Help Is on the Way: Solving Your Labor Needs by Accessing Disability Talent

It has always struck me as odd that the discussion of employment for people with disabilities often begins with a discussion of the law, of economic disadvantage, or even of justice. It seems to me that a discussion about any kind of employment should start with talent - the talent an employer needs and the talent that a person with a disability can contribute to any organization.

We know that employing people with disabilities is good for a business owner’s bottom line. In a study published a few years ago by Accenture, DisabilityIN and the American Association of People with Disabilities, the numbers were clear. When comparing the performance of 45 Disability Inclusion Champions with 95 peer companies that did not champion disability inclusion from 2015 through 2018, the Champions were found to have two times the income, 30% higher economic profit margins, and up to 30% staff turnover when compared to their peers over the same period.

Now, some people swear by numbers, while others find themselves asking “why?” Personally, if I find numbers exciting, then I want to have some idea how I can duplicate that performance. I want to share with you a case study from a book that I found instructive. In Hidden Talent: How Leading Companies Hire, Retain, and Benefit from People with Disabilities, editor Mark L. Lengnick-Hall shares a story about woodworking company in Michigan, in a town with a severe labor shortage, much as we are currently experiencing.

The company needed people, specifically to do jobs that weren’t the most fun, like stacking wood and punching holes in metal. At this time of low unemployment and great competition for labor, this company was approached by an agency tasked with finding jobs for people with disabilities, to explore their interest in a new talent pipeline.

At that moment, they were thinking less about disability employment than the need to find labor wherever they could. Their first hire was a success, but the case study really focuses on the hires after that. The first story that they tell is of a worker with a brain injury which made complex tasks challenging, but who was dedicated, serious, and strong, and became their best manual laborer.

From this success, they began to work to access the talents of other people with disabilities. In one case, a foreman spent hours figuring out how to operate a machine without the use of his eyes so that they could hire a blind person to operate it, a position that remained filled when Hidden Talent was written more than a decade later. We learn the story of another employee whose intellectual disability made him uncomfortable with taking the road test required for a driver’s license. The company would have lost this otherwise well-qualified employee because the bus commute had become more arduous, and he was going to leave. Instead, other employees worked with this individual, driving with him to and from work in order to prepare him for his driving test. This allowed him to stay with the company.

I’m sure that these were all good people, but I respectfully submit that this is not a story about people doing something nice for disabled employees. Rather, this is a story about a set of people who had a set of raw talents and abilities that this understaffed company needed, and a company with open positions it was finding difficult to fill. The foreman who spent hours figuring out how one might operate a machine blind, or the coworkers who taught their fellow how to drive were technically accommodating a disability. What they were really doing, however, was trying to figure out how to access the talent they needed.?They needed someone to operate the machine. So, they figured out how a blind person could do it.?They needed this employee to keep coming to work. So, they taught him how to drive. They were simply doing what was best for their business.

I think it is this concept, of “fit” and matching and meeting need, that explains the statistics above. Part of the equation is undoubtedly the contributions of disabled talent. Another part is learning the broadly applicable employment lessons of employing disabled talent. I would wager that some of them shifted their thinking from empowering the talents of people with an identified set of conditions called disabilities to empowering the talents of everyone in the organization.

Think about it: If you can make an employee more productive by empowering them to overcome a barrier they face, should we care if that barrier is the result of a disability?

A more personal example: My voice recognition is necessary if I’m going to produce written work, because for all intents and purposes I can’t type or write. It can also take dictation at 3 times the speed at which the average college graduate types, and 1.5 times the speed of a trained typist or secretary. It’s also cheap and easy to use.?Shouldn’t a business owner think about making this technology available to any employee whose productivity is limited by their typing speed? The return on investment would be enormous. We all learned about the power of a flexible telecommuting schedule from the pandemic. Though that was once considered a disability accommodation, it is now revolutionizing workforces all over.

The idea is not that people should get accommodations that don’t make them better at their jobs. Rather, it’s about matching jobs to a people and helping them overcome the barriers which might keep them from maximum productivity. It comes as no surprise to me that these kinds of accommodations create both greater opportunities for organizations to become more efficient (in the form of lower turnover rates) as well as more productive and profitable.