19
Jan/11
0

Build Inclusion Through Disability Awareness

Business professionals know that today’s work environment is on the move.  Technologies, marketing channels, even employee training programs are constantly changing.  It’s never been a more dynamic time to be in business.  With the rapid changes, however, comes the excitement of evolution.  It’s survival of the fittest; today, being most fit means leveraging your workforce.

The first step in leveraging your workforce is ensuring that you spread disability awareness.  Today’s dynamic workplace is one where many individuals of many abilities must interact and work with one another.  Engaging in disability training is one way to spread awareness, as many disability programs start with an educational overview of different conditions, communication practices, and etiquette guidelines.

Once employees are made aware of the rich differences they share with their peers, they can move to more specific areas of disability training, such as disability etiquette.  Etiquette training increases the ability of one employee to communicate with another in a respectful and considerate manner, regardless of either one’s abilities.  This is important for several reasons.  First, workers are more likely to communicate with one another when feeling respected within their environment.  This breeds efficacy, or the feeling that one is capable of bringing about change.

Second, courteous communication practices help employees communicate with one another in a non-offensive way.  This contributes to creating a respectful environment, and likewise to instilling a sense of efficacy in workers, but has another benefit:  risk mitigation.  Organizations that regularly train for disability maintain a heightened level of disability awareness that prompts appreciation for the differences among peers.  Ongoing training likewise keeps communication skill sets sharp, ensuring employees respect one another in the workplace.  Without training for disability, an organization cannot hope to create a respectful and functional diverse workplace.  This opens the door for a host of negative side effects including harassment lawsuits, discrimination claims, and other distracting and detrimental outcomes.

Training to enhance workplace skills is a sure bet for productive growth this year.  Training initiatives must be conducted with persons with disabilities in mind, however.  Disability training plants the seed of awareness.  From awareness grows respect, appreciation, and inclusion—3 fundamental principles of communicative and profitable work environments.

13
Jul/10
0

Inclusion Training through Diversity Awareness

Rapidly evolving technologies and an ever-changing political landscape make today’s business environment a dynamic challenge.  In the face of such volatility, organizations thrive on the depth and diversity of their employees.  A workforce rich in racial, cultural, and ethnic tradition keeps ideas fresh, varied, and constructive.  There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and never before has generating multiple solutions to a wide variety of problems been so valuable.

Finding unique individuals to help carry a group to an end goal is a difficult challenge.  Fortunately, the Civil Rights movements of the early and mid 1900s revolutionized the cultures of businesses large and small.  Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities increasingly gained recognition for their inherent value, deepening the talent pool from which organizations could draw.  The archaic ideals of the 1800s and early 1900s have become footnotes in the history books.  No longer are men the breadwinners, women the homemakers, and the minorities the disadvantaged.  Further, advances in technology have made the workplace more accessible, particularly for individuals with mental and physical impairments.

Even more daunting than finding a talented workforce is the task of managing workplace diversity to maximally achieve that end goal.  This difficulty is faced by a host of different leaders in various organizations, from collegiate coaches to Fortune 500 Executives.  However, recruiting talent is only the beginning.  Distributing, uniting, and retaining talented individuals is a long term process that will graduate mere managers to the level of wildly successful, esteemed leaders.

While a richly varied talent pool in an organization’s culture is of paramount importance, a leaders ability to unite and retain that talent is the critical it factor. Diversity awareness and respect is the foundation on which any endeavor to unify a diverse mass must be built.  Herds of unique individuals with equally unique ideas and solutions are of little value if the herd cannot move together.  In this way today’s business leader is under more pressure than ever to educate employees of their coworkers’ differing backgrounds, ideologies, and lifestyles.

Diversity awareness training fosters an understanding of the multitude of differences that make each person a one-of-a-kind individual.  With awareness comes education, and with education sprouts the opportunity for appreciation.  To further encourage appreciation among employees, leaders within an organization can engage in regular workforce and employee diversity training.  Diversity training seminars and workshops offer an invaluable occasion for individuals to learn about one another and cultivate a respect for ethnicities, ideals, and traditions that differ from their own.

The ultimate end goal for any diversity training program is to perpetuate a feelings of reciprocal awareness and respect among employees.  Without both awareness and respect, leaders cannot hope to have employees work effectively.  In a business environment laden with dynamic challenges, organizations simply cannot afford to have anything other than a unified and diversified talent pool.  Disability and inclusion training D.V.D.s, C.D.s, and other resources offer a vital first step towards developing diversity awareness programs to bring employees together, maximizing output, and enrich their work experience.