Series Fifteen, Episode Five: Inclusive design: Workspaces fit for all, fit for the future

Julia: Hello, my name is Julia Streets and welcome to DiverCity Podcast talking about equity, inclusion and diversity in financial services.

On the podcast, we seek to shine a light on positive progress call out areas requiring further focus and offer lots of ideas to help drive change. Before we get started today, I just want to take a moment to thank our friends at City A.M. They’ve given DiverCity Podcast a new home at Impact A.M. with their pages dedicated to ESG, impact investments, DE & I and more. And we really appreciate that they publish and promotes both our episodes and our supporting blog series, so their readers could stay right on top of the very latest diversity, equity, and inclusion debate. Thank you to our friends at City A.M.

In this episode. I’m delighted to be joined by two guests, Ed Warner and Ross Hovey. Allow me to introduce them to you. Ed Warner founded the inclusive design business called Motionspot back in 2012 after his friend and co-founder James Taylor was paralysed in a diving accident and they were left underwhelmed by the clinical design and poor quality of adaptations in his home.

Ed has since built Motionspot into a REBA Award-winning global organisation in inclusive design, helping to transform spaces and lives through beautifully designed, inclusive environments that deliver independence for anybody with a disability, as well as those with sensory and cognitive needs, including neurodiversity and Motionspot also designs for people of different faiths and genders, to create spaces that are truly equitable. It’s also worth mentioning that Ed was the government sector champion for the design of accessible spaces and products for a three-year term, and he’s a regular speaker on inclusive design, relating to the built environment. So, think about how inclusive design supports the S in ESG and it’s a vital component of EDI strategies. So Ed, welcome to the show. I’m delighted you could be with us.

Ed: Thank you, Julia. Great to be here.

Julia: Our second guest today is Ross Hovey, who’s enjoyed a stellar career of more than 20 years in a variety of roles within Lloyds Banking Group, and he’s now an established expert on disability in the workplace with extensive expertise in implementing and managing a workplace adjustment process. He has a great understanding of accessibility requirements in both the built and also the technology environments.

His work in the field of disability has gained great respect and he’s deeply involved with the work of Changing Places, which is all about setting standards for fully accessible toilets and spaces. And he’s a member of the Gatwick Airport independent accessibility panel.

On top of this, he manages his own team of carers to enable him to live a fully inclusive life, persistently challenging the status quo, and he’s deeply passionate about inclusive design and accessibility for all. Ross, I’m delighted you could join us. Welcome to the show.

Ross: I’m delighted to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Julia: So gentlemen, welcome to the show and I’m really curious to know what you are focused on right now. Ed, can I come to you first?

Ed: Thanks, Julia. We are particularly busy at the moment working with clients around helping them understand how to design more inclusive workplaces for their employees. We’ve seen a real shift, particularly coming out of COVID, of businesses needing to repurpose their offices as well as encourage employees back into the workplace after working from home conditions. 

Thankfully, there’s a much greater understanding across business owners and their design teams that they need to be designing more accessible and inclusive environments for everyone.

We’ve got a lot of work going on at the moment around research for neurodiversity in the workplace as well as an interesting campaign looking at design of environments for the menopause and menstrual health. 

We’re also working on an inclusive design standard with the Royal Institute of British Architects to look at how we can set inclusive design standards for the industry, as well as working with clients around how to take inclusive design principles in the UK and translate those on an international basis across all of their workplaces to ensure there is consistency across the world.

Julia: What’s really encouraging about your comments there is that it feels like awareness has definitely picked up and there’s a need for and a recognition for, standards across the board and also across the world as well. We’re definitely going to come back to some points on that as we go through. Ross, can I ask you as well, curious, what are you working on at the moment?

Ross: My role at Lloyd Banking Group is within the group disability mental health and neurodiversity team. So, as a team, I probably would eat the whole of the podcast talking about all the things that we’re doing to break down barriers and drive up inclusion in the workplace for our disabled colleagues.

My role specifically within that team is Accessibility Manager. One of the biggest things that I’m working on at the moment is how me and Ed have got to know each other, is following COVID, a different world. How do we design workplaces fit for the future that enable all of our colleagues, including those with disabilities, to be able to come to work, thrive and be their best and have a barrier-free environment? Whether that’s looking at spaces for people with neurodiversity, toilet facilities for people with disabilities, gender neutral facilities, how do we create inviting entrances which create access for everybody and don’t have separate routes for people who maybe have mobility impairment? My biggest piece of work at the moment I’m working on is very much with our property function on designing offices that are fit for the future and the way we want to work and transact with our colleagues.

Julia: I’ve got so many questions to ask you about what great design looks like, but for the benefit of the audience and also for our enlightened leaders who don’t necessarily work in the field of diversity, equity, inclusion, why does this sit so prominently and importantly in the conversation about ED&I and ED&I strategies? Ed, can I ask you first and then Ross, I’d love to get your thoughts afterwards.

Ed: From an inclusive design perspective, it’s so often been the rather neglected topic within EDI. If we look at where the focuses tended to be, it’s been around HR policies, procedures, and practises. And our big belief is that yes, all of those areas are tremendously important, but if you only focus on those areas and don’t think about the potential barriers within the built environment, don’t think about how your employees and visitors within your buildings interact with the spaces that you own, you’re not going to create a truly diverse and inclusive space. For us, it’s about working with clients, to help them design really beautiful inclusive spaces that then can tie into the HR policies, procedures and practises to create really truly inclusive environments for everyone.

Julia: It feels like there’s very much an extension of some of that great work that’s been done to date to bring us up to date. But also I pick up the comment that you made earlier, Ross, about make it fit for the future as well, which is really interesting. I’d love to get your thoughts on why this is so important right now.

Ross: You can have fantastic recruitment policy that creates a barrier free recruitment experience, but then if you don’t follow it up with a workplace that’s matched the recruitment part, it falls over. You can’t treat this in isolation. You’ve got to marry up your whole end-to-end strategy. From the moment somebody decides they want to work with you, from that inclusive recruitment touchpoint through to their career and even whether they stay with you, or whether they move on to a different organisation, that they experience a workplace that enables them to come in, to collaborate, to be effective, to have the space that allows them to be, as we talk about at work a lot, be their best. It’s just a no-brainer really, why would you not do it?

I think the world has moved on as well, from what I would say in the past, building design was all about I guess people with what I’d like to say, wheels and white sticks and disability has moved so much from that now. There’s so many more different invisible disabilities that we need to support colleagues, especially colleagues with neurodivergent needs. They like to work in quiet spaces, they might want to work in darker spaces. We’ve got to really design something to attract the best talent as well because all the organisations want the best people to work for them. And if you don’t have the best facilities, you’re already 10 yards behind.

Julia: That’s really fascinating because I wonder if we can just get a bit deeper into that. I’m really curious to hear from you about what are some of those designs and implementations that you’ve put into place to serve this community? We were talking earlier about neurodiversity, cognitive and sensory disabilities as well as physical disabilities and as you say, the visible and the invisible is being catered for. Tell us more about some of the implementations.

Ross: We are on a journey, so we’re not by any means at the end yet. We are going through a period of refreshing what our estate looks like and feels like for our colleagues. And some of our buildings have recently been through some refurbishments and we know that we’ve still got a long way to go and we’ve got a real strive to constantly improve. But some of the things that we’ve started to do is think about people that like to work in different locations. So, where in the previous days, you had a restaurant area that people predominantly went to grab a coffee or to eat, actually some people, that’s an environment that they like to work in because they feel relaxed, they don’t feel it’s like the quiet office and that they’re surrounded by people and they like the buzz and the noise. So, we’re creating spaces for them to work in those places.

We’ve got equally other people who find lots of light, lots of movement, lots of motion, very difficult. So, we’re creating quieter spaces where they can go. And in those spaces, we make it clear to all colleagues that this is a quiet space, so it’s not a space for taking calls. One of the things that we’re really keen to do as well for people with physical disabilities is enhance the toilet facilities. We’ve been one of the first organisations to deploy a Changing Places facility in two of our offices. And we are looking to roll that out as we refer our estate throughout the UK. So, we want to make sure where possible we have a Changing Places facility available, but not only just available for our colleagues, we want to make it available as well to the communities that we are situated in because those facilities are really lacking in the UK.

Where possible we’ve put them, what we call in our unsecure zones. So, before you enter the secure zone of a building, you can use a map for example, to identify where the toilet is and your geographical location and one might pop up, that’s at Lloyd’s Banking Group and that is actually you can just come into reception and ask to use the toilet. You don’t have to be an employee for example. We’re even going beyond just looking at our colleagues. And I know as well, and again I’m not close to some of the detail, but in some of our offices it’s about the community as well. How can we create an office that reflects the community that we operate in as well, for example, recently we’ve just refurbished one of our Bristol offices and the restaurant uses produce from that area, to make that local feel, which again makes people feel at home, people who feel anxious about different environments. There’s just so much we’re doing.

Julia: Can I just return to the question about Changing Places? Would you mind just for the benefit of the audience explaining what you mean by Changing Places places?

Ross: Yes, Changing Places have been around in the UK for a while now, and Tescos were one of the leading or organisations behind the campaign to put them in for their customers. A Changing Places toilet, some people might refer to it as a super loo, but super loos is another thing that’s coming out, so let’s not confuse the two things. A Changing Places facility is a larger accessible toilet, which has very key facilities in it for people with complex needs. For example, I happen to be a wheelchair user and I don’t have any ability to hold my own weight and it would be unfair to ask somebody to lift me. A Changing Places facility has an overhead ceiling track hoist which allows someone to transfer me from my wheelchair to a toilet and then back to my wheelchair if that’s what needed.

But they also have a bed for people that might need to lie down, to put on their clothes or might need to use other facilities that a bed requires. There’s also a shower, there’s a height adjustable sink because not everyone in a wheelchair uses the same wheelchair that’s at the same height and we’re all different heights. The mirror is pointed down, so that it looks at you rather than being flat on the wall. There’s a privacy screen generally, so that if you’re there with a carer you can have a moment of quiet reflection to yourself. And there’s space for generally two carers and one individual. These are what you’d call the most inclusive accessible toilets that you can have.

Julia: In the spirit of full inclusion, your reference earlier to it’s not just about making inclusive for the employees of the bank, but it’s also about making inclusive for the community as a whole as well, which is really, really inspiring to hear, actually. Ed, I’d love to bring you in here as well because as I said in your introduction, you’ve been leading on design for a number of years now. What are you particularly paying attention to in terms of implementations, design, changes that you are making and your clients are asking of you?

Ed: We’ve seen a real shift in the industry and just picking up on Ross’s point about it used to be all wheels and white sticks, we’ve seen similar, in that the initial conversations we so often have with clients is, the client says, “Oh, well we’ve designed a level access entrance and we’ve got a wheelchair accessible toilet. We are an accessible building.” To which we say, “That’s a starting point, but actually only 8% of disabled people are wheelchair users.” How can we help design for the 8% as well as the 92% of people who may have another physical, cognitive, sensory need, particularly range of different neurodiverse conditions, as well as also designing for different backgrounds, from cultural perspectives, ethnic backgrounds and gender?

Designing for a wider range of protected characteristics. And one of the things we’ve really seen, and Ross is a great example of this, is businesses having a champion in their organisation that is flying the flag from an inclusive design perspective and able to challenge internal thinking to say, “We need to be doing something about this.” 

The types of design principles that we’re implementing into client’s workplaces span everything from design of inclusive entrances, getting away from those revolving doors in so many financial institutions that are very inaccessible, not just for wheelchair users but for anyone with anxiety. I feel particularly anxious going through a revolving door. They’re really not accessible entrances at all and we don’t believe that someone should have to go through the wheelchair accessible entrance next door to that revolving door. We should have one inclusive entrance for everybody in the building.

Then when in the building, it’s designing reception areas that are inclusive. So, have you got different heights on your reception desks? Have you got a hearing loop? Have you got seating in that main reception area that may suit someone who wants a perching stool or someone who wants to sit down and doesn’t have the core strength to be able to get up from that seat?

Thinking about other principles across the workplace, like Ross has described, design of sensory rooms, we’re seeing a real trend towards rooms that enable people to move out of a really busy, open plan work environment, and just recalibrate for a small amount of time before going back into that busy, open plan environment. We’re seeing design of faith rooms come through in workplaces. And to Ross’s point about reflecting the local community that your workplace is in, you might need to design more than one faith room within that particular local community.

Then it’s design principles, like thinking about the small points such as acoustics and lighting and the use of materials and your air quality and use of biophilia, which is planting in the office, to maintain and promote a sense of wellbeing. There are so many small design principles that make such a difference to how we all respond to our built environment. And to Ross’s point, if you get these right, you can create better environments so we can all bring our better selves to work.

Julia: Quite often when we talk about the clean air environment and you say the living walls and the plants and everything we bring in, we quite often think that about the environmental side. But you’re saying this is very important, particularly for the S of the ESG, which was a comment I was making in the opening remarks. I wonder if I could just sort of ask you to extend a little bit further, which is this fascinating discussion we have on the podcast about intersectionality.

So, if we’re thinking about design for particular individuals under protected communities, let’s call it or characteristics, we are highly intersectional people. I’m a gay woman in the city and we hear about networks of women of colour, or men of colour, or carers and so many intersectional elements to it. Curious to know, are you focused on any design aspects that cater to the intersectionality of employees and their communities and their networks?

Ross: The gender neutral toilet is something that is at the moment not common in the workplace. It’s still a relatively new initiative. And that’s something we’re looking at the moment across our estate, there’s regulation around actually the number of people in your office and the number of toilets you need to provide. So, you’ve got to get the balance really right and make sure that by serving one characteristic, you’re not then penalising or disadvantaging another characteristic.

One of the things that we are looking at is how do we have gender neutral toilet spaces, but maybe within that there are also gender neutral accessible toilets, so more of them. So, what you’re doing there is you’re creating a toilet that is available for anyone who identifies in a specific way, but also if you don’t identify, if you do identify as a male or a female, you can still go there and you have a disability, there’s also an accessible toilet for you. So, that’s one of the things that we are looking.

The other area that I recently saw across work that we’ve done in one of our offices in Leeds, in terms of the intersectionality, is that people with disabilities follow various religious differences as well. So, having an ablution facility for somebody in a wheelchair, because traditionally that hasn’t been thought of in the past. And in one of our Leeds offices we have a different adapted, and Ed will know this, the technical term more, but the ablution facility, like the basin type for washing, we’ve created one that has a more accessible approach to it and it is an accessible design one, which previously again, has often been overlooked.

That’s where we face into some of these things and it’s an interesting challenge and that’s why we are working with the likes of Ed to make sure that we get it right and are learning from what has happened in other spaces and other organisations.

Julia: And of course, I always say to our guests when they come to the show, that the answers are found for your employees and your employee resource groups and your networks, they will tell you what they need. And I love the fact that actually, you said it Ross, about leaning in on these challenges and they’re not necessarily, I guess challenges. They’re requirements, they’re desires, they are things that people want.

Ross: Yes, we want to do it. It’s the challenge of getting it right. That’s what we want to do. We want to get it right for everybody and making sure that we have the facilities that everybody needs.

Julia: Ed, I’d love to get your thoughts on this mean from your point of view. I mean, if you’re working to a particular brief, the requirements list could far exceeded the budget, let’s just say. So, I’d love to get your thoughts about where are we seeing really smart implementations being brought in to design technology facilities, whatever that is, that are smarter ways of meeting the brief, in order to be able to please as many people as possible.

Ed: I think what I’d say is, it’s so important as part of the design process to have different perspectives contributing to the design process. And one of the most important things we do at Motionspot whenever we work with a client, is to bring people with the lived experience into the design process to get the feedback from them around the challenges they’re facing within the built environment, but also what they want to see from new developments.

Just drawing on Ross’s point about that intersectionality between faith and disability, we’ve seen that recently on a project where we were advising to design food separation fridges for halal and kosher within office kitchenettes. But the only position that those halal and kosher fridges could be was at such a high height, that made it inaccessible not only for wheelchair users, but someone short of stature, or someone who had arthritis in their shoulder and couldn’t reach out to those food separation fridges.

Ensuring that the message comes across as part of the design process to say, “We can’t compromise and have it at that particular height, we have to think about how we can redesign it within this space, for these reasons.” And that’s why it’s so important for those perspectives to come across.

In terms of your question over the costs associated with this and the pressures that clients are under to design for as many people as possible, what I’d say is we always promote the element of designing choice within your building. It’s going to be very difficult to design for every single person with every single protected characteristic, in every single geography. But as long as you’re aware of what the needs of your employees are and the future needs of your employees, going back to Ross’s point about future proofing, you can ensure you design your workplace in a way that it meets the needs of as many people as possible.

We had a client recently where we were designing sensory spaces for them and they raised the challenge to us over, they wanted heavily patterned wallpaper in their meeting rooms. And for some people, heavily patterned wallpaper is really sensory stimulating. They’ll really react very positively within a meeting to that, but for a lot of people, they will react the other way and will need much calmer surfaces and materials to be able to concentrate and focus attention on the meeting. So, rather than having all meeting rooms in a neutral finish, our advice was, well, let’s have a number of focus meeting rooms in more neutral colour palettes to generate that focus. But then let’s have a selection of meeting rooms where you can be more stimulated by the environment. So, it’s about designing choice and getting those perspectives into the design process.

Julia: Gentlemen, thank you for the conversation. It’s been fascinating to listen to and I think this is a great moment to bring in Cynthia Akinsanya with some research to support today’s discussion.

Cynthia: The 2023 Harvard Business Review article, How To Make Workplaces More Inclusive For People With Invisible Disabilities, outlines the following points. Don’t generalise disabilities. Remember that two people with the same disability may have very different experiences. Broad policy around disability without understanding an individual’s specific needs does not work. Employees with disabilities may feel stigmatised by an umbrella policy that categorises them in ways they don’t identify with. Advocate for inclusive policies and practises.

Organisations that have adopted inclusion initiatives can report up to a 26% increase in productivity. Avoid centering activities around food. This can help build camaraderie and break barriers but for employees with food allergies, intolerances, or maybe fasting as part of their religious beliefs, food at work can be a minefield.

And finally, establish an inclusive community. When there are peer support networks and informal chat spaces at work, people have the space to share their experiences without fear of shame or reprimand.

Julia: Thank you, Cynthia, as always for that research. And let me just take a moment to remind everybody how to find DiverCity Podcast and links to the research could be found on our website to divercitypodcast.com. That’s DiverCity with a C, not with an S, divercitypodcast.com. And you can find all our episodes there and do sign up for early notifications of future recordings. You can also sign up for our newsletter, DE&I That Caught Our Eye, where we share news stories and updates so you could stay on top of what’s current right now.

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I’d love to bring you both back in again because it’s fascinating listening to you talk and I’m really pleased, before we went to Cynthia for the research, we’ve got a chance to talk about this discussion about briefs and scope of work and budgets. I’m really quite concerned as we navigate these tough times, that this does not fall down the corporate agenda. I would love to hear your thoughts, give us the compelling reasons why this absolutely must remain at the top of the corporate agenda right now.

Ed: I think we have to acknowledge that boards across the country and around the world are battered every day by headwinds, both economically and also different things going on in their business. But D&I absolutely has to stay at the heart of what businesses are doing. I think for me, particularly from an inclusive design perspective, a focus on inclusive design and broader D&I agenda enables businesses to recruit the best talent.

Having inclusive offices enables employers to be able to reach a group of individuals that previously weren’t able to work within their businesses, and importantly, it enables employees to be able to retain the best talent. Where recruitment is so challenging at the moment, that has got to be a real positive advantage for businesses when focusing on D&I.

For me, it’s not also the social thing to do, it’s also financially beneficial. We had a wonderful example the other day of a client that did some return on investment and showed that for every pound they spent on inclusive design as part of the design process, saved them a hundred pounds in expensive retrofits at a later date. So, for us, if they can think about how they design their built environment, they can protect themselves against having to spend again to design environments to suit their employees and visitors.

Julia: Well, if that isn’t a compelling reason, I don’t know what is. Particularly the very budgets conscious financial services industry, and we have listeners all over the world, Ross coming to you as well, I’d love to get your thoughts about why this absolutely must remain high on the corporate agenda.

Ross: The customers that we serve reflect the people that we work. So, we need the people that reflect the customers we serve. If we haven’t got the right kind of balance of diversity in the workplace because we’ve not created an inclusive workplace, then how do we represent that in the customers that we serve? We need those two things to reflect each other.

Like Ed said as well about talent, today for me as a disabled worker, just as an example, whilst there might be opportunities to maybe earn some more money by going and working somewhere else doing a similar job, that isn’t what it’s all about now. People have greater needs. They want to feel comfortable and be who they are, be their authentic self. And if your workplace hasn’t been designed to enable that, then no matter what you’re offering them in terms of financial, they’re not going to hang around. People want that flexibility as well. They want to be all connected to their workplace.

You have to design a workplace that really reflects the environment that you’re trying to create and enables people to want to stay with you and help you grow. I think nowadays, it’s another element of the psychological contract. When you’re thinking about where you want to work, you want to work somewhere where actually, if you want to go and put your headphones on and go and work in a different part of the office, if you want to use a particular toilet facility because that’s how you identify, that you feel comfortable doing that. Organisations that don’t follow this will see their top talent wandering off to the organisations that are doing it.

Julia: Could not agree more. And it is all about talent and retention. It’s about growth and it’s about performance. But also I’d love your point about it being, people have higher expectations and it’s always that higher purpose and purpose comes through a lot in these conversations we have on the podcast. Gentleman, thank you both so much for your time. It’s been a wonderful conversation. It’s incredibly considered, not only in terms of thinking about your experiences and you’ve brought some beautiful examples through, but also thinking about some of the intersections and some of the smart initiatives that are going on and really why this matters, and I think that’s incredibly important. To all our listeners, thank you for joining us. I’ve been Julia Streets. It’s always a joy to have your company, but I must just take a moment. Ross Hovey, thank you so much for being with us.

Ross: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Julia: And Ed Warner, thank you for your time today.

Ed: Thank you, Julia. Great to be part of it.

Julia: And we look forward to bringing you another episode very soon. And I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have. Thank you very much, goodbye.

Cynthia: This episode of DiverCity Podcast was produced by Roshan Roberts on behalf of Julia Street Productions. You can find out more about the guests from this week’s show on our website. That’s www.divercitypodcast.com. That’s DiverCity with a C and not S.

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