This section provides more detail for those with a research interest.

Employers' experiences

Productivity and performance

A different approach

Employers' experiences

Several surveys have been completed looking at what employers perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of employing disabled people.

Employers surveyed in the UK, USA, Australia and the Netherlands report the following benefits of employing disabled people:

• Quality hires - motivated individuals
• Increased potential labour market
• Diverse Skills and Perspectives
• Reflecting the diversity of the local community
• Benefits to the employer brand
• Organisational learning
• Lower turnover in hard to fill positions
• Better or average sickness absence, health and safety records and maintenance costs for disabled employees

Employers felt that disabled employees show a high level of commitment and loyalty to an organisation…as a result employees are hard working, and have low sickness absence and high retention rates.

Institute of Employment Studies Survey, 2005

In contrast, when talking about perceived disadvantages of employing disabled people:

• Significant numbers of employers report no disadvantages (a larger number than the employers who reported no advantages)
• Disadvantages described tended to be specific to certain disabilities or health conditions in certain job roles, rather than a disadvantage relating to employing people with a disability or health condition in general.
• Some employers report concerns around work speed for some groups of disabled people, although rate them the same or higher for other measures of productivity [i]

Productivity and performance

Research into whether disabled people are more or less productive than other employees is limited and inconclusive. The Employers' Forum on Disability believes that this is in part because disabled people are, like non-disabled people, all individuals and it is impossible to generalise about the experience of employing people with very different impairments. Different impairments will affect performance in a different ways for every individual. Some people's performance will be negatively affected; others will be more motivated to achieve and in many cases disability will have no effect on productivity at all.

Focusing on the productivity of disabled people is ultimately unhelpful. Research often compares 'disabled employees' (who are all individuals with different impairments) with 'average employees'. In fact there is no such thing as an average employee and everyone's performance and productivity differs and is constantly fluctuating.

New thinking on how to manage people to enable them to reach their potential and be productive, profitable employees who contribute to business success, require employers to adopt a much more sophisticated approach to productivity and performance:

• The trend towards individualised employee relationships means that it is less and less meaningful to talk about averages
• Older workers want more flexibility - accommodating aging workforces requires employers to take a more sophisticated approach to productivity, contribution and performance
• Past performance is of limited use as an indicator for future performance

What does the research say?

Virginia and Commonwealth University has done some research looking at the issue of productivity: 255 supervisors of individuals with disabilities were surveyed within 43 large businesses across a whole spread of industries.

Disabled people were rated the same as or better than non-disabled co-workers on punctuality; attendance; work quality; task consistency; overall proficiency, with slightly lower scores on work speed.

Deakin University surveyed 643 Australian employers. The "average" employee was rated significantly better on productivity variables, and employees with a disability were rated somewhat, but not significantly, better on reliability variables and employee maintenance variables. Employers identified more organisation benefits than costs, a large majority considering the financial effect of modifications and changes cost-neutral, with financial benefit more common than net cost. [ii]

A study conducted on behalf of Telstra Australia in 1999 found that:

• People with a disability worked on average 4.1 years in a call centre, compared to 3.2 years for people without a disability.
• Over a 15-month period, people with a disability had 11.8 days absent, compared to people without a disability who had 19.24 days absent.
• There were no significant differences when comparing people with a disability to people without a disability in the areas of performance, productivity and sales.

Other research shows that:

• Over 90% of employers who had recently employed a person with a disability said they would be happy to continue employing people with a disability.
• 78% of employers described the match between their employee with a disability and the job as 'good.'
• In relation to the cost benefit of workplace accommodations for employees with a disability, 65% of employers rated the financial effect to be cost neutral and 20% identified an overall financial benefit.
• The average recruitment cost of an employee with a disability was 13% of the average recruitment cost of an employee without a disability.
• Employees with a disability averaged one-sixth the recorded occupational health and safety incidents of employees without a disability.
• 90% of employees with a disability record productivity rates equal to or greater than other workers.
• 98% have average or superior safety records.
• 86% have average or superior attendance records [iii]

A different approach

The flexibility and investment in reasonable adjustments that some disabled people need in order to do the job, is shown to be increasingly necessary for the wider labour force to be able to work productively and to their capabilities.

New management thinking is challenging business to focus on developing people's strengths rather than attempting to fix their weaknesses.

Only 24% of working people say that their managers actively coach them in how to use their strengths at work.

It means that companies may say 'Our people are our greatest asset' but they mean about as much as when they say: 'the customer is always right.' The truth is most people are less interested in deploying their assets than in lessening their liabilities.'

Marcus Buckingham, 'The Strengths Revolution', Business Voice, November 2005.

In the past, both disabled people and employers have lost out, through trying to 'change' disabled employees to make them better fit a 'normal' stereotype. All employees would benefit from greater emphasis on developing their individual talents and strengths.

Sources

1. [i] Institute of Employment Studies Survey, 2005; Unknown, Unloved, Research voor Belaid, 2004; Noble, J. Entrepreneurial Research Project, Telstra Australia, 1999.
2. [ii] Joseph Graffama, Kaye Smitha, Alison Shinkfieldb and Udo Polzina, Employer benefits and costs of employing a person with a disability, Institute of Disability Studies, Deakin University, Australia
3. [iii] References

   Carr-Ruffino, N.) Diversity success strategies. Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 1999.

   Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. (CIPD) Adapting to disability wasn't so difficult after all: The change agenda. London: CPID, 2001 pp.1-6.

   Du Pont Corporation, "Equal to the Task", 1990.

   Graffam, J., Shinkfield, A., Smith, K., & Polzin, U. Factors that influence employer decisions in hiring and retaining an employee with a disability. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 2002a, 17, 175-181.

   Graffam, J., Smith, K., Shinkfield, A., & Polzin, U. Making it work: Employer outcomes when employing a person with a disability. Melbourne: Institute of Disability Studies, Deakin University, 2000.

   Graffam, J., Smith, K., Shinkfield, A., & Polzin, U. Employer benefits and costs of employing a person with a disability. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 2002b, 17, 251-263.

   Noble, J. Entrepreneurial Research Project, Telstra Australia, 1999.