Designing for Belonging: Tools to Apply Universal Design in Team Strategy
Universal Design isn’t just for buildings. It’s a framework for building teams where everyone can thrive.
Universal Design Matters in Team Strategy
When most people hear the term Universal Design, they think about physical spaces, things like ramps, curb cuts, or closed captioning. But the heart of Universal Design reaches further than that. It’s about how we shape the environments, systems, and relationships around us so that people of all identities, abilities, and learning styles can fully show up and participate.
In team strategy, this means we don’t wait until someone is excluded to fix the process. We start by designing with differences in mind from the beginning. That shift—from reactive to intentional—helps us create spaces that aren’t just accessible, but truly welcoming.
The Center for Universal Design at NC State describes it this way:
“Universal Design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.”
This work asks us to think more deeply about how we plan, who we build for, and how we make space for everyone in the room, seen and unseen.
If you're looking to integrate Universal Design into your team leadership or strategic planning, here are some practical tools and questions to guide your process.
Start with Values-Based Access
Within the SageD Collective, it would have been impossible for us to arrive at a place where Universal Design tools felt meaningful if we hadn’t first been honest about the values that guide our work. Before we tried to fix systems or adopt frameworks, we had to ask ourselves why we were doing it in the first place and for whom.
If you’re bringing Universal Design into your organization, a good place to start is by mapping your values in practice. Use a team values canvas to reflect on questions like:
What does access mean to us beyond physical design?
Whose needs and lived experiences are centered when we make decisions?
Who consistently needs to “stretch” more than others to participate?
This builds from disability justice frameworks shared by Sins Invalid and The Disabled & Here Project, which remind us that access without relationship is just compliance.
Audit Team Norms with Inclusion in Mind
Applying Universal Design to your team strategy starts with understanding your current landscape. Conducting a design audit can surface which practices might unintentionally create barriers. We can’t shift what we haven’t examined. That’s why a design audit is one of the most practical ways to uncover where exclusion might be built into your team’s daily habits.
Look at the tools, rhythms, and expectations that shape your meetings, planning sessions, and collaboration. Ask questions like:
Are there multiple ways to engage, like verbal discussion, chat, or written responses?
Do we provide agendas, context, or materials ahead of time in accessible formats?
What patterns or norms might favor certain communication or cognitive styles over others?
Often, these norms feel invisible until someone points out that they’ve had to work twice as hard just to keep pace. For a deeper framework, explore Universal Design for Learning (UDL) from CAST. While designed for education settings, many of its principles, like providing multiple means of engagement and expression, translate directly into inclusive team facilitation and planning.
Build Flexibility into Structures, Not Just People
Creating inclusive systems means adjusting how we work, not asking people to constantly adjust themselves. Flexibility should be designed into the structure, not left to individual negotiation.
Some options include:
Offering multiple ways for team members to communicate feedback, such as voice memos, brief surveys, or direct messages.
Sharing leadership roles within a project—rotating facilitation, notetaking, or check-in responsibilities.
Normalizing flexible pacing, breaks, or asynchronous collaboration to support different energy rhythms and access needs.
These aren’t just productivity tweaks. They’re intentional moves toward belonging. And as Kat Holmes writes in Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, exclusion often happens when systems are built for the average, rather than the full spectrum of human experience. The alternative is to create flexibility on purpose, so no one has to ask for permission just to do their best work.
Co-Design With, Not Just For
At the heart of Universal Design is a very simple truth: people know what they need. But we have to ask, and we have to listen.
Co-design is the practice of making decisions with those most impacted by them. Not after a plan has already been made. Not once feedback is gathered at the end. But as part of the design process itself.
That might look like inviting team members to help shape how a retreat is structured, how roles are defined, or how an onboarding process could be more welcoming. It could be as simple as saying: “We’re building this together—what do you need to feel grounded and involved?”
Design Justice, a framework developed by Sasha Costanza-Chock, calls this participatory power. It’s not just about making a better product or experience, it’s about shifting who holds authorship in the first place. In our experience, this is where the deepest change happens. Not in the tools themselves, but in how we use them together.
Bringing Universal Design into your leadership isn’t about checking boxes. It’s about committing to relationships, building muscle around reflection, and making room for people to show up as they are.
You don’t need to redesign everything at once. Start by asking:
Who isn’t at the table—and why?
How can we make one small shift this month that invites more ease, voice, or belonging?
This kind of design work is ongoing. You might not get it perfect the first time. But the more we practice, by asking better questions, building with care, and shifting systems to match our values, the more space we create for everyone to belong.
As we continue this work, our invitation to you is this: Don’t just design for inclusion. Design with it. Start with one small change that makes your team’s culture more responsive, more human, and more aligned with the world you want to build.
