Tom Temin This is a study you write regularly to monitor how many people with disabilities remain and are hired by federal agencies.

Karen Brumond So it’s not like our annual report where we do it on an annual basis, but we write a variety of thematic reports on various topics, whether it’s the employment life cycle of people with disabilities within the federal workforce or the use of Appendix A. employment of persons with disabilities. We’ve also written ones that focus more on race and gender. We cover all different topics.

Tom Temin So the challenge is to keep people. Once you hire them, I imagine that’s true for everyone, including people with disabilities. But oddly enough, you found a few variables. You narrowed that down to four variables that you said were, quote, significantly associated with a decrease in the number of voluntary departures. And what were these variables?

Karen Brumond We examined disability retention in FY 2020 to see which variables, across a wide variety of policies and practices, were associated with a decrease in voluntary attrition. So moves. There were fewer voluntary attrition of people with disabilities from agencies that had reasonable and compliant accommodation programs, as well as compliant programs for requests for personal assistance services. And which had published its procedures for requests for personal assistance services on its public website, and that on processing requests and compliance procedures for this applied to whether they had established it from 2019 and from 2020.

Tom Temin In other words, if you plan to hire people with disabilities, you need to be prepared for the compliance systems and accessibility features you need to be able to accommodate them so they can work fully and feel safe. They were in their place. truly belong.

Karen Brumond Absolutely. People with disabilities often need accommodations to work. Not always, but sometimes someone acquires a disability while working, and in order for them to continue working for you, you may need to provide a reasonable accommodation. Additionally, it may be more of a psychological issue: people who see that the agency is dedicated to procedural compliance will want to stay at the agency even if they don’t actually need these accommodations.

Tom Temin And that raises another question, which is that the federal government is behind the regulations and rules to accommodate people with disabilities in government and in the private sector. It appears that some agencies are not compliant in the first place.

Karen Brumond We have a high level of compliance with our required policies and procedures or EEO programs. However, there are some variables where you see lower compliance and higher compliance. We absolutely want agencies to comply with regulations, as we see here they can be effective in improving EEO.

Tom Temin Of course. And as a social science research analyst, would you then say that you could infer from your results that if management leaders care about this, then compliance and people’s full capacity to accommodate will follow and it there will then be fewer voluntary departures.

Karen Brumond I would agree with this statement. To have a good disability accommodation program, you need buy-in from leadership. So the more buy-in you have from leadership, you will also have a more welcoming environment for people with disabilities and other employees.

Tom Temin We speak with Karen Brummond. She is a social science research analyst in the EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations. And what was your research methodology? What did you compare and contrast to arrive at these results?

Karen Brumond So we looked at 156 policies, procedures and practices that federal agencies should put in place over three years to see if it affected the number of separations of people with disabilities in 2020. We use complex statistical methods, particularly binomial regression if you love these details.

Tom Temin Some of us are.

Karen Brumond So with this we were able to see the control of the number of employees of the agency and the termination rate of all employees of the agency. We were able to see if these policies, procedures and practices were associated with better retention.

Tom Temin And have you shared this feedback with the agencies involved? Do they know how they are?

Karen Brumond We regularly conduct technical support visits to agencies to ensure they are following required policies, procedures and practices. The specific practices that we recommend here, we just released this report, so we’re going to put more emphasis on that with more agencies, especially since we’ve found that these are the most effective practices for retaining people . disabled.

Tom Temin And coupled with the report, you have a very simple eight-point list on how to improve EEOC and disability retention. And as you mentioned, executive engagement is at the top of the list. But senior leaders come and go. So we will probably have to go a little further than that. And you mentioned accountability, including goals to guide and support efforts. What exactly does this mean?

Karen Brumond When we talk about empowering staff, having some transparency so that people are actually tracking what’s going on, and then accountability, you also want to see that when something goes well, people are rewarded when something goes wrong . People are told to find out why things are wrong and make them better.

Tom Temin And what about the workforce made up of non-disabled people? They can probably contribute to this effort as well.

Karen Brumond Absolutely. You need a supportive environment for people who want to stay with an employer. So, if coworkers are supportive of people with disabilities and understand that they will need accommodations, the workplace will be better for everyone.

Tom Temin All right. And what other advice do you have? What else should agencies do? Seems like sometimes they have to invest a little in technology.

Karen Brumond Yes, they definitely need technology. For accessibility, many people need certain technologies like screen readers, for example. They will also have to ensure that they have interpreters for people who are hard of hearing or deaf. They can also set up mentoring programs for any disadvantaged group. Mentoring programs have been shown to improve employment for people with disabilities or other historically disadvantaged groups.

Tom Temin And there is at least one new requirement in the whole regulatory effort regarding people with disabilities that people should be aware of.

Karen Brumond In 2017, the EEOC passed as we updated our regulations with a final rule titled Affirmative Action for Individuals with Disabilities in the Federal Government. Among other things, we are beginning to require agencies to provide personal assistance services to job-qualified individuals with disabilities and special needs or personal assistant services. Since we’ve found this to be an effective method of retaining people with disabilities, it’s really great to see that we’re putting these regulations in place and that they’re actually effective.

Tom Temin All right. And we’ll make sure people know about them. We will have a link to them. Karen Brummond is a social science research analyst in the EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations. Thank you very much for joining me.