Aug/100
Diversity and Equality: A Workplace Must
A lack of diversity and equality may cost an organization billions of dollars over time. The damaging affects of inequality may manifest themselves within an organization in several ways, including losses in productivity, increases in employee turnover, and a dampening of employee moral. The Is It Bias? Making Diversity Work D.V.D. addresses these issues through a critical examination of organization biases, large and small, and how they affect company growth.
However, an organization may take proactive measures to define, recognize, and reduce even subtle biases among employees to pave the way toward long term financial stability.
Organizational Productivity
Increasing company diversity can increase both short and long term productivity. In the short term, a company culture built on equality works with exceptional cohesion. Cohesion provides the groundwork for peer-to-peer collaboration, a necessity for future growth.
Minimizing Turnover
Company diversity slows employee turnover. For example, the greater the variance in worker age, the slower the rate at which organizations lose employees to retirement. This is an issue to which organizations must pay close attention as the baby boomer generation of the 1960s nears retirement. Additionally, workplaces that hold principles of diversity in high regard are better able to retain and develop young employees. Managers, and their organizations as a whole, must instill a sense of equal opportunity among workers regardless of age, ethnicity, and other extraneous characteristics. Failure to do so can cause deeply rooted feelings of resentment, anger, and helplessness, each major contributors to losing human capital.
Inspiring Moral
Great leaders show their followers through action. Organizational leaders who utilize diversity activities inspire moral among their employees by setting estimable precedent. These activities come in many forms, but they each share the same goal: to teach employees to identify and diffuse even inconspicuous biases that lay the foundation for feelings of inequality and other counterproductive thoughts.
Properly utilizing diversity resources is the first step towards safeguarding against loss. Organizations may begin training diversity through many multimedia products. Program Development Associates offers the Is It Bias? D.V.D. to help management define, recognize, and reduce biases among their workforce. Only once biases are uncovered can they be disarmed—a critical step towards an inclusive work environment.
Aug/100
Modern Diversity Training: Assistive Technology
The desire to employ persons with disabilities is growing. In honor of the recent twentieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Program Development Associates Disability Training Blog is proud to present a look towards the diversified businesses of the present. This coverage will be completed in two installments.
In this article, titled Modern Business Training: Assistive Technology Products, we will take a closer look at the assistive technology that is enabling persons with various mental and physical disabilities to gain employment. Next week, we will follow up with Modern Business Training Part II, a look at the Universal Design for Learning and its application in complementing assistive technology and broadening the scope of employment opportunity for those with disabilities.
Assistive technology can be considered any of a variety of instruments used by individuals with disabilities to perform functions that might otherwise be difficult or altogether impossible (i). This is a broad and somewhat conceptual definition that has many applications. For example, mobility devices including manual wheelchairs, power wheelchairs, power scooters, and walking aids are all consider assistive technology. In this example, the technology is somewhat primitive compared to digital gadgetry but nonetheless enables the mobility of an individual who would otherwise have some degree of difficulty moving about.
Assistive technology goes beyond mobility devices to also include hardware, software, and other information technologies. For example, consider that individuals with physically impaired hands or fingers can utilize custom designed keyboards and computer mice to operate computers. Individuals with moderate to severe visual impairments can likewise overcome their unique sensory deprivation with software that reads digitally displayed messages aloud, like emails and other lines of text on a computer. In both of these examples, individuals are able to overcome their unique disabilities and perform work specific tasks.
Without these kinds of enabling technologies, these individuals would be hard pressed to find work environments in which they could actively pursue objectives, contribute as team members, and develop into working professionals. The expanding application of assistive technology, however, provides the groundwork for individuals with disabilities to do just the opposite. Indeed, the proliferation of assistive technology establishes the opportunity for businesses to diversify their workforce and cultivate the talents of a range of individuals. Moreover, employers are better able to retain valuable human capital; individuals who spend years learning, training, and contributing within a specific company can more easily retain their position should unexpected, devastating accidents occur. This adds a tremendous value for businesses rich in human capital; unexpectedly losing capital for any period of time can be costly, derail growth strategies, and undermine core business objectives.
Disability employers must know, however, that assistive technology is just that: technology. The effective application of assistive technology hinges on the ability of a disability or diversity employer to consider access. Technology is of no use if it is not accessible to the users for which it is intended. This is particularly important when considering the application of assistive technology, as it is specifically designed for persons with unique mental and physical impairments. Nuances that make one piece of assistive technology accessible to one individual may not make that instrument equally accessible to another individual with a similar impairment.
Since effective application of diversity training depends largely on accessibility, it is of great importance for employers to consider the needs of each of their employees. In the second installment of Modern Business Training, we will investigate how employers can best identify the unique needs of each employee to make assistive technology, and the workplace in general, more accessible.
(i) http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?109
Aug/100
An Executive Order for Disability Awareness
Disability awareness propagates in the wake of President Barack Obama’s most recent Executive Order to increase the Federal employment of individuals with disabilities. The order, released Tuesday July 26th, was issued just one day after the Americans with Disabilities Act reached its twentieth year since enactment. In those twenty years, despite previous presidential orders and Federal initiatives, the unemployment of Americans with disabilities has only risen (i). President Obama, however, hopes to reverse that trend. Different from prior initiatives, Mr. Obama’s Executive Order focuses primarily on retaining individuals with disabilities and learning impairments. An emphasis on disability training and education for Federal agencies and personnel is to be the point of difference that primes this Executive Order for success.
Recognizing the Federal Government as the largest employer in the nation, Mr. Obama begins by addressing the need for government to lead by example. In opening the Order, Mr. Obama states that the government has an important interest in reducing discrimination against those who live with a disability, eliminating the stigma associated with disabilities, and in encouraging individuals with disabilities to seek Federal employment (ii). The importance of these interests cannot be understated. Reducing discrimination and the stigma associated with individuals who have a disability is an important first step in reducing the unemployment rate. The ideal workplace for individuals with disabilities to prosper has core elements of regular disability education, inclusion training workshops, assistive technology integration, and mutual respect among coworkers. In achieving these core elements of an inclusive workplace, Federal agencies will establish strong paradigms that will work to welcome those with disabilities as potential employees.
Mr. Obama’s Executive order moves on to state specific requirements Federal agencies must meet in providing opportunities for persons with physical and mental impairments to gain employment. Most noteworthy, the President calls for the mandatory drafting of strategies to hire and recruit those with disabilities within 60 days of the Order’s enactment (iii). An essential part of these strategies includes outlining disability training programs for Federal Human Resource departments and other hiring professionals. This portion of the Executive Order aims to better prepare agencies to promote job availability as well as to provide hiring professionals with the disability education needed to recruit and train workers with disabilities.
Most importantly, the Executive Order sets the groundwork for long term success by setting standards for retaining workers with disabilities. Mr. Obama charges the Office of Personnel Management, in consultation with the Secretary of Labor, with the responsibility of identifying and assisting agencies in implementing strategies to retain Federal workers with disabilities. Paramount to the success of this initiative is the ability of the agency to conduct thorough disability awareness training internally, developing an inclusive workplace that will help those with disabilities develop into industry professionals. The President’s Order will help in this regard, specifically detailing the duties of the Office of Personnel Management to include helping with internal training, using centralized funds to provide reasonable workplace accommodations, increasing access to the appropriate assistive technologies, and ensuring the accessibility of the physical and virtual workplace (iv).
In the twenty years that have passed since the enacting of the Americans with Disabilities Act, unemployment among individuals with disabilities has actually grown. Despite Executive Orders, initiatives, and disability awareness programs, the American public is ill equipped to recruit, train, and develop into professionals those with disabilities. Disability training resources are a necessity in reversing this trend. As Mr. Obama’s Order makes clear, responsibility lies in the hands of company owners, internal managers, and other business professionals to utilize inclusion training and other techniques to hire and keep workers with disabilities. Disability awareness training is a vital first step towards creating business environments in which this goal is attainable, and the Federal government’s push to lead by example is inspiring.
(i) http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/stats.htm
(ii) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-increasing-federal-employment-individuals-with-disabilities
(iii) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-increasing-federal-employment-individuals-with-disabilities
(iv) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-increasing-federal-employment-individuals-with-disabilities
Mar/100
New Resource – Fred’s Roman Holiday
Freds Roman Holiday DVD
http://www.disabilitytraining.com/product-info.php?Freds_Roman_Holiday_DVD-pid956.html
Resource #: FSRD979W
Fred's Roman Holiday DVD
Fred’s Roman Holiday is the story of an elderly man who early in his life was labeled with a developmental disability. His poignant return to Rome late in his life embodies the lost oppurtunities of a human being confined to a state facility.
The film sequel to the multi-award-winning film Fred’s Story (1996), in which Alfredo Calabrese described living against his will for decades inside Mansfield Training School – then one of Connecticut’s institutions for people with mental retardation. Fred shared the joy of the freedom of his new life once the institution had closed.
Opening scenes in Fred’s Roman Holiday reprise Fred’s Story to provide a context for Fred’s ordeal inside the institution. But Fred’s friend, Gayle Kranz, knew that Fred had a dream that went beyond those in Fred’s Story. She had met Fred at Mansfield Training School twenty years earlier and knew that Fred had always longed to go to Rome. To Fred, Italy was a magical place. Three years after the release of Fred’s Story she organized this trip.
On the way to Rome, the viewers meet Fred’s other traveling companions: Gayle’s niece, Neesham; Kathy, an academic in the field of inclusive education; and Fred’s close buddy and caretaker, Bob. These people join Fred in quest to find the office of Benito Mussolini, the disgraced dictator who had become the focus of Fred’s mysterious, lifelong fascination. Their collective search evolves into a profound exploration of what sustains a person’s strength through years of hardship, loss of identity, and institutional control.
When Fred last reveals the source of this ironic and misunderstood fascination, the viewer understands Fred’s attempts to cope with dashed dreams of romance and freedom. Fred has touched the hand of history, and he would never forget how it felt and how special he knew he was, despite all the world has done to him.