Beyond Compliance: Why Accessibility Matters for Your Business Growth

Kantar sat down with Seher Yilmaz to discuss the importance of accessibility and inclusion as a core business strategy. In this conversation, Seher shares insights on how accessibility can drive business success and create a more engaged and loyal workforce.

Let’s start with the big picture. Why do you believe accessibility should be seen as a core business strategy rather than just a compliance issue?
Because people are the core of every business. No matter what you manufacture or which services you sell, without people you will not deliver. If you see people as the center of your operations, you will also understand that accessibility should be at the center. When the people in your business have equal opportunities for participation and co-creation, you will unlock their full potential. This creates engagement and loyalty – two values that are key to success.


You’ve said that accessibility, inclusion, and equality are essential for employee development. Can you share a concrete example of how this has played out in your organization?
Every person’s development journey is individual. This applies across the labour market, but perhaps even more at Samhall. We are one of the largest employers in Sweden, owned by the Swedish state, with 24,000 employees. Our mission is to create enriching jobs for people with disabilities. All of our staff who start working at Samhall are referred to us by the Swedish Public Employment Service. To be eligible for a job at Samhall, in addition to having a disability, you must also have tried everything else on the labour market. So, when someone gets a job with us, they have already been excluded from the Swedish labour market several times.

We train our staff and match them to the right tasks in areas such as cleaning, care, logistics, and manufacturing. We see potential in every individual, where society has failed to do so. To be able to see potential and utilize the skills and abilities of all our employees, we need a broad definition of what development means. For one person, it can mean arriving on time every morning after being excluded from the usual day-to-day structure of working life. For another, it can mean taking on the responsibility of helping colleagues complete tasks they didn’t think they had the capacity to do.

Without accessibility, inclusion, and equality – we cannot truly say that everyone’s development journey starts in different places. We won’t respect our differences, we won’t create space to genuinely listen to each person’s needs. Then we’re not building an employee-centred development journey, but a one-size-fits-all employee development journey. And as we all know, one size rarely fits anyone.
 

The statistics around disability and employment are striking. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions companies still have about hiring people with disabilities?
The numbers unfortunately speak for themselves. Today, 250,000 people with disabilities that affect their ability to work are without a job. Unemployment among this part of the population is much higher than among people without disabilities. At the same time, we know that many companies and organizations are in need of staff.

Samhall has investigated what 700 employers think are the main obstacles for Swedish companies to recruit people with disabilities and why they themselves don’t recruit more inclusively. The most common obstacle mentioned was the belief that the tasks were too demanding for people with disabilities. The second most common was lack of knowledge – employers simply felt they didn’t know enough to feel confident hiring people with disabilities.

The misconceptions we see often stem from projecting one’s own fears and assumptions when considering opening up recruitment to people with disabilities. Strange as it may sound, I find something hopeful in these prejudices. These aren’t real, tangible barriers we’re talking about – they are fears. And fears can be ignored. Every day I see 24,000 of my colleagues go to work and do real, high-quality jobs. That’s why these are just misconceptions, made up by you and me. And if we can make them up, we can also make up a different way of doing things.

You have together with Kantar developed a new Accessibility Index and practical tools for managers. What kind of impact have these tools had so far, and how are they being used in day-to-day work?
Both the Accessibility index and the practical tools were launched in spring 2025, so it’s too early to say what the long-term effects will be. We are also such a large organization that I recognize change doesn’t happen at the same pace everywhere. But the immediate effect has been that we have been able to have a different kind of conversation about equality and accessibility. It has shifted from gut feeling to being fact-based. This gives us a much more secure starting point to know what we need to work on. For individual managers, it has meant greater clarity about where their development opportunities lie.

To make it easier for managers to take action and start making changes, we have presented a dedicated toolbox linked to the different issues in the Accessibility Index. The tools require neither a new budget, nor a reorganization, nor expanded mandates. It’s about behavioural changes and new methods that can be implemented right away. How well this is received and actually used will be followed up both through conversations with managers and, of course, through employee surveys.


Many organizations struggle to move from intention to action. What advice would you give to companies that want to start working more systematically with accessibility? 

1. Start with a pilot. It can feel overwhelming to begin working on something as important as accessibility. To avoid getting stuck in the idea that everything has to be perfect right away, start with a pilot. This could be anything from introducing a new index in your employee survey to improving the physical accessibility of your facilities. After the pilot, evaluate how it went and then scale up.

2. Be honest about your starting point. Together with Kantar, we user-tested our employee survey to see in black and white what we needed to improve. We did this together with people with different types of disabilities. The results were useful, and honestly, also difficult. But they gave us an honest starting point. Without that, we couldn’t truly say we were taking accessibility seriously.

3. Bring in expertise. Accessibility isn’t something you can expect to fully grasp on your own. It requires competence and should not be handed over to someone with good intentions but no knowledge. In that case, you won’t succeed – no matter how much you want to. So the advice is: really bring in expertise.


Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond – What do you hope will change in how businesses approach disability inclusion? 
I hope more and more businesses will realize that accessibility isn’t just about following regulations or reporting on sustainability requirements, but also about the simple fairness of creating workplaces and brands where everyone feels included.