Episode 012: Inclusive + Accessible Business, Limitless Potential | Interview with Rebekah Lambert
Full Disclosure - we were going to release this as a full podcast episode, but Clem’s sound was a dog’s breakfast. Sh*t happens.
But sh*t makes great fertilizer, so rather shelve this eye-opening interview, we’re giving it to you in form of this blog post. Our guest Bek will be back for another interview, (hopefully) sans sh*tty sound issues.
In this hybrid “blog-cast” we're talking about inclusivity and accessibility and how businesses need to go beyond simply adding alt-text to their images.
Who is Rebekah Lambert?
Rebekah Lambert applies her trade as a virtual marketing officer that helps change-making purpose-orientated startups, organizations, and entrepreneurs with their content strategy and community-building needs. She's the founder of the Freelance Jungle, a grassroots community that ends the isolation and raises the knowledge bar for thousands of Australian and New Zealand freelancers.
She reminds freelancers that stress is a productivity cost through online community and a pay what you can afford approach to education. For her efforts, the Freelance Jungle won the workplace wellbeing category at the Way Ahead 2019 mental Health Matters Awards, a believer in freelancing as a way to reinvent your working life.
Rebecca has produced free virtual festival for Australians made redundant by Covid in 2021 with funding from Facebook Australia and Good2Give. When she's not in the jungle, she's exploring the Illawarra with her Labradorks and hairy musician partner, creating noise of a different kind.
Can you tell us in your own words a little bit more about you, how you got into marketing and how your business has really evolved into you becoming an advocate for inclusivity and accessibility?
I'm not unlike most people that are out there these days. You have many hats and it's been many careers that have led me to this specific place that I am in today. So, I got into marketing quite by accident through product development after working in a systems team and a call center team at a dating startup.
And so I was basically working as the universal translator between the systems team, the customer service team, and the marketing team to get the messaging right, because no one was speaking the same language and it was all falling over. So being the arsey little thing that I was, I wrote my own job description, pitched it to them, then got the role. And then from there I've worked in agencies, and I've done stuff in freelance and all the rest of it.
I guess with the accessibility stuff and the inclusion stuff, as a person that lives with disability and a mental health condition as well, I find that the majority of the world is built from an unrealized position of health.
It’s a health position that is unobtainable, in fact, for most people. So, part of what I do is actually highlight my lived experience in mental health and disability, but also help people understand it so that they can do the right thing by their business and make it profitable through appealing to a very overlooked market that actually makes up a fair chunk of people.
Can you explain the difference between inclusivity and accessibility? In the way that we talk about these things, we tend to substitute one word for the other.
From my perspective, inclusion is that umbrella that we put over the top of a lot of things. Inclusion is about creating space for all kinds of marginalized communities, basically. So you've got the black Indigenous person of colour experience together with the LGBTQIA+ experience together with deaf and disability as well as Autism, which is fast recognizing themselves as a separate community.
The majority of the world is built outside of our framework and makes it a little bit harder for us to access it in different ways. Inclusion is about having that overall policy where you think about people and including everyone in society having an equity base as opposed to, you know, inequality or even equality, which is often misrepresentative and then have.
Accessibility is more towards looking at the needs of people with disabilities who are deaf and who are neurodiverse in terms of the architecture, the tools, the policy, the procedures, and all of the things that go into it.
What do inclusivity and accessibility mean in a business sense? Because it's not just about alternative text on images, is it?
No, I think the easiest way to think about it as a business owner is that there are four pillars of well-being that we all live by - physical, mental, financial, and social well-being.
If you are not meeting those terms with your business in the way you speak to your customers, then you're not really going to be making the return you want. And funnily enough, if you look at well-being as these four pillars, that physical, social, mental, and financial aspects, then you can actually see where you are creating accessibility problems or whether where you're not being inclusive.
For example, speaking from the disability community perspective, when you've got 45% of Australians who have a disability, we've got the highest representation in terms of underemployment and unemployment in Australia. So, making your events financially accessible to people is by offering a pay-what-you-can-afford models, or offering something that people can scale to so the early bird discounts aren't just the offset of highfalutin prices.
If you're looking at including people on a physical level, if you have events with people with disability, you may include an Auslan interpreter. So people that are Deaf can actually follow along and see what's going on.
You can think about the venues that you choose, not just because it looks like they've got a ramp at the front and you should be able to get a wheelchair up there. There's a whole lot of other things to consider. For example, how steep the street is with getting in with your wheelchair? Are there are lips and trips? And whether there's an accessible toilet.
64% of people with disabilities won't go out to an event because they don't know they can actually go to the bathroom. It's those sorts of things that we are thinking about in terms of business.
When you're looking at mental health and all the rest of it, having policies that don't exclude people because it makes it a hostile environment.
For example, using an event again, making sure you don’t have groups of people that are all standing around in the corner and because they all know each other. Think about actively making sure people know each other and get introduced so someone doesn't feel like they're excluded, and goes away thinking, “Oh, well I am excluded and unwelcome,” and that sort of stuff.
Or if you've got Neurodiverse people coming to your event, have a bloody cooldown room so they can check it out, and sit down for a little while - which works for anxiety as well, and then come back into the event. That way, it's not all this hurly-burly noise in the background, all of this stuff going on all the time.
It’s about looking at those policies and what we can do to expand our business and appeal to more people in an inclusive way.
Have you observed anything with regards to freelancers and their mental health, whether that be a positive or a negative shift where do you sort of see that going with regards to people’s approach to protecting their own mental health?
It’s definitely changed. When I first started in 2010, even up until about 2014 and 2015, people were saying, “don’t use the words mental health,” because it has stigma attached to it. Now, everyone's out and proud about their mental health. You see it on Twitter bios, it's out there.
People are talking about their experiences through it, you can see that people are reflecting on it. To be honest, why shouldn't we? I mean, Beyond Blue did a study and found that for every $1.00 that a company would invest in wellness, they got a productivity return of $2.64. It makes economic sense.
We can now actually make those sorts of cases for it. But it's also this whole thing of recognizing that if we're not looking after our best asset, which is ourselves when we're in business, then we've got nothing else. It kills me when I see people in The Freelance Jungle, they come through and they go, “no, I love my work. My work is my passion. I don't have any hobbies. I don't see my friends. Like I just sit there in front of my WordPress and I get so excited.”
That's great. But I know I'll see you in six months’ time for a burnout coaching session. Because we all need freedom from obligation. We all need a recharge with our mates.
We all need to hang out in nature, exercise, eat well, and do all of these things that often as freelancers, are the first things to be chucked in the bin as soon as the time pressures on. And this is what we need to realize.
This year, I declared at the beginning of my newsletter, this is the year I'm putting mental health first. So, if I look at every decision through the lens; Will this impact my mental health in a negative way? And it's a no, then I'm going to go ahead with it. If it's a maybe or a yes, obviously I don't go anywhere near the yeses.
And what I've found is that I've earned more money, I've made greater connections, and I've worked on things that I really enjoyed. Whereas before I had other mentalities going on, like, oh, I've gotta do the right thing and I've gotta have the clients and I've gotta make the money.
What's the biggest mistake that you are seeing business owners make when it comes to being inclusive and accessible with mental health and how do we fix it?
I think the mistake that we make is we often feel overwhelmed and we think it's too much. We have to get realistic about things. I’m going to spew a few stats at you:
One in five Australians has a disability.
One in two Australians will experience a major mental health crisis in their lifetime.
As business leaders, if we're actually gonna take those words and state, “we're business leaders,” we need to lead from the front with inclusion and accessibility.
We need to actually look at the models that we are using and be person-centred first rather than saying the way to freedom and money is to have a course and then release your book and then do this and that and everything else.
Think about people as people.
For example, when you're looking at mental health and when you're looking at business and all the rest of it, set yourself and your clients' timelines that are not gonna create pressure. None of these best-case standards. I've worked with people that are like, “oh yes, we'll turn this website around in four months,” and it's taken them an entire year.
Let’s set timelines that are actually reasonable. Let's set working hours that are actually reasonable and similarly, reasonable expectations on each other.
But not only that, even when you're dealing with your clients on a mental health level, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur, you are here and all you ever get back from them are edits and negative feedback and all the rest of it, then that does your head in. If you do that to someone who's your contractor all the time, that does their head in.
What we need to do is look at using compassion as a way of guiding people and getting feedback that is nurturing rather than critical. And working together as collaborators instead of having this hierarchy, you know, where it is, “I can only be the person at the top and I'm in charge of the project and you are not.”
We really need to break the barriers down and connect because once you connect with people, then they will tell you what they need in terms of their mental health. They will tell you what they need in terms of reducing their stress and then, they'll also be telling you, “I have Autism, so when I organize this, I would like it like this. Is that okay?”
They'll start disclosing because as a Person with Disabilities, I've gotta tell you, if people aren't compassionate in the day-to-day, I don't tell them as much of my story as I do to people that are more compassionate. Because I'm not sure how they'll treat the further information because of stigma and because I'm already seeing the negative behaviour in the one-upmanship and the hierarchy and all the rest of it. I don't want to involve something that's personally a sore point or a soft point with me so that someone else can poke at it.
Say you are a small business that's got a small team, or you are working with quite a few contractors, et cetera. Is the mistake there the exact same one that you've witnessed?
Yeah, the same error is made most of the time. If you're really going offer things in the first instance, it is compassionate leadership.
The second thing that you should offer is true flexibility in the workplace.
As soon as you are flexible in the workplace, you make it easier for someone to manage their physical disability or their chronic illness. Beyond Blue did a major report and found that if you gave people just two extra days a month to manage their mental health condition better without having to certify that it's holiday work or it's sick leave, then the productivity levels went right up.
Because you're not asking intrusive questions. So if we have a focus on the work product rather than presenteeism, that changes the game enormously because people can manage physical and mental health. If you're working with people and you're allowing for compassion, you open the door for disclosure.
We think, “oh no, I'm going have to spend a hundred million on building a website and architecture,” and all of these sorts of things. But you can actually start with these principles right off the bat without even knowing anything about inclusion or accessibility. And what the funny thing is, if you introduce accessibility and inclusion principles into your business, it actually makes it easier for everyone else.
There's an analogy that people use - add a ramp to a building, 70% of the people will walk up that ramp. It's not just the 4% of Australians that are in wheelchairs.
It's the same thing with the other softer side, the intangible side of inclusion and accessibility as well.
Once you start actually thinking of workplace flexibility for people that are managing chronic illness, physical disability, or mental health, you of course, help parents, you of course help people that are in the sandwich generation who are looking after their grandparents at the same time as their kids.
You help people that are living in regional Australia in different time zones. So, it's about looking at it from those four pillars and thinking about how can we actually have a strategy that promotes wellbeing on a true level that actually helps with the inclusion and the accessibility as a whole.
There's a book that I always reference called Do What You Love and Other Lies about Success and Happiness, which is by Miya Tokumitsu. It talks about how because of the influence of the Protestant work ethic, we all have this deeply ingrained feeling that somehow, we are not of character, we are not morally correct if we are not productive to a certain level.
And that means that when our body is sick, or when our mental health is ailing, or when we are socially isolated, or when we are financially under stress, and we are feeling our well-being, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, and dip. We get double the impact because we've lost productivity, right? There's not a lot of conversation about purpose outside of the whole “be passionate about your job and be purposeful” ideal. We need to actually speak to people where they live.
Disability is a club that anyone can join at any time, and this is what most people forget. 70% of us do by the age of 70.
We need to look after our mental health. We need to look after our physical health because if those sorts of things are difficult for us to manage, or they become an encroachment on our life, or they start defining the terms of our lives, none of the other stuff really matters.
So, it is about making sure that your business isn't all fitting into this myth, this Protestant work ethic, productivity, make all the money, you know, scarcity myth that we've got going on. So that we can actually make space for real inclusion so that we can make space for looking after ourselves properly.
Like I said, if we don't look after our best asset, we've got nothing, right?
We've spoken about some of the mistakes that people are making. But what are some of the positive things that you have seen and great initiatives that you've seen businesses taking to be more inclusive and to improve that accessibility?
One of the classic examples of how disability became more visible during the pandemic was the Auslan interpreter. With the newscasts that's now transformed into events and translated into online communication and all that sort of stuff. It is really good to see that because it's a normalization of, quite frankly, a beautiful language as well as an entire community being elevated and saying, “Hey, the door's open for you. Come on through.”
I have to touch on a little bit of tiny doom and gloom before I bring you back up on this one. But when the Black Saturday bushfires came through and annihilated those beautiful towns in Victoria, those smaller towns, one of them made the decision to rebuild their town with accessible tourism in mind. So they created streets that were nice and level without, you know, high camber and all this sort of stuff, and, and without big gradients to deal with. And they looked at were the placements of the bathrooms. They looked at how they'd map out the towns and all the rest of it. They're now going gangbusters because it's gotten around the world and people come and visit Little Country Victoria for a slice of accessible town. Knowing full well that no matter what your disability, or if it's an aging thing as well, you'll be safe, and you will be included. That's a $12 billion annual market in Australia that's not being tapped into properly on a town planning level, on an architecture level, and on an event level.
That little town is now cashing in on basically if you create the space for these sorts of things, there are, there are people that are already got fistfuls of dollars that are going, it's like Julia Robert’s Pretty Woman moment when she walks back in with the dresses she bought to the shops that snubbed her and says, “huge mistake!”.
There's all these people with different disabilities out there saying, “I want to spend my money with someone. Will you be that person?”
It doesn’t have to be huge. You can make incremental changes.
You know, change a little bit on your website. Make it inclusive. Make it inclusive across readers. Use colours on your social media that aren't these pale-washed-out things that, especially women seem to like doing that basically stops red-green colour-deficient people read a thing thing that you've put up.
Do those sorts of changes and you'll make more sales. If you think about putting your colours through accessibility tools, if you think about kerning on your fonts, if you think about these tiny little things, you'll just have all these people that no one else is getting them as a customer because they're all trying to be really pretty and have a stylistic thing, but they're not thinking outside the box, and thinking about who might be excluded by the content.
And it works really, really well. There are some amazing things that are happening.
Look at Dylan Alcott, an amazing guy. He is running accessible music festivals. They've booked out and sold out. I remember listening to Dylan do an ABC radio segment for International Day of People with Disabilities (Dec 3rd) a few years back, and he was talking about how a woman had walked up to him in a coffee shop and was in tears saying, “I've just so happy to see you out here.”
And it came that she was having an inspiration porn moment over him ordering a coffee because a man in a wheelchair getting coffee before work at the ABC is somehow something to cry and hold his hand over.
To go from having that sort of stuff to him actually commanding a festival circuit and being named Australian of the Year and stuff like that is a huge moment for all of the People with Disabilities that are out there.
Clem's a huge one for repurposing social media. A transcript makes all the difference to someone who can't hear. Captions using alt tags so that people with low vision or no vision can see things is important as well. Having your websites compatible with readers helps.
I use an accessibility reader sometimes, and what I hear is a hell of a lot of code and horrible descriptions of emojis. Do not use emojis in your social media descriptions if you want people with accessibility requirements to be able to read them with a reader.
It depends on what your audience is and who you want to help. But it's really important to think:
what can I do today to improve the way that I'm going with making my marketing accessible?
Is it changing some colors?
Is it tidying it up so that my website can be accessible across a tablet or a phone?
Is it adding some captions to my video? Is it making sure there's a transcript somewhere later on?
You know, all of this kind of stuff all adds up.
When you are helping a business with their strategy or their policy from a marketing angle, what is something that you are always making sure with your client's marketing that they have that most will in fact forget to include?
It's a good question and it's a very simple answer. An idea of sensitivity training or some idea of sensitivity.
And the classic example is people just not knowing how to use the language and also not knowing about identity first stuff, or not thinking about the terms that they use and what they mean to other people.
So using mental health as an example, I'm not gonna buy from you if you have a “crazy day sale”. Not gonna buy from you. If you're talking about killing things, killing yourself and, oh, you'll be so excited you'll kill yourself. I will not buy from you. Think about the language you use.
I'm currently watching a TV show that was very prominent in the 90s and listening to the way that they reference things in comedy and just cringing pretty much every episode at least 20 times because of the way the people were referred to the language that was spoken and the terms used.
The interesting thing is still Gen X, my generation, has an issue with it. Because when you challenge people to say, please don't use the word “spazz,” which refers to Cerebral Palsy. I have Cerebral Palsy. Don't use that around me, or at all. They're like, “but it doesn't mean that.”
You don’t get to say that.
I'm the one that has to take the emotional labour away from the situation. I'm the one that has to deal with microaggressions every single day. I'm the one that has to get up every morning and know that those steps are not built for me to walk on or that train is inaccessible because of the gap, all of these things in the world are not designed to include me.
I don't need to hear it from you as well.
Once we start changing language, then we can start changing processes. We can start changing the architecture and the infrastructure and all the rest of it. But if we don't even challenge the language that we are using, then we've got no hope of creating change, and we're only paying lip service.
I know there's a lot of stuff and there's a lot of flack younger people get, but to be honest, if I was doing social media or marketing in this day and age, the person I would put in charge of teaching me sensitivity would be a Zoomer because they went through schooling that was far more compassionate and far more reflective than ours.
They're far more aware of the experience and therefore they're going to challenge some of the ways that we speak about people, speak about issues and speak about accessibility generally. And it's also this whole thing of actually learning that what we learned was not the right thing to learn.
We learned to have a very competitive system. We learned to have a very straight, able-bodied, white system that was ruled by men. So if you're gonna challenge the patriarchy, you also have to challenge all of those other patriarchal things that come across with it.
And also if you really, really, really wanna do your marketing right and you really wanna get your sensitivity right, there's nothing wrong with employing a bunch of people and getting them to build you a sensitivity policy.
Get them to look at your website, look at your online shop, look at your physical shop or whatever, and get their input so that you are not continuing exclusion. So, that it's not just the small changes you are making, but you are making a commitment to a wider span of changes that are going on, which we've seen on local government level.
They've all got EAPs to include people in structures to look at the architecture, to look at how they run events, to look at the policy and the terms that they use to celebrate diversity on specific days, to highlight things because they've realized that within the community, once you cut out everybody, that's of a marginalized experience, you really don't have that many people left. You think you do, but you don't.
Do you think a lot of the problem is because maybe some of these disabilities or even mental health is not something physical, so if we can't see it, we can't necessarily start to process to try and understand it and therefore have that in mind? Do you think that that's part of the problem?
Maybe? I mean, 80% of all disabilities are invisible. I mean, that's an important thing to remember. You're not going to see the visual cues a lot of the time, and you have to rely on the disclosure, which is why the compassionate space is so important. But honestly, I think the majority of it is reflected in the fact that once you set something up and you start doing it, you don't revisit it.
If you look at history, if you look at law, if you look at business, the financial markets, politics, all of these things that influence business in a very strong way. They say of law, we're 20 to 30 years behind the actual social change. You know, business is probably a little bit more progressive, but probably not much more.
And the mentality is still, you know, “oh, but that's how we've always done it.”
So people aren't looking at things and then they compartmentalize. They don't understand that.
For example, I saw something from a conservative group that was saying of this stuff about kids being out about their LGBTQIA status has led to more of them identifying as being on the rainbow, and therefore they're all being brainwashed.
No, it just means that the generation is far more likely to disclose what's going on with them than previous generations where people may have suffered from being shoved in the closet and denying who they were for decades and ramifications in other ways.
So, there has to be a certain amount of safety.
I've met people that have got physical disabilities or who have mental health conditions who are still speaking in whispered tones, who are still not identifying as part of the disability community. And that's okay.
They're on their journey. It's their story. They'll come to it when they need to, and they'll find their place.
Because we had a lot of stigma attached to it, to be open about having a disability, you can see it in the wider community.
Everybody keeps saying, “oh, let's not call it disability and let's call it something else that's really comforting for us.”
No, able-bodied people. Please, just say the damn word. Not some fluffy euphemism.
The disability community literally had to have a campaign “Say the damn word.”
By using words that are not related to disability, it's your discomfort that you're giving to me.
So, whilst we're still in this world where this discomfort is being put upon us, and we're not openly disclosing about what's going on with us for fear of exclusion, you know, for fear of losing our jobs, it’s unfair.
I just wrote an article for a peak mental health body, which is the pros and cons of disclosure in the workplace. Obviously, that is proactive about how they reach out to people with mental health and all the rest of it. But let's not for a second, assume that people won't be looked at as less than simply because a boss hasn't gotten over their stigma or because a field that they're in still has problems.
We still have issues with the stigma. So once we start challenging the stigma, I think more people will speak up. And the more people that speak up, the more we will see normalisation of language, and the more we will make change, right?
I don't think it's necessarily they haven't got the visual cues. I think it is we haven't challenged enough of the stigma for those visual cues not to matter anymore.
If there's one thing that you would like service providers to really pay attention to and to take away from our discussion today. what would that be?
I think it comes back to, which was at the top of the things is the four pillars of well-being.
So if you look at your business and think:
Are there physical barriers to my events?
Are there physical barriers to my website?
Are there financial barriers to my events?
Are there financial barriers to my customer’s participation?
Is there a chance I may be unwittingly cutting out people with disabilities through the language that I’m using?
Think about your business and take your hat off as a business owner, and put it on someone else and say, “if I was to walk into this room, would I feel safe? Would I feel included in this event? Would I be happy to buy at this online shop with all of these popups going off in my screen reader all the time?”
And just look at those sorts of barriers in real time. And if you don't know how to look at it, that's okay. There are a bunch of people out there that do it for a living that can come and do a talk, or they can set you up with an inclusion plan, or they can run your website through their tools and go, fantastic for the most part, but you need to fix this, this, and this.
Ask for the assistance because the community is out there and they're willing to give the advice to you. There are representatives, there are people that make a business out of this and elevate your business in that way.
In summary:
Look at the barriers that you might have
Write down a list of what you've got to change or improve
Consult with someone who actually knows a little bit more who's inside the community and see what you can do about building yourself a list of things to change.
Look at it as a change process over time because that's really what we need you to do. Because what someone with Autism needs is different to someone who is Deaf or for a physical disability or mental health condition.
You can even do it with your Christmas party or networking this year. Don't go to the places with the big, tall cocktail seats. Try having a few things going on with the old back spine and legs and see how you go.
So if people want to connect with you and learn a bit more, where should they go?
As a virtual marketing officer and a community manager is unashamedlycreative.com au
And where I'm doing the advocacy, where I think. Last check about 12 to 15% of the community actually is out about having a mental health condition or a disability is the freelancejungle.com au
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