Loyalty by Design or Loyalty by Default?

At nearly every disability inclusion conference or forum, a familiar message is echoed across panel discussions and keynote presentations: “People with disabilities are incredibly loyal employees.”

This sentiment is often backed by data and offered as a strategic advantage—an incentive for companies to prioritize disability hiring. For example, The Chicago Lighthouse found that disabled employees remain employed, on average, for 1.7 years, compared to 0.9 years for non-disabled peers (The Chicago Lighthouse, 2021). Accenture’s widely-cited Getting to Equal report (2018) links disability inclusion to measurable business performance improvements, including higher retention rates. The Job Accommodation Network (JAN) similarly points to the low cost and high return of workplace accommodations, suggesting that retention among employees with disabilities is both beneficial and financially viable (JAN, 2020).

However, while these findings are frequently celebrated as evidence of success, they also demand a more critical reading. Retention, when isolated from context, is not inherently virtuous. It can also be a signal of systemic constraint.

For many disabled professionals, remaining in a role is not the result of loyalty—but of limited alternatives.

The Risks of Movement

To fully understand the nature of retention among disabled employees, we must consider the labor environment they are navigating. Changing jobs is rarely simple, but for employees with disabilities, it often carries added burdens: disclosing one’s disability to new colleagues, renegotiating accommodations from scratch, and facing unknown workplace cultures where inclusion may be uneven, inconsistent, or performative.

These factors are not abstract concerns—they are daily calculations. The cost of leaving is not merely professional; it is emotional, physical, and psychological. For those who have worked hard to establish stability in one environment, the prospect of re-entering a job market that is still rife with ableism and inaccessibility can be daunting, if not entirely prohibitive.

In such a landscape, staying put is not a reflection of workplace satisfaction—it is a rational act of self-preservation.

Structural Barriers in the Workplace

It is also important to acknowledge that disabled professionals often encounter stagnation within the roles they occupy. Many report being passed over for advancement, excluded from leadership development, or siloed into positions that are tangential to organizational decision-making. Accommodations, when granted, are often reactive rather than proactive—placing the burden on the employee to advocate for access instead of on the institution to ensure it from the outset.

These structural realities can make upward or outward mobility seem not only unlikely but actively risky. In this context, long-term employment is not a measure of inclusion. It is a consequence of immobility.

Misattributing Retention to Loyalty

The ethical concern arises when companies celebrate this kind of retention as “loyalty.” When organizations congratulate themselves for retaining disabled employees without interrogating why those employees remain, they are conflating endurance with satisfaction. They are treating constraint as commitment.

This misattribution is not only inaccurate—it is harmful. It encourages a culture where limited options are seen as acceptable, and where a lack of movement is mistaken for contentment. It also allows organizations to avoid deeper accountability for the structures that limit disabled professionals’ access to mobility, leadership, and influence.

A Better Definition of Inclusion

True inclusion is not about retaining people because they have nowhere else to go. It is about creating an environment where people want to stay—even when they could leave. That means building a workplace in which disabled employees can advance, transfer, return, or exit without fear of losing access, credibility, or autonomy.

A culture of choice—not constraint—should be the goal.

This involves:

• Embedding accessibility and inclusive design into every part of the employee lifecycle.
• Normalizing accommodations as part of standard operational practice, rather than making them exceptions.
• Actively recruiting and promoting disabled professionals into leadership roles.
• Holding organizations accountable not just for retention, but for equitable representation across career levels.

Conclusion

Retention data alone cannot tell the full story of workplace inclusion. When disabled employees remain with an organization, it should not be assumed that they are doing so out of gratitude or loyalty. In many cases, they are navigating a landscape of constrained options and systemic barriers.

Loyalty, when freely given, is valuable. But loyalty produced by a lack of alternatives is not something to be proud of—it is something to fix.

Organizations must earn the commitment of their disabled employees not by being less inaccessible than the next employer, but by creating a workplace in which their growth, contribution, and mobility are no longer the exception, but the standard.

References

Accenture. (2018). Getting to Equal: The Disability Inclusion Advantage. https://www.accenture.com/content/dam/accenture/final/a-com-migration/pdf/pdf-89/accenture-disability-inclusion-research-report.pdf

Job Accommodation Network. (2020). Workplace Accommodations: Low Cost, High Impact. U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Disability Employment Policy. https://askjan.org/topics/costs.cfm

The Chicago Lighthouse. (2021, March 15). Disabled bring skills, loyalty, problem solving and more to workforce. Corp! Magazine. https://www.corpmagazine.com/industry/human-resources/disabled-bring-skills-loyalty-problem-solving-and-more-to-workforce/