How a Google accommodations leader’s ‘disability journey’ led her to push corporate America to rethink disability inclusion

For most people, landing a dream job either involves grinding nonstop until you achieve it, or serendipitously falling into it.

For Dannie Lynn Fountain, a benefits accommodations people consultant at Google, the journey to disability inclusion advocacy work in corporate America was a mix of the two.

After holding several roles in departments including sales and marketing at Google, while also running her own HR consultancy, she transitioned into HR in 2021 before landing her current role, where she supports disabled employees with workplace accommodations, in 2023. “It was just like personal and professional finally merged,” Fountain told HR Brew.

Fountain is one of many people who had a "disability journey" with being autistic during the early pandemic lockdowns. Quickly, she became aware of the hurdles and stigmas that disabled workers experience around disability disclosure and accommodation requests. She also became aware of how widespread the issue is in corporate America: While 90% of companies claimed to care about DE&I in 2022, only 4% were focused on disability inclusion, according to the World Economic Forum.

“Once you become aware of [disabilities], once you’re also personally experiencing it yourself, you can’t turn away from it,” she said. “This is across corporate America as a whole. So then it was like, well, let’s fix it from the inside out.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

The ability to have discussions asynchronously. I implemented a process for candidates to do initial intake with recruiters at Google asynchronously (via chat or email) [and for] our accommodations processes.

When I worked in staffing, the traditional workflow was: If you’re reaching out to a candidate, the very first thing you do is a recruiter screen, where you’re literally getting on the phone with the candidate for 10 to 15 minutes, asking them about their background, telling them about their role. At that time, the reason I was advocating for it was for myself. My calendar was stuffed with 10 to 15 minute candidate calls. It was too much time on, and there was no capacity in my work week for me to turn off. It was just documenting: These are the key points we need to communicate in that call, this is the key information we need to capture in that call, here’s a template for when we're reaching out to candidates to offer the call or email or messaging. At that time, it was either we would have the discussion over email or via LinkedIn recruiter messages.

Because I had already done that, and I brought that work up in my interview, and I had literally just gone through the accommodations process four months before my interview…it was like, I’ve already built this process once, we can just replicate it over here. Obviously it’s a little different, because in the accommodations process you’re talking about sensitive medical information, so you have to be a lot more conscientious about how are you capturing, how are you ensuring accuracy, how are you making folks feel comfortable.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

That accommodations are somehow “cheating” or makes it “easier” for disabled people to get “better” performance reviews.

That accommodations and performance are parallel processes. They’re not the same, because the intent of an accommodation is to enable an individual to perform 100% of their job responsibilities. If we dig deeper into that, what you could actually say is your unaccommodated, disabled individual right now is having to work harder to get the same performance as the abled person on your team…If we’re using current performance as a metric for whether or not we would accommodate someone, the unaccommodated disabled person is currently operating from a deficit, and that’s just ableist, frankly.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

The ability to create solutions that completely transform the way an employee experiences their workplace—often improving their mental health and decreasing their disability-related burnout in the process.

Fifty-six percent of accommodations are zero-dollar cost to implement, and could be things like increased breaks or modified working hours. ADHDers for example, typically don’t have that traditional prototype, where nine-to-five is their most productive hours. If it’s a knowledge work job, they’re shifting their working hours. Also, the ability to take meetings with the camera off…or an accommodation where 100% of your meetings the agenda is sent in advance. Tons, tons, tons of accommodations that are zero-dollar cost to implement.

Also it can be stuff like noise canceling headphones or providing Loops [earplugs] to reduce noise…So there’s some stuff that costs too, but all of this stuff is so little…but the impact can be significant.