• Write Reviews
• Business Training
• Hop On The Bus Training
• Directory
• Blog
• About
• Donate
• Get newsletter

Article Categories

---

Community Participation

Disability Aware & Business

Latest Buzz on Disability

Housing

In the ‘Hood: What the Local Mom & Pop Shop Can Teach Companies about Disability Awareness

by JJ Hanley

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I were looking for a place in our neighborhood to have a cup of coffee. I suggested a nearby café of a gourmet chain where the coffee was great.  My friend preferred a small, mom & pop coffee house several blocks away.  When I argued that it was further away and the coffee at that place wasn’t all that good, my friend mumbled something about how the mom & pop “gets it.” But he relented and we went to the gourmet spot.   

As soon as we placed our order at the café, I understood why my friend had wanted to go to the mom & pop.  He has a disability, and the person behind the counter didn’t look at him when she took his order.  When he spoke, she didn’t understand what he said, and instead of asking him to repeat himself, she looked to me for help.   It wasn’t that the server was deliberately being rude.  In fact, she was trying to be friendly.  She just didn’t “get” disability awareness and, as my friend told me later, the mom-&-pop shop did.   

So, what is disability awareness?  It’s welcoming, common sense service to a person with a disability.  It includes techniques such as “person-to-person communication,” “flexible service,” “assistance or accommodation when needed,” “extra time as needed” and “respectful service.” At jjslist.com, the review website that I started to help people touched by disability find disability-aware community businesses, visitors consistently place all of these service features at the top of the list when they recommend businesses as disability aware.       

I asked a few of these recommended businesses how they make disability awareness a part of their day-to-day service and they shared these thoughts: 

Owner/manager involvement -   Disability awareness starts with owners’ and managers’ own attitudes and behaviors.   According to Frank Lomoro, vice president and general manager of Sunset Foods, a Chicagoland supermarket chain with locations in Northbrook, Highland Park, Libertyville and Lake Forest, managers’ attitude directly influences how the staff treats a customer or another employee with a disability.   “Personal, attentive service is ingrained in the way we do business.  We train our staff to treat everybody the same, regardless of whether there is a disability or not,” Lomoro says. 
 
Such top-down disability awareness may be challenging for larger companies to build and maintain because of the additional management layers through which the message often has to travel.  One way for larger companies to address this problem is to offer disability awareness training workshops to managers so that they can transfer the knowledge to employees at the local level, or make basic disability awareness training a part of new employee orientation. 

Serve as you would want to be served – Anyone who practices disability awareness may make a mistake but most customers with disabilities appreciate sincere efforts at respectful, attentive service.  Staff shouldn’t avoid person-to-person interaction out of fear of doing or saying the wrong thing.  “I think [staff] is often afraid to communicate with people with disabilities,” says Dave Cozzolino, owner of Wilmette Pet Center in Wilmette.  “They’re afraid they might say something wrong and they’re afraid to approach people with disabilities because they’re different.  But they aren’t.  They just want to be talked to and appreciated like everybody else.” 

Be flexible -   “This place is here to serve the community.  That means everybody in the community,” says Sahel Patel, manager of a Subway franchise in Evanston who gets out from behind the counter whenever needed to make sure his customers with disabilities receive the service they need.  “When the customer comes in we treat them nicely,” Patel says.  “If I’m not too busy I’ll come outside and put his sandwich on the table. I want people with disabilities to have the same good experience that all my customers are having.”

Disability awareness doesn’t just build customer loyalty with those who have disabilities.  It can also build loyalty among customers without disabilities.  One visitor to JJ’s List wrote that she isn’t touched by disability, but she recommended Homer’s Ice Cream in Wilmette as disability aware when she observed the interaction between the restaurant staff and a young man with a disability.  “The Homer’s employee…went out of her way to make sure [the person with the disability] had everything he needed.  I was just waiting in line and happened to observe this wonderful interaction.”

That’s what disability awareness is all about.

JJ Hanley is a trainer of person-first and disability aware practices and founder of JJ’s List.com.  She can be reached at jj@jjslist.com or 847-702-4098.