Case Studies for Building Empathy and Awareness for Accessibility at Ally Bank

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Case Studies for Building Empathy and Awareness for Accessibility at Ally Bank

GCal

Outlook

Thursday

March 11, 2021, 5:30 pm -

6:20 pm EST

Type: Breakout

Track: Organizational Success with Accessibility

In this talk, Sabrena Foxx, Product Manager at Ally Bank, will review how the accessibility program at Ally Bank successfully implemented empathy and awareness events to drive buy-in for accessibility. This talk will be filled with examples of how to build a wide-reaching accessibility initiative.

 

[missed start in coctail class]

 

don't underestimate the power of friendship.  It's another way to tap into your support line.

You want to build a network of like-minded people and create a conscientious approach to creating linkages to build awareness.

The network diagram on this page shows how your accessibility program is the nucleus that can connect your company's ERG to the user group affiliations an the disability community.

If you can build an intentional network, you can create a win-win relationship for everyone in this network based on rapport, trust, and mutual benefit.

Let's look at -- let's look closely at this diagram.  You can see the word "your program."  Let's use that as your accessibility program.  It's the center, but it serves a valued connection between the disability ERG and the disability community.

These two groups can serve as excellent sources of connecting with people who have disabilities.  And you can also tap into a group of people who have a passion for this demographic.

Next, your connections with your user group opens the door for you to have access to people who do the same types of work with you.  And that could be another place for you to continue to source speakers or connect points to help your program grow.

Now, the devil is in the details.  You need to assemble a team to help you build out your programming.  This is where you need people who have good planning skills and execution skills.

You do not want to rush the logistics.  You want to think about the time zone.  What time should you have this session?  What are the delivery options?  Should it be in person?  Should it be virtual?  Create opportunities to broadcast from multiple locations.

Think about it.  Who are you inviting?  You want to foster a community between your different departments in your organization and most companies there are numerous departments all working on a single goal.  But these departments can easily have a siloed approach to their work.  If you can take a non-project opportunity like Global Accessibility Day, you can foster that sense of community between those teams.  I recently had a developer tell me that accessibility had gave her more opportunities to talk to her design partners than she's ever had in any company.

These events not only connect people but they also connect people to their jobs.  Next, you want to market the event.  Ask to have your event spotlighted on your internal intranet site.  Talk to your communications team.  Partner with the disability employee resource group.  These two teams can help you pick up some extra press to get your event publicized.

Use social media to build additional awareness.  Share teasers.  At Ally we have taken thoughtful quotes about accessibility or people who have disabilities, and we have posted those all throughout our different offices.  It was a way to generate interest and to get people talking.

The final thing that I want to talk to you on this slide is, have a plan to capture metrics.

You will need them later.  And hire somebody to take pictures.

Next, you've had a great event.  Now what?  You want to share your story.  By now you are the key leader running your accessibility program at your organization.  And you are the face of accessibility at your company.  Your team did a lot of work to attain full buy-in from your executives to launch your accessibility efforts.  Therefore, you want to continue to have their commitment.  You can do that by continuing to raise disability so that your executives know exactly what the program is achieving.  And it's helping them to advocate from the continued funding.

The first thing you want to do is keep your executive leaders in the know.  An event like Global Accessibility Day is an excellent PR opportunity for your program.  The event will promote additional awareness and advocacy.

We talked about bringing in external speakers earlier.  Why not ask one of your key leaders to provide the opening remarks or closing remarks after your guest speaker?  This is an excellent way to publicly have the importance of accessibility reinforced.

Now, you want to broadcast your metrics.  You have several metrics, I'm sure, that you're sharing with leaderrers on an ongoing basis.  But don't neglect to share the empathetic side of accessibility.  It continues to help with the story of why we're doing this work.

Use the metrics from attendance and share quotes from the associate base about the event.

We have seen that voice of the associate is a powerful tool that gives feedback to leadership on what the associates feel is important.

Now, hard work never goes in vain.  You can repurpose the materials from Global Accessibility Day.  Last year our team did a presentation on "How to Be an Inclusive Coworker."

We have been asked at least three to four times from different groups throughout the organization who heard about that presentation, from the disability resource -- disability employee resource group to our executive training team, they all wanted to hear what we had to say.

If you have the ability, record your session.  You want to ensure as many people as possible have the ability to listen to your presentation on demand.

Now, you want to share the story of success from your event.  I mentioned taking pictures on an earlier page.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  You can use these photos and quotes and metrics to give your report out to add color and depth.

It will help your leaders connect with their message in a more deeper and more meaningful way.

In summary, it's important to understand the importance of empathy and accessibility, and how you can use awareness, education, support, and advocacy to advance your efforts.  When you move to the human aspect as the gateway to the "why" instead of compliance and legal reason, you can energize your team with passion.  I believe one of our early participants from our first Global Accessibility Day said it best when we asked them to describe their experience.  And I quote... "It is a social responsibility.  I love that we held accessibility awareness day and that we have a company that promotes this type of awareness.  It helps all employees to understand our company values and how we live out those aspects in every aspect of our business."

So, I hope you have walked away today with a few gems to help you about creative ways to promote accessibility.  This is all the content that I have.  Katie, let's open it up for questions.

>> KATIE OLSON: All right.  Thank you so much, Sabrena.  And congratulations on the five-year anniversary of your accessibility program.

>> SABRENA FOXX: Thank you so much.

>> KATIE OLSON: All right.  So there are some good questions here in the chat.  So some of them are related to the simulation exercises you had talked about.  So we are wondering, how did the planning go for the disability simulations in terms of working and coordinating with members of the community?

>> SABRENA FOXX: Yeah, so we approached this very delicately.  We have heard about "Lunch in the Dark" and we knew that we just couldn't have this session by ourselves.  So we had Sarah Tapp as our keynote speaker for that particular year for global accessibility awareness.  We told Sarah about the "Lunch in the Dark" activity and we asked her.  Because we were originally going to have our usability team facilitate the dialogue.  We said, no, wait, Sarah is the right person to lead this dialogue.  So it was, you know, learning by accident, and then we realized, that's the right thing we need to do.

So in a subsequent year when we had DJ onsite, we knew we needed DJ to lead us through the dialogue.

>> KATIE OLSON: Sure.  So bringing somebody in from the outside to lead this, that's --

>> SABRENA FOXX: That's right.

>> KATIE OLSON: That makes good sense.

Did you have -- did you experience any individuals that were resistant or did not want to participate?

>> SABRENA FOXX: I think there was one person.  I remember she was so sweet.  She was like... she wanted to do the "Lunch in the Dark" but she had just come in from working out you know, we have a gym in our building, and she said she just wanted to eat.  She was like, they've got this lunch in front of me, I'm blindfolded, I've got to figure out how to put my sandwich together, I don't even know where my mustard is.  She said she had to stop and say, wait a minute, this is someone's life every day.  I need to respect this conversation, and it was a real a-ha turning moment for her.

>> KATIE OLSON: And that's good.  Because it sounds like she came to that realization on her own.

>> SABRENA FOXX: She did.  She really did.

>> KATIE OLSON: All right.  That's great.  Okay, let's see...

Here is another question.  This one is in from Emily.  How are you shifting hands-on experiences that were previously in person -- you know, such as your "Lunch in the Dark" and the dancing -- in a post-COVID remote work world?

>> SABRENA FOXX: That is an excellent question.  I think the one positive benefit from this has been we've been able to think broader.  You know, I don't think that we would ever have been in an at-home environment.  Let's take Ally, for example.  We have a large number of people in Charlotte.  We have a large number of people in Detroit.  But then we have people all over the United States.  We had always just focused our efforts on either hosting out of Charlotte or hosting out of Detroit.

But COVID made us think about... why can't we just have a total virtual event and have everyone dial?  And it also opened up our eyes to speakers that we would have loved to have had but we would have been like... we don't have the budget to fly them in.  But now that we can leverage someone and they can sit in the comfort of their own home, it's actually been, you know, eye opening and a better way for us to find speakers that we never would have been able to tap into before due to budgetary concerns.

>> KATIE OLSON: Sure, that makes sense.  It's actually opened additional opportunities.

>> SABRENA FOXX: That's right.

>> KATIE OLSON: All right.  Let's see...

Okay, here is a question about metrics.  You had talked about capturing metrics and reporting on the metrics.  Could you expand upon what types of metrics?  I know during the presentation you gave an example about who was in attendance at the sessions, are there other types of example metrics you could share?

>> SABRENA FOXX: I think being able to show year-over-year progress is one of them.  So being able to show, like, last year we had 10 people, this year we have 15.  You know, showing that the interest is still there and being able to put a story around that.  In addition, I think, being able to capture how many people are watching the presentations on-demand, and then being able to really bring in those pictures.  You know, because I remember my manager saying, make sure you take pictures.  And I was like... but why?

But then I got it.  Because we were able to put together a story that maybe enabled to voice the experience wasn't nearly as impactful of me being able to show a photo of people in the middle of the activity.

>> KATIE OLSON: Sure.  Wonderful.  Thank you.

All right.

I'm going to pop over to the chat here and see what else we have.  Oh, somebody is saying they loved the spoon that you had on the one slide, showing that example.

>> SABRENA FOXX: Yeah, the Liftware Steady is... it brought tears to my eyes.  I thought about my sister's father-in-law who has Parkinson's and, you know, I was like, you guys have ofigure out how to buy him one of these.

>> KATIE OLSON: Yeah.  That's what Gene said too, her father had Parkinson's.  That's how she related to it.

All right.  Let's see.  There's some more chat coming in here.

Okay, back on the topic of on-demand learning, which topics would you prioritize making first available to a cross-functional audience?

>> SABRENA FOXX: Probably your keynote speaker would be good.  And then if you have anything that is a learning opportunity, maybe you're teaching about a new technology that would advance your development teams your testing organization, I probably would try to get those on demand.  I know we have to go through an act of Congress to get a session recorded at my organization.  So I probably would try to find your top two or three and not take everything.  But two or three would still make people feel like they have been there.

>> KATIE OLSON: Okay.

Are there along those lines of kind of focusing on two or three key speakers, are there certain topics you would suggest to focus in on?

>> SABRENA FOXX: I think that one where you can bring someone in from the disability community is always a good one.  Because you want to continue to help people understand the "why."  So by being able to bring in a speaker, someone who walks the walk every day, I think there is an opportunity of learning, and then you never know what type of relationship you're going to strike up with making those additional connections.  And then I also think things that are related to people always want to learn more stuff, so whether that's your design team or your development partner, being able to show them new ways to make their job easier as it relates to accessibility, or even just thinking about innovative approaches, that can be a way to energize your workforce.

>> KATIE OLSON: Excellent.  That makes perfect sense.

Let's see here.

A couple more questions here.

Here is another one from an anonymous attendee.  What kinds of things did you talk about in your inclusive coworker training?

>> SABRENA FOXX: That one has been awesome.  So we talked about how to build better PowerPoints, helping people to understand how they need to tag images in their PowerPoints.  Really helping them to understand how you need to talk through a PowerPoint presentation.  We also talked about Word documents, how do you make those accessible.  And then the third thing we talked about making -- saving your documents as a PDF.  So just using the inherent features already built into the Microsoft products, we expose people essentially to those built-in items, so we weren't teaching people, you know, anything hardcore accessibility things that it was easy enough to grasp.  And then we also have exposed people to the subtitles in PowerPoint.  You know, a lot of teammates don't know that that is there.  So just by giving them little tips on things that they can use, and then Teams also has a feature in it to talk about live captioning.  So we introduced the teams to that.  And then we also talked about feature in Zoom that has live captioning.  So really a lot of the workforce tools that you already have at your desktop, we really leveled up those items so people could have more exposure.

>> KATIE OLSON: Great.  It makes a lot of sense.  It's stuff they have access to already, they just need to learn how to use it to maximize it.  Perfect.  That makes total sense.

All right.  I think we'll take one more question.  Are you up for one more, Sabrena?

>> SABRENA FOXX: Sure.

>> KATIE OLSON: All right.  Okay.  Here is a question about hiring people with disabilities at Ally Bank.  Are there specific initiatives to hire people with disabilities and bring them on your staff?

>> SABRENA FOXX: Yeah, there are some things that I'm not able to talk about, but we are an EEOC organization company, so, you know, we would never use any type of discriminatory practices related to hiring.  From a personal standpoint, I feel we will grow our accessibility program by leaps and bounds when I can turn to someone who walks the walk every day and ask them, am I missing the mark?

But there are things in place to just improve kind of the depth of where we are in terms of exposing people to different types of roles within the organization.

>> KATIE OLSON: Excellent.  And having those people on staff are just, like you said, it helps open the eyes and to just be able to have them live the experiences and help provide the guidance to even make things more accessible is wonderful situation.

Well, wonderful, Sabrena.  Thank you so much for sharing your stories and sharing your ideas about creating awareness and education, support, and advocacy.  We really appreciate your time today.

And thank you to all the attendees for joining, and I hope you all enjoyed just a couple sessions left in Axe-Con.

So thank you, everyone.  And take care.

>> SABRENA FOXX: Bye!

>> KATIE OLSON: Bye!