Want to measure employee engagement? Measure accessibility

TL;DR: Accessibility highlights collaboration and surfaces ineptitude. Leadership wants to know that too.

As accessibility experts, we know a dirty secret about tech: Where we find intractable accessibility barriers, we find dysfunction.

Recognize systems level vs team dysfunction

At the systems level — sometimes the dysfunction is a vendor chosen by procurement who didn't review a VPAT riddled with unsupported features, or it's a cultural issue with a VP who is still exerting their design taste in the minutiae of toggle switches. Those are issues a designer, developer or QA team can't do much about.

At the team contribution level — we often find teams de-prioritizing accessibility training, ignoring requirements and generally not keeping up with modern digital development. You hear it in outdated references like, "We've gotta keep the content above the fold." or "We want to make it pop!" They consistently defend their work with "Google does it this way." or "We're on a tight deadline, so we'll fix those bugs later."

These teams haven't attended a professional conference in years. These teams don't read books on design or development. Their UX research consists of looking at competitors. If you asked the product manager what their Lighthouse performance scores are, they don't even have a deer in the headlights look, they have more of a deer looking at a brick wall: 0 curiosity about any metrics other than their bonus.

These teams are not engaged with each other, tossing the work over the fence to the next team. They're delivering what looks like working software to a minority of customers who look just like them, and moving on to the next quarterly target middle management set for them.

What is engagement?

When teams are emotionally committed to their teammates, the enterprise and its goals, they’ll give discretionary effort above and beyond 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 accessibility trainings or by self learning.)

Why 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.

Engagement: It's different from productivity

The problem is, commitment and discretionary effort isn’t measurable, so organizations try to measure and incentivize productivity instead.

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” -?Charlie Munger?

In the modern era, organizations measure productivity by twisting agile methodology from being agile, to doing agile.

What organizations incentivize as productivity:

• Delivery on time (or at least saying you shipped on time, even if it's hot garbage)
• Pretty velocity and burn down charts (even if features were shifted to next quarter)
• Conversion/sales metrics (even if it hurts the overall brand experience)

What are the outcomes:

• Designers who won't advocate for people because "we're on a tight deadline"
• Developers who ignore basic code quality to deliver (what looks like) a demo, frightened to hold up a release
• Features that steal conversions from other portions of the business

(* The author recognizes the superlative use of "never", but… it is factual in this case.)

What is the opposite quality of those outcomes?

Accessibility gives us a metric strongly correlated to discretionary effort (and good UX outcomes and reduced legal risk, but that's for another blog post).

• Ability to think and demonstrate care about other people
• Delivery of quality alongside quantity
• Trustworthy collaboration between design, dev and QA
• Dedication to just… doing the right thing

Accessibility measures what leaders really want

Business leaders are just people (believe it or not) trying to make difficult decisions about the future with imperfect information.

Too often we discuss accessibility as an activist in our favorite cat shirt — rather than as a change agent, offering accessibility as a source of measurable business intelligence.

When they ask, "What's in it for us?", they’re not just asking about money. That question they're really asking, "What solutions are your bringing me?"

Is it a sociopathic question to ask in this context? Yes, it is. Are you going to change that? No. So deliver what leadership is seeking: Tools to achieve gain.

They often have little insight into software development. They would love to know what product teams are coasting, and which ones are actually doing good work. We are exceptionally well placed to offer them a measurable answer.

This content was adapted from Drive investment: Communicate value to leadership & middle management from The Book on Accessibility.

The Book on Accessibility was written for experts who know building an enterprise accessibility program isn't about WCAG conformance, it's about delivering a measurable program to the business itself.