Q. What can I do as an employer to accommodate people with disabilities?
1 Answer
It’s hard to answer that without knowing the full context of what you’re dealing with. I can think of two possibilities here: either you’re trying to make your company more accommodating in the hopes of attracting more people with disabilities, or you already have a few workers with disabilities and are wondering how you can do better by then.
Knowledge is power in both cases. Try to learn more about the disability, how it affects their work, and what you can do to make it easier for those employees to be productive. That information can make it pretty easy to spot ways you could accommodate those employees. Looking into how other employers have adapted their businesses can also be useful.
Of course, that can be tricky to do if you don’t know which disability you’re targeting. The term “disability” is fairly broad, and it can be used to refer to both physical impairments and mental health issues.
You can get a sense of how broad the definition of disability is by checking the atWork Australia website. They’re a Workforce Australia services provider, so helping people with disabilities find work is their specialty.
If you don’t yet have an employee with a disability, there are a few ways you can approach making your business more accommodating. The easiest is to just pull up a list of the most common disabilities in your office and see which of those disabilities wouldn’t affect the work you do.
For example, if it’d be easy for someone in a wheelchair or with low vision to work in your company with minimal adaptations, you can make the changes and start looking into hiring more people who fit those criteria. There are plenty of NGOs and programs out there that look to match people with disabilities to workplaces that can accommodate them.
answered by charlesmay