'A silent suffering': Making the workplace more inclusive for those with hearing loss

When Cammie Taylor sat next to a giant speaker at a concert, she never thought that a split-second decision made in her twenties would have such severe consequences. But she quickly realized that something was wrong with her right ear, and an emergency trip to the audiologist confirmed that the experience had left her with hearing loss.

"I waited for it to improve and I waited for it to go away, but it didn't," she says. "My hearing test revealed that I can't hear certain consonants in the higher range. The audiologist offered me hearing aids for $3,500 and it made me laugh because there wasn't a world where I had that kind of money to spend on a device." 

After years of navigating the workforce and  struggling to feel comfortable enough to talk about her disability, Taylor became the HR director at TruHearing, a managed healthcare company that helps connect individuals that have insurance plans with accessible and affordable hearing aids. Through her work with TruHearing, Taylor was able to be retrofitted with a hearing aid that magnifies the sounds around her that she may be missing.   

"When they told me about what they were doing in my interview I was intrigued," Taylor says. "I was like, oh my gosh, I had this happen to me and now finally someone actually had a mission statement to solve the problem that I had almost 12 years ago." 

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Unfortunately, Taylor's struggle is far from unique. Forty-two percent of employees surveyed by TruHearing reported struggling with hearing loss. But despite it affecting a significant portion of the workforce, only 25% report having been offered hearing benefits by their employer, a rate significantly lower than vision benefits (66%) or even dental benefits (71%). And in a world where employers are touting DEI and promising to build more inclusive workplaces, they're missing out on a key demographic. 

"If an employee can't see, you recognize it immediately and with vision benefits you can get it taken care of," Taylor says. "But hearing loss is a little bit more nuanced. Unless the employee has either disclosed it or has a hearing aid, the barrier an employer is perceiving is not simply the employee misunderstanding things or an inability to listen carefully. It's a silent suffering for those employees."

Hearing loss doesn't just impact an employee's ability to understand their tasks and responsibilities, it also makes it significantly harder for them to connect with the people around them and can become an increasingly isolating experience.

"If someone says something in a meeting and everyone laughs [a person who is hard of hearing] has two options: you either pretend to laugh or you have to lean over to the next person and ask what was said," Taylor says. "And if you don't laugh you look like a jerk to your colleagues who are very judgmental when in fact, you just couldn't hear it."

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Those instances may seem small and inconsequential, but as they compound they begin to have deeper, more painful repercussions for the individual according to Taylor, who described times colleagues asked her if she was upset with them or in a bad mood because of the way she did or didn't react at work. 

"I remember feeling very insecure because hearing and listening is so tied to intelligence," she says. "The normal process is that you hear something, you listen to understand, you process that information and you move forward with that information. If you have a barrier at the beginning of that process, where you're not even actually hearing it to begin with, assumptions can be made about your every step of the way."

The solution for hearing loss is as simple as carving a place for it in a company's employees benefit offerings, according to Taylor, and giving it the same attention employers often give to other areas of healthcare. Under standard healthcare plans most employees are eligible for at least a routine vision tests — those same tests exist for hearing. If a company offered hearing benefits, an employee could schedule annual visits with an audiologist to have their hearing evaluated.

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"If I couldn't rely on my ears, that means everything would have to be in print for me to connect with you," Taylor says. "But that's not how it is. We have conversations and we take cues to make business relationships. If you want to preserve your workforce, then you need to look at equal accessibility."

Employers could then take the next step and cover hearing aids the same way they cover eyeglass frames, by partnering with providers. Those kinds of incremental changes will create dialogue and normalize the conversation around hearing loss at work until the idea of having a hearing aid is just as widely accepted as wearing glasses in the office. 

"How many people do we have who are inauthentically showing up to these spaces and not actually getting access to the information they need?" Cammie says. "Think of how many of those people would be able to thrive if they had just had access to hearing health."