How Job Design for Disability Improves Work for Everyone

Disability-related innovations are all around us. Curb cuts in sidewalks, originally designed for wheelchair users, benefit caregivers with strollers, travelers with suitcases, and delivery workers with hand trucks. Automatic doors intended for individuals with mobility impairments are convenient for all. Blurred backgrounds in video calls, standing desks and ergonomic keyboards, and speech and voice recognition tools were all designed to assist people by minimizing distractions, easing lipreading, reducing chronic pain, and supporting people with mobility impairments — and all are now widely used by the general public. Every day, people with and without disabilities use numerous innovative accommodations that have become indispensable mainstream tools — to such an extent that few people realize that the features were originally developed to address disability-related needs.

In short, what’s often labeled a burden can be a source of practical innovation. But many managers still view disability at work through the negative lens of cost and compliance. Our research suggests a more positive, generative perspective.1 When a team includes someone with a disability, coworkers often view their own work with fresh eyes. They notice previously overlooked inefficiencies and barriers, question operating assumptions about how tasks “must” be done, and propose better ways to design work. Those changes typically improve work for all, making the job easier and safer for everyone, not just the person with a disability who needed an accommodation.

Functional impairments associated with disability, then, can signal suboptimal job design. Many workplaces are implicitly built for an “ideal,” able-bodied worker who never tires, strains, or loses focus. Designing for a broader range of workers is not just fair; it’s a necessary way to reflect reality. For example, as workforces age — a looming reality for many industrialized countries — jobs that function effectively only for the ideal worker will become harder to staff and sustain.

From Accommodations to Task Redesign

The usual organizational response to disability-related functional limitations is to grant an individual an accommodation so that person can keep doing the job as designed. While this fulfills legal requirements, it misses a larger opportunity: Treating a functional limitation as a spotlight can reveal where job design may be ineffective.