New initiative looks to build demand-side capacity and 'disability confidence'
Often, the focus on organizations that wish to hire more people with disabilities rests on the shoulders of those candidates.
They are encouraged to gain more skills and training in order to fit into the organization and fill open positions.
But a new initiative is flipping that paradigm around and placing the onus on employers.
“We’re taking a different approach and the way we’re going to increase opportunities is by building the demand-side capacity and supporting employers and building their disability confidence and their capacity to hire and retain and promote people with disabilities,” says Rebecca Gewurtz, associate professor at the School of Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University in Hamilton and adjunct scientist at IWH.
‘Skilling up employers’ for persons with disabilities
The Inclusive Design for Employment Access (IDEA) aims to increase the employment of persons with disabilities in Canada by increasing the confidence and capacity of employers and workplaces to recruit, hire, accommodate, train and promote persons with disabilities. It will provide organizations with training to discover exactly how persons with disabilities can be successfully recruited and onboarded into a company.
“We realized that the effort being put into getting people job-ready was doing a great job but there are still very high levels of unemployment, underemployment out of the labour force among this population compared to able-bodied persons so we really need to put much more focus on an employer’s capacity,” says Emile Tompa, senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) in Toronto.
Instead, the program — funded by the federal government's New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) Transformation Stream — will work with employers.
It’s about “skilling up employers and the demand-side capacity building, and helping them get up to speed under the area of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility [and] really focusing on persons with disabilities because it takes a know-how that organizations in the past didn’t have,” says Tompa.
Persons with disabilities face a much tougher time at work, as 59% of working age workers in that cohort have jobs, compared to 80% of able-bodied employees. They also have lower average incomes: $34,000 versus $39,000 per year, according to Statistics Canada.
‘Social innovation laboratory’
The program is being characterized as a “social innovation laboratory” and it will encompass five areas of focus:
- Reworking workplace systems
- Providing employment support
- Offering training on successful transitions to careers
- Designing inclusive environmental designs in workplace
- Uncovering new and innovative technologies
The new effort will include input from a wide variety of stakeholders as well.
“The goal is to bring these diverse voices together to actually solve some of the problems that have been hampering past efforts,” says Gewurtz.
“That’s what is going to make IDEA different because we were able to bring the different players together and in ways that haven’t been done before.”
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Not trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’
IDEA has an ambitious agenda, says Tompa and will build on successful past initiatives.
“We’re developing a webinar series, we’ll have a monthly newsletter, we’ll have workshops in training and micro-credential training programs, so there’ll be a battery of different opportunities to engage with and draw on whatever resources we make available. Some of it will be just pointing people to where they can get the information others have already developed — we’re not going to reinvent the wheel,” he says.
The rollout will include a website (that is currently only a single page) that will allow employers and organizations to become involved.
Currently, there are not many places where employers can access this type of information, according to Tompa.
“Employers don’t have the time to be searching for where you find the best-practice guidance, where do you find resources to help you with onboarding, so having a one-stop shop and having a knowledge base of evidence-informed guidance, tools and resources is absolutely critical.”
The “radical, transformative piece” will allow employers to gain the wherewithal to assist in reaching this untapped market in order to help solve labour shortages, says Gewurtz.
“Being able to think about people with disabilities as meeting some of their needs can be quite a win-win. It’s quite a powerful opportunity for employers to develop these skills and rethink the way they operate so that they can be more inclusive,” she says.
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HR should reach out
As an example of what needs to be changed during the hiring process, Tompa cites task-based assessments.
“Some people are better at showing what they can do than talking about what they can do and it’s in that employer’s best interest to see and experience the person’s talent and abilities rather than having them speak about them.”
For HR departments struggling in efforts to find disabled employees, “this initiative, and the success of this initiative, rests on the shoulders of our capacity to build partnerships, and HR professionals and employers are a really important stakeholder,” says Gewurtz.
“We invite employers and HR professionals to reach out to us.”
