By Diane Royanto, Guest Blogger
Did you know that more than one billion people live with some form of disability? That’s a lot of potential employees! Unfortunately, many businesses have yet to embrace disability inclusion in their workplace. This is despite the fact that doing so can lead to a number of benefits, such as tapping into a talent pool that’s more than 10.7 million people strong.
This blog post will discuss why disability inclusion matters and how your business can benefit from it. We’ll also drop a few tips on how you can make your workplace more inclusive for individuals with disabilities.
Disability inclusion is important because it ensures that everyone has an opportunity to work and contribute to their community. By embracing disability inclusion, your business can benefit from the unique perspectives and talents that people with disabilities have to offer. Additionally, companies that are disability-inclusive tend to be more diverse and inclusive overall.
There are a number of ways to create a more disability-inclusive workplace.
Encourage Diversity and Inclusion as Core Values
You should encourage diversity and inclusion as core values within your organization, for starters. This means that everyone in the company, from top executives down to front-line employees, should be committed to creating an environment where disabled people can thrive along with their fellow coworkers.
When disability inclusion is encouraged as a core value, it becomes more accessible for people with disabilities to voice their concerns and collaborate with other employees. As a result, workplaces become more productive, and employees are happier in general.
Hire a Chief Diversity Officer
Another way is by hiring a Chief Diversity Officer tasked with overseeing all diversity initiatives, including disability inclusion. It’s also essential to make sure that your company has an inclusive culture by implementing policies and procedures that support individuals with disabilities throughout their employment lifecycle – from recruitment through retirement.
Make sure your recruitment process is disability-friendly. This includes ensuring that all job postings and applications are accessible and conducting interviews in a way that’s respectful of an individual’s disability.
Promote Disability-Inclusive Communication
You should also promote disability-inclusive communication across your business. This means using accessible language when communicating with employees, customers, and the general public about disability issues.
For example, use person-first language such as “person living with a disability” or “people who are deaf.” Don’t use terms such as “the disabled,” “wheelchair-bound,” or “suffering from.”
Provide Disability Awareness Training
Finally, make sure that all employees have access to disability awareness training. This will help them better understand disability and how they can create an inclusive environment for people with disabilities.
Training employees on disability inclusion is key to making your workplace disability-inclusive. When everyone in the company understands and values the contributions of people with disabilities, it becomes easier to create an inclusive environment for all.
Make Your Workplace Accessible
Businesses should also provide facilities appropriate for disabled individuals. This includes making sure that buildings and work areas are accessible and providing disability-specific equipment (such as wheelchair ramps) when necessary. Just like how you can create a safer environment at home for people with disability, companies should do the same for their workplaces.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, businesses that embrace disability inclusion have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. It should come as no surprise that embracing disability in the workplace can result in a number of benefits for companies.
Furthermore, diverse teams are known to be better at problem-solving since they bring different perspectives and experiences together to solve problems creatively (and quickly). This can lead to increased innovation and a better bottom line for your company.
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