“What Gets Measured Gets Done” says the ODEP’s new guide for inclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace. In 20 pages, it provides a multitude of approaches to accomplish this goal.
The new Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) guide, Business Strategies That Work: A Framework for Disability Inclusion (PDF) wraps up with the section “Grow Success: Accountability and Continuous Improvement Systems.” The section includes practices for providing personnel training and setting up mechanisms by which success can be assessed at regular intervals.
Accountability is the root of nearly all efforts to increase employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities by the ODEP and its U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) counterparts housed in the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program (OFCCP). Some of the verbiage in this section sounds as if it’s pulled from earlier sound bites by Patricia Shiu of the OFCCP and ODEP leader Kathleen Martinez:
Often times, “people don’t know what they don’t know.” It is critical that companies extend professional development opportunities to employees in all offices, divisions, and departments…It has been stated that “what gets measured gets done.” Specific strategies and practices that your company can use to measure its progress toward creating an inclusive workplace include establishing annual quantitative goals, objectives, and benchmarks…
When businesses seeking federal contracts bristle at the DOL’s newly proposed rule that they have seven percent of their workforce be comprised of people with disabilities, it’s largely because of the perceived costs. James Bovard elevates corporate dissent to a shrill pitch in his June 5 column for the Washington Times, when he compares the rule to both an “iron fist” and a “nuclear bomb” in the space of a single paragraph; the reason for this assault on the capitalist sensibility, as he puts it, is “supposedly, because ‘good faith’ failed.”
But if the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is consistently four to five points higher than the national rate, then “good faith” has failed, hasn’t it? Bovard provides no data to substantiate his incredulity; instead, he posits the proposed rule would do the opposite of what is intended and force HR professionals to focus on an applicant’s disability versus their qualifications. But to rail against the effectiveness of an untried strategy for solving the problem of unemployment among people with disabilities is similar to a child saying she doesn’t like brussels sprouts the first time they are placed on a plate in front of her.
In less than 20 pages, Business Strategies That Work provides multiple approaches to help companies be better at recruiting, hiring and keeping qualified employees with disabilities; most of which involve little more than simply paying attention to the fact that individuals with disabilities have the necessary training and skills to perform any number of tasks from manual labor to advanced scientific analysis. If companies used the time they spent protesting new rules to actually attempt to implement some of the strategies, perhaps they would be afforded a little more “good faith” when it comes to making life matter for this underserved population.
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Image by Mason Bryant, used under its Creative Commons license.