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When they’re done right, employee resource groups (ERGs) can be powerful tools for companies to build relationships with staff members and ensure the workplace is serving them well. But in some cases, the ERG can even change major aspects of the company.
At semiconductor manufacturer Micron, the company’s Capable ERG, an affinity group with more than 8,000 members for employees with disabilities, led the charge to help make the company’s worksites more accessible.
In 2018, members of the Capable ERG approached Beth Elroy, who was then working as director of site facilities at the company’s Boise headquarters, and asked if her team could move the curb cut—a ramp built into a sidewalk primarily intended to help people with mobility aids like wheelchairs. Elroy was confused by the request at first because the existing curb cut was ADA-compliant. But when she went to inspect it, she realized how far out of the way it was from the entrance.
“It was that moment in time where it was like a light bulb went on, where it was such a simple fix,” Elroy tells Fortune. It took her team under an hour to make a new curb cut, spending just a few hundred dollars total. “But what a powerful statement it made at Micron that if you were arriving in a wheelchair, you had to shift over a little bit to come to the main entrance, rather than just provide access right up front and center.”
That moment led Elroy, who now works as Micron’s vice president of global environment, health, and safety (EHS), and sustainability, to become more involved with the group, eventually becoming the ERG’s executive sponsor in March 2023. Micron already had a global real estate team establishing global disability accessibility standards for company worksites, but Elroy and the Capable ERG pushed for even more robust accommodations. Their victories include:
— Installing automatic doors to entryways and restrooms.
— Adding quiet rooms for employees with sensory issues.
— Lowering equipment like sinks or coat racks so that people with mobility devices like wheelchairs can better access them.
— Creating top-down smock uniforms that make it easier to get dressed.
— Adding closed captioning for Zoom meetings.
The group also created a leadership training program in 2022 that promotes awareness among supervisors of seen and unseen disabilities.
Elroy says that disability access shouldn’t just be about doing what’s required—it’s about going above and beyond, and ensuring the company is consistent with how it supports all workers with disabilities.
“We absolutely have to have workplace standards,” she says. “Compliance is important. It's foundational. But we should be going above and beyond compliance, making our decisions so that it's the right thing to do.”
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
Today's edition was curated by Emma Burleigh.
