Employable people with disabilities have virtually the same educational qualifications for employment as those in the general adult population. Yet as of April 2014, the unemployment rate among those with disabilities was more than double the general population rate — 13 percent compared to 6 percent. Why the discrepancy?

According to an analysis of data gathered by the Families and Work Institute and the Society for Human Resource Management, several factors work against a prospective employee with a disability: Companies tend not to have staffing plans, they do not offer the flexibility many disabled workers need to flourish, and they don't provide disabled employees with a forum that gives them a voice in company policies regarding hiring.

Read: Disability accommodation tricky

This is the major conclusion found in the “Talents of Employees with Disabilities” released by FWI and SHRM. The report comes from a larger study, the 2014 National Study of Employers, that the two groups published in April.

The study found that 50 percent of companies surveyed had no formal staffing plan, which meant none of those employers had any formal guidelines for including workers with disabilities in their staffing matrices. About four in 10 did have formal staffing plans that included provisions for hiring and retaining those with disabilities.

The relative dearth of employees with disabilities results in many workplaces where there are no formal or informal “employee resource groups” where those with disabilities can naturally meet and discuss their needs on the job.

But too little flexibility was cited as perhaps the largest obstacle to formally including workers with disabilities in the corporate staffing strategy.

Respondents were asked if they offered employees five types of flexibility: flex time and place; control over breaks; caregiver leave; personal time off; and task flexibility. In all cases, small employers were about 15 percent more likely than large employers to offer these “benefits.”

The researchers identified task flexibility as a vital component of a corporate policy that would encourage the hiring and retention of more workers with disabilities. The concept offers to those with disabilities various options for getting their jobs done besides the usual suspects: flex time and working from a remote location.

“This form of flexibility allows employees to swap tasks so that the demands of individual jobs can be adjusted to match each employee's personal responsibilities, career development needs and ability range while keeping individual workloads manageable for all employees,” the report said. “Task flexibility can be part of a team approach where employers examine how a collection of employees can best accomplish the required tasks rather than limiting solutions to how a single individual's work can or cannot be adjusted. It can also be relevant for a particular employee who is hired to meet a specific business need required by the employer.”

The report acknowledged that experiments with task flexibility in actual workplace situations had better outcomes when it was explained to employers that workers with disabilities would benefit from the process and, by extension, so would the employers.

“…Task flexibility was less well received when presented as a universal form of flexibility than when it was presented in the context of people with disabilities,” the report said.

Companies large and small tended to offer different kinds of flexibility more often to workers with disabilities than to those who do not identify themselves as having a disability. Asked specifically if they offered task flexibility to some or all employees, 73 percent said they did. When asked if they offered task flexibility to some or all employees with disabilities, 84 percent responded affirmatively.

But when asked if “all or most” were offered such flexibility, the percent of those answering affirmatively dropped considerably, from 84 percent to 61 percent for those with disabilities and from 73 percent to 53 percent for the general workforce.

The report concluded that different approaches need to be taken by small and large employers to bring more talented workers with disabilities into the workplace and unlock their potential to contribute fully to company goals.

“These findings present an interesting picture of several organizational characteristics that enhance the inclusion of employees with disabilities. On the one hand, small employers are more likely than large employers to offer five types of workplace flexibility that are of value to all employees, including those with disabilities. On the other hand, large employers are more likely to have the formal staffing plans and ERGs that identify and institutionalize business policies and strategies that make for greater inclusion of employees and customers with disabilities,” the researchers said.

“People and organizations invested in improving the employment options for people with disabilities should consider encouraging smaller employers to engage in more proactive planning for how they recruit and retain staff and to form more ERGs. While a single small employer may not have enough employees interested in such an ERG, coalitions of small employers within a community could provide the critical mass to establish such a group and benefit from the cross-employer idea exchange. For larger employers, greater efforts to reinvent the way work is done and make workflex more common would be key steps in being more inclusive of employees with disabilities.”

Instant Insights /

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