Organizations often face the dilemma of strategic orientation. While this dilemma takes on many forms, the two most common are quality orientation versus production orientation. Providing high quality customer service, for example, usually consumes the time necessary to also maintain high quality internal production.
Overcoming Communication Barriers with Disability Education
One way to adopt high standards for both quality and production is to departmentalize operations. This is not a new concept; many companies have production departments that are separate and distinct from customer service departments. However, fragmented departments must be able to communicate effectively in order maintain overall operational efficiency. For disability employers, this issue takes on added difficulty because peer-to-peer communication is framed in an inclusive workplace with many challenges that must be met and overcome.
Employees of all ability levels must have a sense of disability awareness and advocacy in order to communicate effectively and maintain a streamlined flow of information. Employers who utilize disability education resources can help employees cultivate the skills necessary to work inclusively. The skills needed to work in inclusive environments are not attained overnight; ongoing disability education seminars are vital in bringing together and uniting employees of all ability levels.
Goal: Autonomy Through Disability Education
Disability education programs do more than build awareness and cohesion, however. For disability employers, ongoing education and awareness initiatives help to build a sense of autonomy in workers with disabilities. Studies are increasingly relating worker autonomy with increased job satisfaction, which in turn increases productivity.
Further, autonomy among individuals within separate departments drives quality production by facilitating worker communication and information flow. Managers are turning to programs and strategic orientations that increase worker autonomy for this very reason. For disability employers, the issue of developing worker autonomy is not so easily addressed. Internal disability awareness and education programs are instrumental, however they are just a starting point. Persons with disabilities often need supplementary disability products to aid in developing professional skills like autonomy and efficacy.
Program Development Associates offers a new product this month to help persons with disabilities cultivate these essential workplace skills: The Discovering Your Personal Power Curriculum. This guide helps those with developmental disabilities learn of their individual, inherent, personal power. With 30 full-scale activities on a CD-Rom that can be reproduced for use among several individuals, the Discovering Your Personal Power Curriculum represents an essential tool for disability employers looks to build worker autonomy.
The population of hearing impaired Americans is growing faster than the American population as a whole. Since 2005, the population of the United States has grown by a little over 4 percent. Contrast that with the growth in deafness among Americans: 9 percent. Currently, there are about 35 million Americans with a hearing impairment, and about 25 million do not have a hearing aid or an assistive device of some kind (i). For disability employers, American Sign Language education is an advantageous addition to employee training programs. Training programs that include sign language courses will benefit organizations in at least two ways: internally, in terms of communication among a diverse group of employees, and externally, in terms of accommodating the special needs of a growing population of Americans.
Internal Communication Skills: Employees and Sign Language
In recent months, our Disability Training Blog has focused on the importance of employing a diverse range of individuals. The number of Americans with a hearing impairment is estimated to climb to 40 million by 2025 (ii). Using this data, we can safely predict that an increasing percentage of job applicants are expected to have a hearing impairment of some kind through the coming decades. Organizations are smart to consider this in building their channels for recruiting and training new employees. Expanding employee skill sets to include knowledge of sign language will make an organization’s long-term recruiting methods easier and more successful in achieving diversity.
Sign Language and Public Relations
A second way in which organizations stand to benefit from incorporating sign language courses in employee training programs is in the realm of public relations. The number of Deaf Americans is climbing, evidencing an emerging market with special needs. These needs are both tangible and intangible, ranging from assistive communication devices to social constructs that enable effective communication. Organizations vary in function and cannot all be expected to produce goods for the growing population of hearing impaired individuals. However, businesses of all industries can facilitate communication with Deaf people simply by training their employees to do so. This represents a significant competitive advantage that cannot be overlooked.
Program Development Associates has a range of products to assist business professionals, elementary school teachers, parents, and university professors in learn and teaching American Sign Language. Additionally, PDA has a number of disability training resources to complement the diversification initiatives of most businesses, schools, and universities.
(i) http://www.hear-it.org/page.dsp?area=858
(ii) see above.
Program Development Associates offers a variety of tools to minimize communication barriers among the members of an organization. PDA offers several multimedia resources to aid in establishing effective communication skills in the workplace.
Community Support for People with Disabilities
Providing a supportive community is the best way to facilitate effective communication. For those with disabilities, supportive environments add an element of inclusion that is critical for professional development. In order to construct an inclusive environment, an organization must be prepared to identify with the special needs of each member, regardless of mental or physical ability. Second, an organization must take strides to meet the special communications needs of each employee, once identified.
Augmentative Communication Strategies for Adults
PDA offers the Augmentative Communication Strategies for Adults book to give business professionals expert guidance in identifying a multitude of disorders and illnesses. Each section provides current and rich information as well as proactive measures to take when communicating. This guide also provides professionals with a CD-ROM of complementary tools to aid in assessing how much communicative support an individual needs.
Conversation Skills: On the Job and in the Community
The Conversation Skills book concentrates on illustrating the skill sets necessary for communicating with people with disabilities. Particularly beneficial for employees, this book helps those with disabilities become integrated and valuable organization members. Skill sets are built through brief 10 minute lessons, issued twice weekly over the course of 3 months.
Effective communication requires all parties involved to be aware that special communication needs may be necessary. In a diverse workplace, this disability awareness must be taught through disability training resources including DVDs, text books, CD-ROMS, and other interactive mediums. PDA has many disability training DVDs for business professionals to implement when issuing diversity training among employees.
Communication skills can make or break a diverse workplace. Organizations that hire persons with disabilities must recognize the fundamental need for improving communication skills, both on a macro and micro scale. Organizational leaders must be attentive to the communication practices between coworkers as well as those that are broadcasted throughout the organization as a whole.
This month, Program Development Associates features the Communicating with Tact, Candor, and Credibility D.V.D. to help organizations improve communication skills among their members. This digital resource explores the use of subtle mediation to effectively communicate with employees, members of interoffice teams, and upper level managers.
The point of difference in this training resource is the methodology it establishes to facilitate communication. This methodology teaches viewers to identify the individual with whom they are communication in terms of four typical conversational roles:
The Escape Artist
The communicator who sidesteps interrogation and often has a finger to point.
The Judge
An intellectual, this communicator uses ethics and morality to frame the actions of her peers.
The Scientist
Intelligent by nature, this communicator likes facts, figures, and statistics, quickly ignoring qualitative data.
The Beggar
Compassionate and empathetic, this communicator means well but often asks for more than they contribute.
By identifying the conversational role of the person with whom they communicate, viewers are better able to understand the motivation and necessity behind messages.
Once viewers learn to correctly identify the communication styles of their coworkers, they are given guidelines to further effective employee communication efforts. These guidelines include: Rephrasing, tactfully constructing talking points, quick message construction, scripting, feathered speech, and reconstructing corporate jargon.
In addition to the Communicating with Tact, Candor, and Credibility D.V.D., Program Development Associates offers a range of resources to foster communication skills. These resources include D.V.D.s, CD-ROMs, and other interactive materials exclusively designed with the diverse workplace in mind.
