Lifestyle
How to Make Your Business More Inclusive for People with Disabilities
Recent years have proven that the world has started focusing on having persons with disabilities included in society. This is can be clearly seen, with businesses working towards promoting disability-friendly practices in workplaces. Also, most businesses today embrace the disability-inclusive culture. Note that making your business inclusive for people with disabilities is not all about hiring them. You need to ensure that your business is able to accommodate and support them too. Here is some great way you need to know in order to make your business inclusive for people with disabilities.
Make Training Company-Wide
The first step to make to ensure that your business is more inclusive for people with disabilities is by implementing company-wide training. The thing is, you cannot do it on your own. This makes it important for you to find someone or people to help you with that. You can also opt to hire an expert to help you develop a good training plan. You need to ensure that your company has quality programs that equip persons with disability with enough working knowledge. Also, train co-workers on how they can handle persons with disabilities as they work together.
Develop a Sourcing and Retention Plan
To include more persons with disabilities in your company you need to develop a good sourcing and retention plan. This will ensure that you find more persons with disabilities with unique talents and abilities. Partnering with nonprofit external organizations can be a smart move. Most businesses want to hire persons with disabilities, making them competitive. This is why you should develop good strategies such as reaching out to state agencies and placing ads in churches.
Offer Special Support
Your business management needs to find ways how it can offer support to its employees with disabilities. This is one way to ensure that your business maximizes production. How can you offer support? You can support persons with disabilities by ensuring they get fair accommodation as other employees. They have special needs which makes them special. It is therefore important that you consider giving them special support and accommodation.
Communicate Your Plans
For your business to be inclusive of more persons with disabilities ensure that you always communicate your plans internally. Send messages to all your employees on your plans to include more persons with disabilities in the business. This will help your employees to be mentally prepared to embrace a disability-inclusive culture. You can easily communicate with your business team through e-mails, newsletters, or physically in meetings.
Measure Your Returns
It is always important to keep measuring your return on investments. However, some variables that are not tangible can be very hard to measure. This is why you should focus on variables you can measure. To make your business more inclusive for persons with disabilities ensure there are variables you need to check on. These include lowering recruiting costs. This will allow persons with disabilities to look for jobseekers without having to use a lot of money on the recruitment costs.
Improve Infrastructure
A business environment plays a very important role in the workplace. To ensure that your business is more inclusive for persons with disabilities, always ensure that your workplace environment has the best infrastructure. Note that it is the responsibility of your business to ensure that the employees with disability are comfortable in their places of work. Types of infrastructure you can improve include business wheelchairs and bathrooms for the disabled.
Make use of Technology
Today, technology has advanced everything used in production. To make your business more inclusive for people with disabilities ensure that your business makes good use of recent technology. Technology will help person with disabilities have an easier time while performing tasks assigned to them. Also, they are going to have an easier time contributing to the production of the business.
Conclusion
The truth is that a big number of people with disabilities are employed. As we aim to embrace the disability-inclusive culture it is important that businesses provide inclusive environments. Not only does it make feel the persons with disabilities feel loved and valued, but also promotes productivity. Thanks to technology, there are several ways we can help to make sure that our businesses are more inclusive for people with disabilities.