Ashley Halstead on the Challenges He Faces as a Person With Disabilities

Ashley Halstead, Sales Coordinator at Enterprise, shares the challenges he faced as a person with disabilities, how he navigated through the Covid-19 pandemic with his skills, and the importance of supportive management with myGwork in the Meet & Greet interview.

Image credit: Ashley Halstead

Can you tell us a bit about your career?

Enterprise allows for continued development and wants to make sure employees get the best out of their careers, I myself have been with the business for 3 years and have been promoted 3 times. I started off in our Insurance Claims Department. I started by recovering monies from insurers and grew into managing the relationships with a couple of major insurers, from the end of the claims. After a recent promotion, I am currently exploring the operational side of the business by setting up corporate and public sector accounts for our clients.

What's the biggest highlight of your career to date and why?

Gaining the recognition that I am a 'problem solver' and that the team can come to me to solve process gaps. For example, in my previous role, I took an insurer that had a poor payment history for around 7 months, set up meetings with the appropriate management there and co-operatively built processes in order to enable smoother working practices. This account ended up as one of our best payers and said Enterprise was now their favourite to deal with on insurance claims, because of the relationship I built with them.

What are the main challenges facing people with disabilities?

My current disability is high-frequency deafness and borderline personality disorder. In previous businesses, I have had managers not believe me when I spoke about my difficulties. They didn't know anything about the disability, but worse, they showed no interest in doing so.

Enterprise was quick to try to understand the issues I faced. One conversation that really stood out was when a senior manager said to me, after working with me on an alternative plan: "We'll try with these alternative arrangements. If it doesn't work for you, we'll work together until we get it right." He understood it was an ongoing process, and it was about using my knowledge of my disability and his knowledge of the business to work out a plan together.

How has your experience as a person with disabilities shaped your worldview?

The main point that has changed for me is understanding that everyone is different and has different requirements. What works for me, might be considered unusual and vice versa. However, people can make their own way of working work best for them. For example, in insurance, most people would use the phone 30-odd times a day - that was never an option for me. I would email on 90%+ of my claims and this was unexpected by peers who were used to phone calls.

However, during the pandemic, when phone lines were cut off for most insurers, my level of payments coming in was steady as I had always utilised written communication, whereas others struggled to keep steady payments. I used my skills to train and develop others to make the most of written communication during the pandemic.

Do you have any advice for people looking to be better allies to people with disabilities?

The most important thing for me is knowing a manager of the peer wants to understand. I told my first manager at Enterprise about my conditions, and they showed me a Wikipedia article and asked me to confirm he was looking at the right condition. It made me feel as though he cared, even if he wasn't an expert at the time.

Handovers are extremely important for when management changes happen, in previous roles I've had to explain my conditions and processes each time a new manager has come in. Enterprise has been brilliant at highlighting any need-to-know information, such as this, on management handovers.

What's next for you?

My ideal career path is to work in relationship management. The great thing about Enterprise is that it is an ever-growing company with more and more opportunities every day. I am always open to seeing what is next around the corner for me.