This article is written by Jonathan Mok, School Development Officer at the Education Bureau in Hong Kong. Jonathan is also a fellow of 2020 Social Justice Fellowship Programme of Resolve, a local NGO aiming at building an inclusive Hong Kong.

In my previous article for Apolitical, I argued that governments should look at their recruitment policies if they want to create meaningful employment opportunities for people with disabilities. Many people with disabilities can contribute immensely as public servants, but actually landing government jobs can be difficult.

I suggested that government agencies could collaborate with community or advocacy groups to tap into the talent pool of people with disabilities through structured programmes combining work experience, mentoring and hard and soft skills training.

Government agencies could also help employees with disabilities to create a mutually supportive community to provide mentoring and coaching among members. They could even make it mandatory for employees with or without disabilities to undergo training covering disability issues. At the end of the article, I called for the government agencies to create more flexible selection policies for people with disabilities, especially those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

In this article, I would like to focus on another major area related to the employment of public servants: work evaluations.

The meaning of fair and transparent

It is expected of all managers that work evaluations are carried with fairness and transparency.

But when it comes to appraising the work of people with disabilities such as ASD, ADHD, Dyslexia and Dyspraxia it soon becomes challenging to say what exactly is fair and transparent. For example, should these employees be evaluated according to the work performance standards for employees without disabilities?

According to a lead consultant at Job Accommodation Network, a contractor of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, a common concern among employers who experience performance issues from an employee with disabilities is the worry that any actions taken due to the employee’s performance would result in the violation of “Americans with Disabilities Act”.

Another reason why it is so challenging for employers, including government agencies, to manage the performance of employees with “hidden disabilities” is that these disabilities are just that: invisible. Yet, ignoring them is at the employer’s peril.

Customising work evaluations could reduce the risk of causing “The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome” for both employers and employees with hidden disabilities

For instance, the U.K’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), in 2018, issued a statutory Code of Practice, requiring that all employers “must do all they can reasonably be expected to do to find out if a worker has a disability”. In other words, employers must examine all possible factors leading to the performance decline of good employees.

Yet, many employers refuse to adjust work management systems for employees with hidden disabilities on the ground that such adjustments would be unfair to employees without disabilities. According to an article by Personnel Today, which refers to the a conducted by the U.K.’s Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas), 75% of employers surveyed “felt adjusting performance management for specific groups of staff was unfair to other employees.”

We shouldn’t set anyone up to fail

You might ask: “Why is it important to customise work evaluation criteria for employees with hidden disabilities?”

To that, I’d say that customising work evaluations could reduce the risk of causing “The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome” for both employers and employees with hidden disabilities.

In the context of employment of people with disabilities, “The Set-Up-To-Fail” Syndrome means that due to the perception of the capabilities of employees with disabilities, managers may only assign these employees with mundane tasks. Instead of trusting the employees to complete their tasks on-time, the managers may end up micromanaging the employees for fear that they would deliver poor quality products or miss deadlines.

For example, when it comes to developing new teaching kits for the reformed English curriculum, the manager may only task the employee with ADHD with sourcing pictures and articles as reference materials for the new English teaching curriculum. Fearing that the employee may not adhere to the instructions for sourcing the pictures and sources, the manager may ask the employee to report the daily progress.

If the employee has any new ideas over the pictures and articles that make the teaching kits more engaging for students, the manager may just reject the new ideas at no time.

The manager is also highly unlikely to ask the employee with ADHD to formulate any guiding questions or make any lesson plans to teachers using new teaching kits. The manager may merely assume that the employee is unable to complete the assignment without riddling it with grammatical mistakes and impossible lesson plans for teachers to adapt to their classes. Yet, for the fear of accusation against disability discrimination or receiving requests from supervisors to provide further coaching to the employee, the manager gives the employee a pass in the work performance appraisal and the increase in salary increment.

The other possibility is that the manager may write a very negative work appraisal report of the employee with ADHD. The employee with ADHD is weighted against the work evaluation criteria for colleagues without disabilities. The manager, however, never provides sufficient coaching for the employee with ADHD. Neither has the manager offered the employee with ADHD any opportunities to engage in other job-related duties. The manager denies the employee with ADHD any opportunities for professional growth. In return, the employee with ADHD may end up with a higher level of frustration at work, causing more conflicts in the office. The frustration could further be compounded by warning letters due to poor work performance or even the possibility of dismissal since the employers may argue that they have offered reasonable accommodations. However, the employee with ADHD fails in fulfilling his or her basic work duties.

Stalling career progression

The employee with ADHD suffers in the whole process.

Since the employee with ADHD is micromanaged and regularly criticised by the manager, the employee’s confidence and motivation take a hit. Worse, since one of the major criteria for job promotion is the employee’s ability to create guiding questions and lesson plans useful for teachers, the manager denies the employee any opportunities to develop skills crucial for developing any teaching materials. For example, the employee should be given opportunities to make lesson plans for teachers first. Then, after visiting schools to examine the effectiveness of the new teaching materials and meet with teachers over the lesson plans, the employee could then further revise the teaching materials and create different sets of lesson plans for the teachers to adopt.

Anti-discrimination bodies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and EHRC state that unless there are justifiable reasons, applying the same rules or standards to everyone could lead to indirect discrimination

Since the employee with ADHD has not offered such opportunities, his or her career stalls. due to the denial of opportunities from reaching their potential. The inability to obtain more job-related skills and even advance the career may cause the employee with ADHD lowered motivation at work.

To reduce the appearance of this “defeating cycle” between the manager and the employee with ADHD or other hidden disabilities, government agencies should adopt the following practices when it comes to work appraisals for the employees with hidden disabilities:

1. Job descriptions

The adjustments of work appraisal start with recrafting job descriptions. As Anne Cockayne of Nottingham Trent University argues in her article, managers can ask the employees with hidden disabilities about their favourite or most confident tasks at work.

It means that every employee will have their role reshaped. For example, going back to the example of developing new teaching kits for the new English teaching curriculum, the employee with ADHD may particularly like to visit schools in low-income neighbourhoods since teachers there are more creative in delivering their lessons. Other members of the team may not necessarily like to visit these schools since the teachers could often ask for more teaching support, which the team members could not promise immediately. However, the employee with ADHD has managed to develop rapport and trust with the teachers there. The employees with ADHD could be tasked with observing lessons in these schools and reporting teachers’ feedback.

2. Adjust the evaluation criteria

Second, work evaluation criteria for the employee with ADHD should be adjusted accordingly. For example, the employee with ADHD should be evaluated against the capability to write quality reports about the effectiveness of the new teaching kits in schools in low-income neighbourhoods, rather than schools regardless of their socio-economic locations. Such adjustments of work evaluation criteria aim at helping the manager assess the employee with ADHD when he or she performs in the best condition. Likewise, since team members without disabilities no longer need to take up the undesired aspect of their jobs, they can also focus on their most favourite work aspects, thus helping them to perform better and receive more favourable work appraisal reports.

Flexible recruitment processes, training programmes to current employees and those with supervisory responsibilities and support to employees with different forms of disabilities are crucial for public servants with different forms of disabilities

Critics may argue that despite agreeing with reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities, they believe that equal evaluation criteria should be used to evaluate employees regardless of disabilities to ensure consistent performance standards. However, anti-discrimination bodies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and EHRC state that unless there are justifiable reasons, applying the same rules or standards to everyone could lead to indirect discrimination. Acas, in its guidance for employers published in 2017, states that dismissal of an employee with a disability could be “a complex idea and it may be advisable to take legal advice.” (P.27 of the guidance).

In other words, the application of equal evaluation criteria to measure employees’ performances at work could cause legal risks to government agencies. By reaching mutual agreements with employees with hidden disabilities on their job duties and work evaluation criteria, government agencies and employees have clear expectations on each other. The government agencies can provide the support needed by the employees. They can understand the steps needed to take to perform well at work. Both sides can reduce the possibilities of solving their employment disputes at employment tribunals.

There’s no shame in being flexible

Lastly, when it comes to employees without disabilities, their work evaluation criteria are not set in stone — often it is adjusted according to the work priorities.

For example, one of my team members is evaluated considerably higher in terms of her publicity work since she needs to engage with media companies to produce promotional materials for my programme. The other team member is evaluated more heavily in terms of his work on my programme’s website.

The work evaluation criteria for employees with hidden disabilities are that their work duties are still adjusted. However, the adjustments of the work duties will take their disability and recommendations by medical professionals into account. The work evaluation criteria will also be changed through assessing the skills and attributes at which the employees with hidden disabilities are weak.

Flexible recruitment processes, training programmes to current employees and those with supervisory responsibilities and support to employees with different forms of disabilities are crucial for public servants with different forms of disabilities. It is equally important for government agencies to rethink how work evaluation criteria can be adjusted so that the employees can be retained through fair assessments and opportunities to develop their careers. — Jonathan Mok

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(Picture credit: Death to the Stock photo)