Real jobs for real people

At last, a business story to warm the hearts of even the most cold-blooded executive, and contribute one solution to the lack of talent during low unemployment. Harrison Mullinax works eight hours a day at Wallgreen Co., where he wields a bar-code scanner, checking in boxes of merchandise bound for the company’s drug stores. Not unusual, perhaps, until you realise that Harrison is autistic. He conveys a serious outlook, speaks in a monotonous, halting voice and sometimes struggles to concentrate on tasks.

An innovative program at Walgreen is offering jobs to people like Harrison with mental and physical disabilities of a nature that has frequently deemed them unemployable.

While many employers recruit people with disabilities, Walgreen’s programme has a larger number of disabled employees, doing more-sophisticated work than is typically available to people with mental and physical challenges.

Walgreen currently employs 264 people, more than 40 percent of whom have various disabilities, and it is 20 percent more efficient than the company’s older facilities. On some days, disabled employees are its most productive workers.

“One thing we found is they can all do the job,” says Randy Lewis, a senior vice president at Walgreen. “What surprised us is the environment that it’s created. It’s a building where everybody helps each other out.”

Walgreen’s employment programme for disabled workers includes:

• Developing a culture that values disabled employment and policies that enhance job satisfaction among employees with a disability.
• Recruitment procedures that facilitate interview attendance and performance, e.g., provide directions/transport to interviews, use sign language interpreters for deaf people and ensure medical assessors are familiar with a person’s particular disability and how it relates to job requirements.
• Job coaches that act as mentors and support, provide induction, task familiarity and even social skills training, from the importance of wearing deodorant to finding appropriate conversation topics.
• Modifying work premises such as making ramps, altering toilets, lowering workbenches and providing flashing lights to alert people with a hearing loss. One worker wanted to learn how to operate a forklift so she could expand her skills, but she didn’t have a place to put her walker. An engineer devised a clamp that attaches the walker to the forklift.
• Changes to job design such as redesigning workstations so that people don’t have to stretch as far and adding help buttons to summon assistance. Walgreen also converted its computer displays from lines of type to touch screens with a few icons. It persuaded vendors to include more information in bar codes on merchandise, so that employees wouldn’t have to enter so much data themselves.
• Flexible work practices such as swapping some duties among staff, regular meal breaks for people with diabetes. Instead of posting printed cards to remind workers about having their bags inspected, Walgreen shows a video of someone opening a bag.

Walgreen Co. are strong believers in the value of disabled employees and their experience confirms that which research has established (Graffam 2002):

• Disabled employees average one-sixth the recorded occupational health and safety incidents of employees without a disability.
• Disabled people are absent from work 85% less than other people.
• Disabled people are cheaper to maintain in employment (recruitment, safety and insurance costs).
• Workplace accommodations for disabled people are financially cost-neutral or cost-beneficial to the organisation as a whole.

References

Graffam, J., Shinkfield, A., Smith, K., & Polzin, U. (2002). Employer benefits and costs of employing a person with a disability. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, vol. 17, 251-263.

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