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Part II
Continuously on our last Ability For Success online discussion, we talked about the benefit of inclusion at workplace. Creating sheltered workshops may lower unemployment rate but it does not create a good career path for people with disabilities. Jobs at sheltered workshops are low paid and they do not give the employees good job skills to move on to a better career path.
Including employees with disability at workplace may have more benefits than just lowering unemployment rate.
Yusuke said the company he is working with welcomes employees with disabilities and is willing to provide accommodations to all employees. Yusuke has not worked with colleagues with disability yet nor visited their work environment. However, he said his company set up accessible rest rooms at each floor so employees with wheelchairs can easily access to the rest rooms.This may not be very common in Tokyo. In Tokyo, space is so expensive so apartments and buildings are usually built to compress many things into one small space. Those accessible rest rooms not only benefit people with mobility impairment but also everyone else.
Annie said that she can better understand a company or organization’s culture when they put employees with disability and employees without disability to work together. Annie also said that working with people from different background gives her new perspective to the same task she has been doing. She is also able to discover new ways to do an existing task. She likes the benefit coming along with an inclusive workplace.
We closed the discussion with our observation of current education system and the recruitment system. The current education system tends to train most people to think in similar ways and to talk in certain ways. Difference is not valued much in the current education system. So is the current recruitment system*1. It is designed to evaluate the majority of people. It is created to quickly filter out the applicants with lower scores and keep those applicants with higher scores. However, is the traditional recruitment system able to identify applicants’ optimal strengths and their individual uniqueness?
In an age when products and services are made to be more personalized and customized, diversity has become more important than ever. Traditional recruitment screening method is like a fast food making process. It quickly generates similar outcomes. It is fast but is it better? Mizuki always says “how can a team be creative when its members are from similar backgrounds and abilities?”
Are you ready to embrace diversity and changes?
Are you ready to build a stronger team with various abilities and diverse ways of thinking?
Our next session is on 24-Apr-2016 in Japan time.
Topic is “How to Create an Inclusive and Diverse Workplace Effectively?”
Reserve your seat here now for free!
Reference:
*1: In a past event, we talked about some recruitment agencies in United Kingdom playing an important role but discriminating talents with disability. Talents with disability are unable to receive a high score when they are tested in a traditional test process. More about the article: