommodation using a tool such as the Understanding Workplace Accommodations guide from the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work. Connect with local disability and mental health agencies to understand how to better support your staff in accommodation processes. As an employer, you should also familiarize yourself with the importance of self-care for leaders in order to lead the way in workplace well-being.
With education comes normalization. By making information available to all staff about what trauma can look like, how it can affect someone and how to react when you think someone in your workplace is exhibiting signs of a trauma response, we can break down judgments and assumptions. Including information about accommodation in onboarding materials can also improve accessibility.
2. Evaluation
Next, I invite you to consider, how trauma informed is your accommodation process? And how can you improve it?
For example, requiring an employee to disclose intimate details of their trauma on multiple occasions or to multiple people can retraumatize them and discourage others from requesting accommodations.
Do you require medical documentation? Many people, particularly those with disabilities, have been exposed to potentially traumatizing situations in medical settings. Not requiring documentation unless it is necessary from a safety standpoint is one way to take a more trauma-informed approach.
Lastly, solicit feedback from employees on your accommodation processes. For instance, you could request anonymous feedback through a survey or create a working group to identify and implement changes that would benefit all staff.
3. Identification
Identifying trauma-informed accommodation involves two considerations: trauma-specific accommodations and intersectional accommodations for persons with disability and trauma.
Many people experience mental illness or trauma as their sole disability. This means that people will seek workplace accommodations to reduce the impact of their mental health or trauma on their work. For example, a retail associate who is unable to work night shifts alone due to a previous trauma might be accommodated by switching to day shifts or using a buddy system for night shifts.
“Employers need to ensure that all disability needs are prioritized and that accommodation for one need does not exacerbate another need.”
Now, let’s consider the intersectionality of disability and trauma. For example, consider a person who has experienced trauma from a natural disaster and is deaf. Their employer provides an ASL interpreter to support their communication with their team but requires them to work full time in the office rather than hybrid to access this accommodation. This means that on days when the weather conditions activate the individual’s anxiety and they cannot come to the office, they are unable to work.
While the interpreter has accommodated one need, it has created a problem that may not have been apparent before; another accommodation or adjustment will need to be added or substituted to accommodate this individual in a trauma-informed manner. Employers need to ensure that all disability needs are prioritized and that accommodation for one need does not exacerbate another need.
4. Implementation
While disability itself is not inherently traumatic, experiencing inaccessibility is a type of chronic stress that can lead to traumatization.
Consider how you go about making these changes in your workplace. An abrupt “all or nothing” approach to amending policies and procedures around a trauma-informed workplace can be too much change too quickly for some folks. A more trauma-informed approach would be to identify the most pressing changes to implement. You may also wish to create a schedule for implementation so that your staff know what to expect and when.
While trauma-informed accommodations are not yet at the forefront of disability inclusion in the workplace, trauma-informed employers can reap the benefits of this approach through higher productivity and retention. Understanding that people all around us carry trauma can liberate employees to use accommodations for personal and organizational benefits, leading to happier and healthier workplaces.
