Accessibility Demo Days and Hackathons Can Differentiate Your Organization to Attract New Talent.
IT accessibility and accommodation programs are more than just checked boxes and followed laws governing the rights of your employees with disabilities and special needs. Internally facing, these programs enhance all employees’ productivity. Externally facing, organizations can gain a competitive edge in attracting the best talent.
Accessibility programs touch everything from recruitment, workplace accommodation policies, devices, and extend all the way to website design. These programs are cornerstones to any diversity and inclusion initiative. It’s time to differentiate and position your organization at the forefront of change.
By the end of this year, Gartner estimates only 60% of companies will have programs for accessibility specifically designed to attract and retain employees. Here are two best practices to promote your organizations commitment to diversity and inclusion:
Run an Accessibility Demo Day or Hackathon
A “Demo Day” is a great way to showcase various assistive technologies, services and programs you currently offer employees. A hackathon is a more involved project to create new solutions. Create a demo day or a hackathon, but don’t mix the two as they have very different objectives.
Either event is a great way to promote your organization’s disability employee resource group. You have one right? It’s part of a complete Diversity and Inclusion program. It’s part of the mantra “not about me, without me”
For a Demo Day, be flexibility on scope and include HR, IT, facilities and business unit leaders. Use the event to recruit members to the employee resource group, keeping in mind people interested will not necessarily have a disability. People with disabilities represent upwards of 15% of the population, so everyone knows someone to share the latest solutions. So include both organization-sponsored accommodation offerings as well as those solutions employees can use at home and share with friends and family.
A few tips:
· Run it over multiple days to draw in more people.
· Have senior executive endorse and attend.
· Get outside help. Your accommodation services vendor should be eager help.
· Avoid disability simulations as they don’t represent real world situations.
· Include elements of workplace ergonomics and apps to fight distracted driving.
A Hackathon is a very different event. It’s a technical group session that brings together various departments to create new ideas that address business objectives. While a Demo Day is about showcasing current offerings, a hackathon is about making future solutions.
The first step toward a great hackathon is to align it to the strategic objectives, such as “Improving the Digital Workplace for Everyone.” Possible projects could be testing a video closed captioning capability for training material, or adding text to voice solutions to a customer facing website. Don’t be too explicit, it may diminish innovation. Choose a good location for tech-savvy individuals, such as an established innovation lab. A virtual or hybrid approach can also work well too. Who will participate? What tools, technology infrastructure and facilitators will you need?
A few tips:
· Peer networking is one of the most attractive aspects of a hackathon.
· Executives should attend, but quietly.
· Conclude with an award ceremony. What are the judging criteria and prizes?
· Assign a budget and relationship manager to each winning proposal.
External hackathons are fun to run and generate positive publicity, but they are more work and riskier. Start with an internal project and have it evolve into an external event.
Final Advice: Demo Days and hackathons are a journeys, not single events.
Inform. Illuminate. Inspire. Together
6 年Here is a organization that hosts hackathons.? Check out the list, attend to get an idea on hoe to run your own.??https://mlh.io/seasons/na-2018/events
Gartner - China Emerging Technology Sales Director
6 年It’s really great! I reposted.
Quantum | AI | Research and Development | Behavioral Science | STEM Leadership
6 年Great advice and guidance, AJ! When well prepared, Hackathons are a lot of fun and generate an abundance of value! Cheers!
Inform. Illuminate. Inspire. Together
6 年Thanks for the details Nasser. Your point that employees want info to share with family is something I hear all the time. Education is an employee benefit.
CEO at Microlink PC
6 年It is a great idea Andrew, we have organised many of such demo days for our clients particularly during their national/regional employee disability network meeting. What we have discovered in these events is that many of the participants may not have any disabilities themselves but they have close family members, particularly children, with disabilities. They find such events extremely useful and go away feeling more positive that they may have found a solution to help them cope with the difficult challenges faced helping their loved ones. We have also discovered that sometimes line managers come to learn about how to deal with a situation they face with a disabled colleague but take away that some of the technical solutions for the disabled people are equally useful for productivity improvement for the rest of their team. Two examples of such experience I can name are when they come across using voice recognition in typing reports and using mind mapping software for planning and project management. Both of these tools are heavily used by people with disabilities. One other significant benefit of such gatherings is that the seniors get to hear from disabled colleague on how they struggle to cope with the inaccessible IT platforms which will help to raise the awareness with the loss of productivity and potential stress and anxieties this generates.