Special Article
Making Progress in Employee Training
By
John Kemp [view bio]
Disability rights advocate and principal at Powers, Pyle, Sutter and Verville, P.C.
It's a simple maxim of corporate management – find good people, give them direction and provide them with the support it takes to get the job done. In the arena of disability, however, many companies have ignored this advice, in favor of a focus on simple compliance with the law, rather than business success.
Over the course of the last few articles, we've looked at expanding the pool of good employees through work-enabling accommodations and supporting workers and customers through accessibility in products and the built environment. But employee support is not limited to having an accessible physical plant, and customers need more than just access to your business. Employees with disabilities need to know that they are accepted at work and that you have considered them in everything from advancement to building evacuations. Customers with disabilities need to feel valued at your business, and know that your staff is trained in how best to serve them.
So, as you think about your “Disability Diversity Quotient” this month, focus on the trainings you provide for your workers, both diversity and non-diversity centered, and ask “Is my business including the concerns of employees and customers with disabilities in our training and education programs?”
Most businesses feel pretty good about their employee training, considering training either a necessary evil or solid long term investment. In either case, I am asking you to look critically at your employee education programs. If your training is falling short in consideration of disabled employees and customers, your company is missing out on a significant segment of society. Remember, there are millions of qualified people with disabilities seeking work, and the estimated buying power of people with disabilities is over $3 trillion. And seniors with disabilities control up to 40% of the net personal assets in America!
I'm not advocating disability specific education, but rather integrating disability concerns into the trainings you already have. For example, during an explanation of your business's emergency evacuation plan, do you consider how an elevator shutdown might affect disabled employees with mobility limitations? Do you explain how employees with vision or hearing disabilities will receive the same emergency information as other employees? This may seem like common sense, but it is often overlooked.
In a less extreme situation, are your employees trained to work with customers with disabilities? Will you lose customers based on employee insensitivity or are your employees trained to handle a diverse customer and vendor base? Particularly with the assistance of advancing technology, more and more disabled individuals are exerting their influence in the market as customers. Just like any other customer, however, disabled customers will not spend their money where they don't feel comfortable and they won't return where staff was not helpful. If you want to access this market, then, your business has to ensure that your customer service works hand in hand with accessibility upgrades to your physical plant. After all, there is no point in getting customers in the door and losing them on the other side. This skill set is not complicated and does not require a separate training, but should be one part of how you teach your employees to deal with potential customers. With a little bit of information on how customer needs may vary, your business will be in a better position to capture and retain an expanding part of the economic market.
Another key to making disabled customers and employees a larger part of your business is diversity trainings. Diversity trainings are not new and these sorts of programs have been expanding rapidly – not all include disability within diversity. Only 64% of Fortune 1000 companies addressed disability issues in their diversity programming in 2001 (source: "Reaching for Diversity." Lin Grensing-Pophal. HR Magazine. Vol. 47, No. 5) As with other aspects of diversity, the key is not to ask for special treatment or lowered expectations, but rather is to dispel the common stereotypes that people think of when they see someone who presents with a disability. Another key is to increase the comfort of your disabled workers in the workplace because a business whose employees don't show understanding for disabled workers will not retain those workers.
Educating your workers and integrating disabled employees into the general workforce is just the beginning of a positive cycle. Let me explain. At this point you've found these great new employees in an underutilized segment of society. Now you want to keep them. But not only that, you want to keep that possible employee pool open for the future. If you have trained your employees to accept individuals with disabilities as great assets and coworkers, those individuals will then share their experiences with others in the disability community. It just makes sense that those who feel like they've been given a fair shake will encourage others to join your business. The result is a continuously increasing pool of talented people who want to work for you. With minimal effort on your part, that cycle can continue and your business will reap the benefits. Now, think about the consequences of the opposite scenario if you choose to only do the minimum.
Being seen as a business that accepts diverse employees is not only helpful for recruiting; it is also helpful for sales. Recent polling suggests that 92% of the American public view companies that hire people with disabilities more favorably than those that do not (Source: A National Survey of Consumer Attitudes Towards Companies that Hire People with Disabilities." University of Massachusetts, Center for Social Development and Education. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation . Volume 24, Number 1 / 2006 . Not surprisingly, 88% of the public also agree that they would prefer to give their business to companies that hire people with disabilities. If your workplace is one of inclusion, where disability awareness and acceptance is a core component of diversity training and where employees with disabilities feel welcome, you stand to take advantage of that consumer sentiment. It is useful to also keep in mind something that Ted Childs, former VP of Global Workforce Development at IBM, said, “If customers go inside our company, they should see people who look like them at all levels.”
When looking to implement some of these suggestions or to assess the success of your current trainings, the best resource you have is your employees with disabilities. Look to the employees that you have, and ask them about their work-related problems they face every day and what issues they feel are being left out of your general and diversity trainings. These individuals know their situation best and will appreciate being involved in the discussion. Also, don't limit the discussion to those questions - maintain an open door for other concerns that will help to identify other problem areas.
Aside from engaging employees with disabilities, it's also fair to ask how you can begin to assess your own business DDQ for training and education. These questions should help start, but by no means finish, the discussion:
- Do general training programs at my company keep in mind the differing needs of people with disabilities? Do diversity awareness trainings include them?
- Have I discussed ways to make employees with disabilities welcome and valued? Have I included those employees in the discussion, or is my company just trying to guess at their concerns?
- Are my employees capable of handling a diverse and expanding customer base that includes people with disabilities?
- Does my company look like those diverse customers? Am I working to keep it that way?
In the end, it is back to where we started: find good people, give them direction and provide them with the support it takes to get the job done. Looking at employee training and your DDQ, it should be clear that a major part of the necessary support is addressing disability issues and making sure that your business can take advantage of this pool of customers and talent.
John D. Kemp is a long-time disability rights advocate and principal at Powers, Pyle, Sutter and Verville, P.C. Please direct questions for John to info@disability-marketing.com.