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.
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
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.
