January 2026
Dr Sepideh Yekani
Luis Canto E Castor
Dr Peggie Rothe
Inclusivity is more than just a ramp
We walk through the same doors, sit in the same meeting rooms, and log into the same systems. Yet the workplace experience can differ dramatically. What feels accessible and empowering to some may feel exclusionary and obstructive to others. Inclusive workplace is an environment where everyone can participate and thrive, regardless of their differences.
And when we talk about inclusion, we’re not talking about making people “grateful” for being able to enter the building. We’re talking about whether the workplace removes friction or quietly taxes some people’s energy and dignity every single day. If you design for the people who are most excluded, you don’t just “accommodate disability”, you upgrade the experience for everyone.
That might sound stark, but let’s be honest: if your building, culture, or tech stack only work for the healthiest, loudest, or most typical employees, you don’t have a high-performance workplace – you have an exclusion machine with a payroll. Leaders would never accept a finance system that only worked for 80% of invoices; yet many still tolerate spaces that routinely fail 20% of their people.
Take a simple example: you arrive at work in a wheelchair, already tired from a difficult commute through a city that isn’t built with you in mind. Just as you reach the office, you’re diverted, asked to use a side entrance or a ramp tucked away from the main doors. In that moment, you’re separated from your colleagues before the day has even begun. Too often, what we call “solutions” are really afterthoughts. True inclusivity is an entrance that welcomes everyone through the same door, wherever possible.
But the journey doesn’t end there. Is the lift wide enough? Are the hallways clear? Can you reach the bathroom or kitchen with ease? Can you sit and move in a meeting room like any other colleague, or does the space itself remind you that the workplace was not built with you in mind?
That side entrance isn’t just a door, it’s a message. It tells people, “You can come in, but not like everyone else.” And we repeat the same pattern digitally, with separate processes, extra forms, or clunky “special” systems that only some people must use. Every time we do this, we reinforce who is truly centred in the design, and who is simply being routed around the edges. Accessibility is rarely about one big dramatic barrier; it’s death by a thousand tiny design decisions. A door that’s too heavy, a kitchen that’s too cramped, a meeting room with no turning circle – none of these on their own look catastrophic, but together they create a daily reminder that you were an afterthought in someone else’s blueprint.
These are not abstract questions. And they are not limited to employees using wheelchairs. They extend to people with other disabilities or long-term health conditions, physical or mental, and to those whose needs are overlooked because of gender, age, or other differences. These are lived realities. And they matter. Because even if those affected are a minority, the impact is anything but minor.
Exclusion, however unintentional, erodes culture, hinders retention, and undermines performance. It is not just an inconvenience; it is alienation and alienation has a cost. It shows up in higher turnover, in people quietly opting out of promotions, in presenteeism that gets misread as lack of ambition.
It’s also deeply intersectional: disability, age, race, gender, caring responsibilities, neurodivergence and socio-economic background all layer onto each other. If you only listen for one type of experience, you’ll miss the compound impact on people who sit at the sharpest edges.
Data as the wake-up call
Stories open hearts: data opens budgets. The value of this evidence is that it turns “I’m struggling here” from a personal complaint into a systemic pattern you can’t politely ignore. The Leesman Inclusivity Module, which can be attached to the standardised Leesman workplace experience survey, can shine a light on these inequalities.
The point of this data isn’t to label workplaces as good or bad; it’s to give leaders a brutally honest mirror. A mature organisation doesn’t get defensive when gaps appear, it gets curious and then makes different decisions on design, fit-out and policy.
Across the Leesman Inclusive Workplace Module*, 22% identified as having a disability, a long-term health condition, a mental health difficulty, or a neurodiverse profile; a group we refer to as “respondents with lived experience.” A further 70% said “no,” to this question and 9% preferred not to say. Of those with lived experience, 67% reported a physical disability and 45% a mental health difficulty; some living with both.
That 22% is about one in five colleagues. And many never disclose due to stigma or career impact. So if you’re thinking “we don’t have many disabled or neurodivergent employees,” the more likely truth is: you do, but the workplace doesn’t feel safe enough for them to be visible.
● The average Leesman Index (Lmi) workplace experience score for respondents with lived experience is 59.9, compared to 67.4 for those without.
● Of those with lived experience, the Lmi score for those with a physical disability is 60.8 compared to 58.1 for those with mental health difficulties.
A gap of 7.5 points might look small on a slide, but lived out, it’s huge. If your customer NPS dropped by that margin, you’d have a taskforce on it by Monday. When that same drop shows up in the experience of disabled colleagues, it often gets ignored. That’s a choice and it’s a fixable one.
When looking at the more detailed questions in the Leesman survey, the widest gap between respondents with lived experience and those without is a striking 17 percentage points (pp) in response to the question on whether the workplace enables them to work productively. The gap remains significant across other measures: creating an enjoyable environment (16 pp), supporting workplace culture (15 pp), and fostering a sense of community (15 pp). People with lived experience are also less likely to agree that their workplace is a place they feel proud to bring visitors to (15 pp gap).
Ensuring all your employees can work productively is not about preference; it’s about whether people can realistically do their jobs without paying an extra physical or cognitive tax. And if your most excluded colleagues are less proud to bring visitors to your workplace, that’s also a brand issue. The building is quietly telling them, “This wasn’t really built for you,” and they hear it.
Another crucial dimension of inclusivity lies in how well workplaces support the activities employees carry out in their daily work.
For employees with lived experience, support is lower across all 21 activities in our list. The largest gaps, all above 10 percentage points, show up in activities that require privacy, concentration, or creativity. These include ‘Business confidential discussions’, ‘Private conversations’, ‘Individual focused work (not desk-based)’, and ‘Thinking or creative thinking’. These are exactly the activities that demand trust and psychological safety. If you can’t find a private space to talk to your manager about your health, your performance, or a mistake, you’re more likely to stay silent, mask, or withdraw. That silence doesn’t mean everything is fine; it means problems are staying underground until they become expensive.
When business-critical conversations are taking place in environments that don’t work for a significant proportion of your people, you’re not just inconveniencing them; you’re compromising confidentiality, decision quality and wellbeing.
The gaps in experience show up not just in solo work, but in collaboration and informal interaction. When spontaneous conversations and focused co-working are harder for one group, you might also skew who gets seen, heard, and involved in the “real” decision-making that often happens outside formal meetings.
Too often, workplaces lack sufficient private or quiet areas and when such spaces do exist, they may be hard to access, poorly signposted, or culturally perceived as “off-limits.” This is the workplace version of the “inverse care law”: the people who most need stability, choice and comfort get the least of it. The signal employees might get is, “We built this for show, not for you.”
Stigma and low awareness could stop people from using the support they need, fearing they’ll stand out or break workplace norms. These needs are core to doing good work. Leaders should model using these spaces, speak openly about adjustments, and make it clear that needing support isn’t weakness; it’s part of being human
When we look at the top five most important features (in fact six, as two scored equally) the satisfaction gap for employees with lived experience remains significant. This is where property, HR, IT and DEI need to stop working in silos. Features like lighting, acoustics, furniture and signage are not just facilities issues, they’re inclusion issues, recruitment issues and risk issues.
The features that matter for most of those with lived experience are: ‘Desk’, ‘Chair’, ‘Toilets’, ‘General cleanliness’, ‘Temperature control’, and ‘Noise levels’. Yet for each of these features, satisfaction among respondents with lived experience lags behind their peers. While these may not be the most exciting parts of a fit-out, they’re the features that people live with hour after hour.
‘Desk’ and ‘Chair’ are the most frequently selected important features across both groups, yet employees with lived experience are less satisfied by 9 pp than those without. Accessible furniture doesn’t mean a couple of “special” desks in the corner. It means the default is flexible enough for a huge range of heights, mobility, and sensory needs.
When basic furniture doesn’t work, people compensate with their bodies: perching, twisting, over-reaching. Over time that could turn into musculoskeletal issues, fatigue and more time off. Investing in adjustable, well-designed furniture isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a preventative health intervention.
The sharpest difference is with ‘Noise levels’. Only 18% of respondents with lived experience report satisfaction, a 13 pp gap compared to their peers. Noise is a critical workplace feature, and while satisfaction in the wider Leesman dataset is generally low (34% between Q2 2015 and Q1 2025), the depth of this divide shows that people with lived experience are excessively affected. Noise hits hardest for neurodivergent people, those with hearing loss, people recovering from brain injury, and anyone living with chronic pain or fatigue. When organisations ignore acoustics, it’s a quick way to lose brilliant talent who simply can’t function in chaos.
Next is ‘Temperature control’, with only 25% of respondents with lived experience satisfied – a 12 pp experience gap. For many, noise or temperature discomfort is frustrating; for those with lived experience, it can be exclusionary. Temperature isn’t about comfort alone; it’s also about health, especially for people on certain medications, with cardiovascular conditions, or going through menopause.
Ranking workplace features by their satisfaction gaps also shows an interesting pattern. The biggest gap appears in ‘Office lighting’, with an 18 pp difference, followed by ‘Air quality’ (14 pp), ‘Noise levels’ (13 pp), then both ‘Temperature control’ and ‘Natural light’ (12 pp each). While these are the basics of comfort, concentration, and wellbeing, they are also the elements that often get value-engineered out when budgets tighten. You may end up saving money on the build, but you could end up spending it later on sickness, turnover and underperformance.
The story is similar when it comes to spaces. ‘Quiet rooms for working alone or in pairs’ and ‘Small meeting rooms’ both show 12 pp gaps. Next come ‘Large meeting rooms’ and ‘Phone/work booths’ (11 pp each), alongside the ‘Space between work settings’, ‘Dividers between desks’, and even the ‘Accessibility of colleagues’, all registering double-digit gaps. When you don’t have enough genuinely usable small rooms and booths, people default to working in headphones or taking calls in corridors and stairwells, which might then tie into the dissatisfaction with noise levels.
The gap on “Accessibility of colleagues” is especially telling. It hints at a workplace where some people are physically or socially out of the way, on different floors, in awkward corners, or simply not considered in team rituals. If your most marginalised colleagues are also the hardest to reach, you’ve designed isolation into the system.
The largest gaps are not in perks, but in the fundamentals, lighting, air, noise, temperature, and space, showing that inclusivity begins with the basics of workplace design. This is the real mindset shift: inclusivity is the boring basics done brilliantly. Before you talk about “next-gen workplace experience,” ask yourself: can everyone see, hear, move, breathe and focus here without struggle?
As the data shows, for employees with lived experience, even the most fundamental aspects of daily work, from focusing at a desk to controlling noise, light, or temperature, remain less accessible and less supportive. These are not minor gaps, and they shape whether people feel productive, comfortable, and proud to belong. In the end, they determine who thrives and who struggles.
The good news is that none of this is unsolvable. It just requires that disabled and otherwise marginalised colleagues are in the room, and listened to, when you make decisions about leases, refurbishments, hybrid policies and tech. If you’re not co-designing with the people who live the problem, you’re guessing. And guesses are expensive.
The question, then, is no longer whether inclusivity matters, but how urgently organisations will need to act. Closing these gaps requires more than adjustments; it demands a new vision and way of thinking that places inclusivity at the very core of workplace strategy. Only then can we build environments where everyone, regardless of their differences or lived experience, can enter through the same doors, work with the same confidence, and share the same sense of belonging.
Inclusivity is not an add-on, but the foundation of a workplace that truly works for all. In practice, that means three things: setting hard metrics for inclusive experience, budgeting for foundational fixes and making someone at executive level clearly accountable for progress.
A workplace that shuts out even a few, fails everyone. If you’re proud of your values but your people still can’t comfortably get through the front door, reach the bathroom, or hear themselves think, then you’ve just found your real priority list.
* Leesman Inclusive Workplace Module: N=63,057 (up to Q3 2025)
