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Making Workplaces Disability-Friendly Posted: April 12, 2023 @ 5:38 am |
As an employer, it is your responsibility to ensure that your employees are working in a safe workplace. And this also includes employees with disabilities.
Unfortunately, there are many organisations that are not disability friendly and this is usually due to an unconscious bias that most of us experience. Consequently, many people with disabilities find it challenging to find a job in the workplace.
It is essential that the culture of a company must be inclusive of everyone, including people with disabilities. Here are a few ways you can go about doing that.
Educating YourselfBefore you do anything, it is important that you must understand their struggles and figure out what issues they come across in a professional work environment.
Most workplaces are not designed for people with disabilities, which can make it difficult for them to move around or adjust to a common workplace. Another problem is discrimination. People with disabilities become easy targets for some people to discriminate against. These are probably the most common ones but once you get to know more about people with disabilities, you will come to find that there is a huge spectrum of challenges that these individuals deal with.
Educating Current StaffEducating yourself is not enough - you also need to make your staff be aware of how they can create a more disability-friendly work environment. The most essential things they need to learn is awareness, empathy, and sensitivity.
It also helps to bring experts who are knowledgeable about disabilities in workplaces or those who work with such people. You can have seminars or conferences to help educate your employees. Additionally, you can even hear from your employees - you never know when they might have a suggestion that can improve the conditions of people with disabilities in your particular workplace.
There is still so much you can do such as forming support groups for disabled employees to discuss any issues and come up with solutions or even hire designers who can make your workplace more disability friendly. When given the ideal environment to work under, people with disabilities can bring out their true capabilities and showcase their skills in ways you might have never imagined.
A prime example can be J. Daniel Boomer - a man born with cerebral palsy and yet somehow managed to become one of the best mathematicians, computer scientists, educators, and futurists known throughout the globe.
Some of the positions that Boomer has taken on include being the State Chairperson and National Vice-president and President at the Oregon State Planning Advisory Council for People with Developmental Disabilities for four years.
He has also assisted the Dean of the Department of Education at the University of Colorado at Denver in developing an information system for the purpose of administrative decision-making - leading to a significant improvement in teacher training programs and practices.
He would also serve as the Project Coordinator at Special Education Division It was there that he worked to analyse and evaluate program and student level information in determining the outcomes of special education students. In addition to that, Boomer would also collect follow-up data across the state of California and then analyse it a few years after graduation to look into the ideal progress of the future of their students.
Moreover, after getting his Ph.D., Boomer became a part of the National Staff of the United Cerebral Palsy, Inc. It was around this time that he took on the role of the National Consultant on computer hardware and software.
Even though he has retired, he still continues to focus his time and efforts researching neuroscience and astrophysics, further contributing his expertise to the professional world.
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