Worklear, the disability employment support service run by Tokyo staffing group Leverages, ran a three-day experiential training programme at its Shibuya headquarters on 25-27 February 2026, ahead of the July 2026 rise in Japan's statutory disability employment quota from 2.5% to 2.7%.
The first two days were open to executives, HR managers and disability employment coordinators from outside companies; the third was an internal session for Leverages' own staff and board, so that management and employees would form a shared stance on hiring.
Each session ran in two parts. In part one, participants wore VR headsets and experienced developmental disability traits from a first-person point of view: visual hypersensitivity, auditory hypersensitivity, and the attention difficulties of ADHD. The VR content was supplied by Silverwood, the Urayasu company behind the VR Angle Shift programme, whose first-person titles are built from interviews with people who have the conditions portrayed.
In part two, Leverages employees who themselves have developmental disabilities explained how a single workplace instruction lands differently for them - including how vague instructions trigger confusion - and participants worked in groups on how to solve those frictions through workplace adjustments rather than individual effort.
The organisers closed by warning against the obvious trap: prescriptive support decided from the VR experience alone ("it was like this in VR, so let's do this for them") risks missing the individual, and the point is to optimise each person's environment.
The programme was repeated on 22-23 June 2026, and Leverages' diversity work took an Excellence Award in the 'Turning Differences into Strength' category at One HR's HR's SDGs Award 2026.
