What’s happening
Business leadership at the C-suite or middle management layer is asking, “What’s in it for me?”
They’re not just asking about money. Leaders are always looking for clarity while making difficult decisions about the future with imperfect information.
What you have to offer
The answer you can give is simple: accessibility sheds light on a seemingly intangible metric: engagement.
Define real engagement
When teams are emotionally committed to their teammates, the enterprise and its goals, they’ll give discretionary effort above and beyond the what’s asked.
Engaged teams don’t engage in malicious compliance (doing precisely as told, even when it’s a net negative for the enterprise). They are constantly making efforts to level up their own skills (either through provided trainings or by self learning.)
The problem is, commitment and discretionary effort isn’t measurable, so organizations try to measure productivity instead.
Accessibility gives us a metric that is strongly correlated to discretionary effort.
Why team engagement matters
A disengaged employee costs an organization approximately $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. Disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year due to lost productivity.
The impact of engagement
Engagement directly impacts an organization’s performance, productivity, and overall success.
The KPIs of engagement are:
Collaboration
Greater collaboration means faster response time with less time lost in coordinating meetings. Engaged teams feel safe communicating quickly with high levels of trust.
Retention
It’s expensive to onboard, hire and train a new employee. Engaged teams feel like they matter, they’re growing in their career and they’d be missed if they left.
Absenteeism
Unplanned absenteeism affects the predictability of work. Everyone should have harmony with their work and life, but when team members bail without planning ahead with their team, work slows or stops.
Meaningful productivity
Measurables like work completed, value delivered or bugs generated are easily correlated to legitimately engaged teams committed to meaningful work.
Engaged teams learn accessibility (and fast)
Time and time again, every accessibility professional has witnessed bright and engaged developers, managers and designers adopt accessibility into their work, processes and mindset.
They quickly grow from an audit based command and control model to a self regulating inclusion first process.
What we observe:
- Designers begin asking questions about semantics and how code affects assistive technology
- Developers seek greater understanding of the intended UX
- Product managers begin seeking quality of work over quantity
Unengaged teams simply can’t do this
This is a hard truth: Teams who won’t invest discretionary effort will not grow their understanding of accessibility.
They won’t empathize with people using their products, and they don’t seek to improve performance and experience. They emphasize completion of work and meeting targets over quality experiences.
Note: Engagement is not productivity
Every enterprise seeks to improve employee engagement, but all struggle to measure it beyond productivity.
You can deliver value to leadership by measuring accessibility, indicating meaningful engagement over fake productivity.
“We get what we measure”
A software team can be very engaged in delivering polished productivity numbers, while not investing their discretionary effort in what advances the organization.
- If you measure projects completed, teams will simply reduce the scope of each project.
- If you measure lines of code written, developers will simply write superfluous code.
- If you measure bugs, teams will mischaracterize bugs as new requirements.
Automated WCAG compliance doesn’t work
Automated syntax checking tools are necessary and useful, but used exclusively are easily gamed just like other mechanical measurements. Evaluating inclusion requires people to improve processes and assess UX outcomes.
Accessibility can’t fix a broken culture
In otherwise healthy environments, accessibility programs can identify under-performing teams and team members.
But, if all teams are unengaged and in a toxic culture, let’s be honest: accessibility and inclusion can’t help. You’ll be left managing a command and control process of writing compliance policies and chasing audit remediation efforts.
Any leader wants to know who is not committed and giving discretionary effort to the enterprise. As an accessibility professional, you have the ability to deliver that business knowledge.