How do you measure the impact of an inclusive employment model?

About

A cafe manager can watch who shows up on time and who's mastered milk texture. What that doesn't show is whether an employee actually feels like they belong there, or whether they're just showing up. Founded in 2017 by Wei Jie Lim and Nadi Chan, Foreword Coffee trains and employs baristas with autism, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, deafness and mental health conditions across its Singapore cafes, alongside a corporate accounts arm running in-house cafes and coffee carts for clients like P&G; normalising disability at work rather than managing around it. Retention numbers Foreword can already see. What a manager can't see is whether the job is actually delivering independence, financially and in daily decisions, and whether ordinary workplace friction lands the same way on a team where most people are also managing a disability or mental health condition. So Foreword, where roughly seven in ten staff are people with disabilities or mental health conditions, used voi to run its Inclusive Employment Impact Study: 18 staff on 35 interviewed on job satisfaction, belonging, autonomy, and financial independence, without commissioning an external study or a week of fieldwork. 

The Challenge

Measuring how a team actually experiences work is harder than measuring whether they stay employed, and harder still when the team is diverse in ways a standard survey rarely accounts for.

• Compliance bias: Ask someone directly whether they're happy at the job that also pays their rent, and the safe answer is yes. The study needed a way past that default, not a form that simply collects it.
• A team that communicates differently: With autistic, deaf, and intellectually disabled staff answering the same instrument, one fixed question wording can read as clear to one person and confusing to the next.
• Five constructs, one respondent: Job quality, belonging, social connectedness, recovery and functioning, and financial autonomy are each validated on their own; stacking all five risked a form long enough that staff would abandon it halfway through.

The Approach

18 of the 35 staff members completed the study, split across people with disabilities (67%), mental health challenges (28%), and other barriers to employment (6%), through interviews voi ran and analyzed without a human moderator in the room.

1. Live, adaptive follow-ups: voi asked a different next question depending on the answer just given, pressing further on a specific story to gain deeper understanding instead of moving straight to the next box.
2. Six indicators from acknowledged sources: Net Impact Score, Job Quality and Satisfaction (Eurofund, 2017), Workplace Belonging (Hagerty & Patusky, 1995), Social Connectedness (Lee & Robbins, 1995), Recovery and Functioning (Corrigan et al., 2004), and Financial Autonomy (Ager & Strang, 2008) gave Foreword a clear picture rather than one satisfaction number.
3. Built for a mixed-ability team: Question wording and follow-up depth adjusted per respondent, so an interview with a deaf employee and one with someone managing depression didn't have to look identical to still be comparable.

Findings

The data backs up Foreword's reputation as a supportive employer, and it also shows exactly where that support runs thin.

• Satisfaction and belonging are both real: 88.9% of staff are satisfied or very satisfied with their day-to-day job, 88.9% feel accepted at work, and 67% say they fully belong rather than partially.
• Most staff see themselves differently now: 72% feel better or much better about themselves than before joining, citing gains like mastering latte art or, in one respondent's words, being able to make decisions on their own instead of having family do it for them.
• Financial independence hasn't caught up: 72% of the 18 respondents can currently cover their own basic living costs and have a say in household spending, and two in three can afford leisure activities.
• The friction is interpersonal, not the job: when asked about negative experience, respondents reported struggles in dealing with colleagues’ pace or attitude, or communication gaps.

The Way Forward

Belonging and job satisfaction both sit close to 90%, a base most employers would take twice as long and several times the cost to establish. Beyond this confirmation of positive impact, the study gives Foreword somewhere specific to point next.

A clear move is on the table now: a standard way to communicate equipment problems and scheduling gaps so a broken machine doesn't sit unreported until the next shift finds it the hard way. Financial autonomy is worth tracking on its own too, since it moved independently of job satisfaction and belonging in this round.

Get to know Foreword Coffee and support their work training and employing people with disabilities and mental health conditions across Singapore.

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