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Page 1: askjan.org · Web viewThis is rare from what hear from our business partners but, ... We really appreciate the partnership we have with ... We've launched it at the United States

ROUGH EDITED COPY

CONSUMER: BETH LOY

JAN

FAMILIES AND WORK INSTITUTE WEBINAR

OCTOBER 21, 2015

CART CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: SHERRIN PATTI

ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC

PO BOX 278

LOMBARD, IL 60148

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a

totally verbatim record of the proceedings

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(Music) >> Apologies if you can start from the top again.>> Okay. So welcome everyone. I am Ann senior vice president at the families and work institute and I'm delighted to welcome you to our webinar workplace accommodations and disability employment. We have a lot of information that we are going to share with you but before we do, I just wanted to over a few housekeeping items. First if you experience any technical difficulties during this webcast please call 800-526-7234 for voice and hit button 5. Or for TTY, call 877-781-9403. Second, towards the end of the presentation we'll have a Q and A period but feel free to send us your questions at any time during the webcast. You can do that either through e-mail at [email protected] or by submitting your question through the Q and A box located at the bottom of your screen. Just type your question and click on the arrow to submit to the question queue. On the bottom right it says webcast download and you can download this presentation by just clicking on that and saving it to your computer and finally I want to remind you that at the end of the webcast there'll be an evaluation form that will pop up automatically on your screen and we really appreciate if you would stay on just for 30 seconds or so to fill out the feedback because we always look forward to hearing from you about whether you found this valuable. So with that, I'm going to turn to our program. We are going to start off with Deb and if we can get to the next slide, please. Deb is a board member of the families and work institute and we are so thrilled that she has worked with us for so long on these issues. In fact, she played a key role in the passage of the American with disabilities act and served for 11 years as the chief diversity officer for Merck and now is doing consulting and has her own firm delivering practical just in time resources and tools for diversity practitioners so, Deb, kick us off please.>> Thank you, Ann. I appreciate being able to kick this off. I'm a big fan of JAN and I will keep these remarks very brief. I think we all know that many if not most of our employees will deal with a long-term or temporary disability personally or one that impacts their extended family. The data shows that 50% of the U.S. population will experience a disability directly or indirectly. Work life integration and support is often the most critical resource for retaining and empowering employees who are managing through a disability related situation. It is often not the disability itself that is causing stress and anxiety but whether it will jeopardize their job and career prospects. By becoming a truly disability inclusive company you cannot only retain talent you have but become a talent magnet for the many people who want to work for an organization that values them in sickness and in health. Employment in many regards is a little bit like a marriage where you sign up to take care of each other. The employee gives the company their loyalty and top performance and the company trusts the employees to get their work done and help them juggle their competing priorities. While work life strategies are important to everyone they are vital to people with disabilities and allies. There is no one better than JAN to give you the information and resources you need to become fully inclusive for people with disabilities. I'm proud to be an FWY board member and to introduce JAN and I advise you to put their information in your favorites contact list because as you learn more about the great resources that JAN offers I know you will want them on speed dial when you have a disability related question. I know I don't back to you, Ann.>> Thank you so much, Deb, and those are some great numbers. Really, eye-opening actually. And make the case for thinking about this as a general

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workforce issue that'll affect everyone at some point so now if we can have the next slide I'd like to ask Ken who is the senior research director here to take you through some of our research that we have done or how to build an inclusive workplace through our national study of employees. Ken manages all of our research on the workplace and workforce. He is a member of our senior leadership team. And is just an invaluable resource himself on a lot of these issues. So, Ken, over to you.>> Thank you, Ann, and as Ann was saying we have done a national representative study of employers looking at their policies and procedures in a variety of work life aspects in a way they include people for people to succeed on and off the job. As part of our 2014 study we looked at a few items focused on experiences for people with disabilities. Two findings that really pop and I think provide some context to the rest of this presentation are, one, we found that more employers said that they would allow most of their employees to access task flexibility and this is the idea that employees can reshuffle their responsibilities to match their strengths and challenges so that the team can be more effective even if individuals may be taking non-standard structures to their work but the task flexibility was more available when employers were primed with the word disabilities. So when asked if they would provide it with people with disabilities, more of them said yes than if we just asked would you provide this to employees in general. And we find that this really drives home the importance to get the language clear for employers. Many of them see the value in the sorts of options when you bring up people with disabilities. But don't necessarily see the value for employees in general. And task flexibility is valuable to all employees. What this means that an employee who may not see themselves as someone with a disability or may not choose to use that terminology to identify themselves may not be as able to access this kind of flexibility if they have a need to because the employers may not be thinking in the right frame around a universal design that provides this kind of support to all employees. So I think there's one piece which is simply around the language to which we discuss supporting employees around these kinds of issues. Second major finding that we saw was we looked at whether or not employers were including people with disabilities in their staffing program. Or their formal staffing policies. What we found that was really surprising is if an employer had a former staffing policy the majority of them did include people with disabilities in that policy. However, we found that about 50% of employers don't have a formal staffing plan at all. So there was no place to even include a policy around including people with disabilities. And so from this we take the reality that you need to build the basic infrastructure within a great many organizations that allows them to even begin to consider how they're going to include people with disabilities into their larger planning and become more inclusive as a general flow of activities as opposed to doing inclusion as one-off situations for people that they know and have an understanding of what to do. So these are just two examples of the kinds of insights that we gain from our national study of employers. We are very soon going to have data from our national study of the change workforce which is based on employees and their experiences on and off the job. And we even built a very extensive section on people with disabilities allowing us to explore their experiences and interests on and off the job both in general and around disability related issues. And to compare question for question with a similar cohort of people with out disabilities and really get a good understanding of what they see as driving their experience at work and at home. So please keep an eye out for that and for data which should be around early next year. So at this point I'll turn it back to you, Ann.

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>> Thanks, Ken. And it is exciting that we're going to have fresh data about how employees are experiencing their lives on and off the job in early 2016 including employees with disabilities. So, yes, please keep an eye out for that and don't forget to write down your questions if you do have them for Ken, you know, towards the end of the program. Because now we want to turn to most experienced speaker in these matters and if I can have the next slide. Lou who is the codirector with the job accommodation network or JAN. JAN is the leading source of free, expert and confidential guidance on disability work issues. It is the service of the Department of Labor's office of disability employment policy so we are just thrilled to have Lou share all of his expertise with us today. Without further ado, Lou? Over to you.>> All right thank you very much, Ann. Good afternoon everyone and thanks to the families and work institute for the opportunity to speak to you about disability employment. I plan to talk for about the next half hour on strategies and tips for employers and how to create a more inclusive workplace including the interactive accommodation process. So let's first talk about creating workplaces. There's the attitude that is a major barrier in workplaces where everyone is valued. Thus today we want to increase you and your team's competence in working with people with disabilities. I call this the three Cs. In order to meet this goal one really needs to understand the business case for hiring and retaining people with disabilities. So I think first of all I challenge you to understand your business case. There is of course a national business case but are you really looking to build your talent pipeline? Are you looking at people with disabilities in order to develop universally acceptable products and services? Will this create a competitive advantage for you? Will this minimize your ADA or section 503 risk or do you want to increase your voluntary disclosure for section 503. This is the type of discovery that is really necessary when you think about creating your inclusive workplace. Also you need to develop skills in order to increase comfort when communicating about or with people with disabilities. So disability etiquette, disability awareness is essential for you and your staff. Know how to develop actionable policies and procedures in order to create the infrastructure necessary for inclusion. So we too would very much agree with FWI and with Ken's research in that infrastructure is absolutely essential and there is a bit of work involved with creating that infrastructure. One of the things that I think is most important about developing that infrastructure or actually an outcome of that infrastructure is the institutionalization of inclusion. Oftentimes we know one of the best strategies for developing and legitimizing inclusion in various companies is to have a champion at the top. A president, a vice president, a CEO of the company that really believes that this is what they need to do for the company. But oftentimes what we'll see is that once that VP, once that CEO moves on, CFO moves on, CIO moves on then we find that that infrastructure and that whole process breaks down so we think having the infrastructure is essential to the institutionalization of inclusion. Know and implement a growing body of good practices when recruiting, onboarding and retaining people with disabilities and that's what I will speak of a lot today as well.

So let me also make the point that when speaking to people with disabilities I'm speaking for instance of young people who have benefitted from educational mainstreaming legislation from the 1970s and now have had quality education resulting in higher high school and college graduation rates. I'm also talking about that aging worker. Who has a chronic health condition. Or simply says that they don't hear or see as well as they used to but they don't consider themselves typically disabled and then there's another group, a population that we

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see often in our calls to JAN. And that's veterans with service-related injuries that, again, don't consider themselves really part of that disability rubric. Oftentimes when I speak to employers I get asked for a sort of quick fix to creating inclusive workplaces. Employers will ask, don't you just have a video I can show and, indeed, there are some good videos including the recently released video by the OFCCP. However there aren't any good shortcuts. A video should be a part of the inclusion initiative but you need to put an infrastructure in mace to fully sustain an initiative.

And it's like any other corporate initiative. It takes work. On the slide I offer my five signs of inclusion to consider when developing that infrastructure. Every company is a different place on what I call the inclusion continuum. The key is discovery to knowing where you are and where your company is on that continuum so you can move your company forward. So the five signs are accessible building, so work site accessibility. And technology. You certainly don't want to hire someone in, say, for instance, someone who is blind and uses a screen reader only to find out that that screen reader is not interoperable with your legacy information system. So that's important that you evaluate these systems. Inclusive ethos. Particular language. You don't want to find that people in your workplace are using antiquated long that's noninclusive and also sometimes discriminatory against people with disabilities. You want to ensure that your public relations is inclusive of people with disabilities so people with disabilities see themselves in your marketing information like other represented groups. You want to leverage national and local resources to communicating inclusion.

And that's ODEP. That's FWY. That's JAN and you want to have inclusive policies and practices.

If you want to recruit talented peep with disabilities who possess the skills you need to be successful then you will really need to show them that your doors are open by working in each of these areas you will show future and current employees that you're serious about inclusion. Now let's focus on the fifth sign. That of policies and procedures.

More often than not companies will request our help in reviewing their policies or we will just conduct a scan of policies from various companies to look at best practices. While we often find high level visions of companies how they aspire to be inclusive, we do not find all of the pieces essential to implement the vision. Or even the pieces for employees to understand how to proceed for instance when requesting an accommodation. So when developing your policies, be sure that you have articulated a step by step process that everyone in your organization knows and understands. The people who are responsible for accommodations have clearly delineated roles so when a disclosure comes across the desk of a supervisor that they know immediately what to do at that point or who to hand that off to.

That there are timelines for processes so within those roles and within the various departments, how long before it goes to the next department or is considered to the next department or if you have to say no to an accommodation because perhaps you're claiming undo hardship then how long does that decision take and how long is that communicated to the employee? And touchpoints for communication. We know that research to return to work in worker's compensation that this is essential to keeping work positive so what there touchpoints what are the essential times when that supervisor needs to communicate to the employee when there are changes with the process?

And the process for resolving disputes. And it's essential to make everyone aware of the policy and process and to communicate that to everyone. To

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take a tip from Francis West communicate the message of conclusion throughout all your existing communication channels. Do not create a new channel just for disability. The result of that will not be fully integrated and included in all of your other channels.

It's important to let everyone in the organization know the business case. For why you're creating an inclusive workplace. Also let them know that this has the support of the sea sweep perhaps with a statement from your CEO. And most importantly provide your internal processes and point of contact for any questions that may arise. So whatever your business reason is for developing inclusion initiative, be it minimizing risk under the ADA or section 503 or be building your talent pipeline all inclusion initiatives are based on an effective process. So on the slide here I tried to break down to make it as simple as possible about how this really works, so as I said the basis for inclusion employment is reasonable accommodation policies and procedures. And then the foundation for reasonable accommodation is a robust interactive process. And while that is not required by the EEOC it is certainly strongly suggested because how can one better show good faith in that negotiation than having a good robust interactive process? Also a request for accommodation or recognition of an obvious barrier to somebody with known triggers with reasonable accommodation and interactive process so that's important for everyone to know and internalize and for you to have policies for.

Also it's very important for everyone in your organization to know that a request for accommodation includes two essential elements. A medical condition and a related challenge at work. It's also important to note that disclosure of a disability and/or request can occur at any point during the employee's life cycle or even earlier during the application process. Thus, there is no process for inclusion more important than reasonable accommodation. In terms of inclusion. It's the base under the law for equal opportunity and essential to ensuring all employees are and remain productive. So what is reasonable accommodation request and how do we recognize this? Particularly it's good for hiring managers to know exactly what it is. And as we see on the slide an applicant or an employee asks for something that is needed because of a medical condition and there is a nexus between impairment, limitation, and work and that is what it's important for the employer to understand. Now what is important to also recognize a voluntary self identification. Just because one is disclosing and self identifying for purposes of section 503 that doesn't necessarily mean they're asking for an accommodation. Sometimes people will also become comfortable in a workplace and they'll talk openly about their disability particularly to their supervisor or mentor or coach. That necessarily isn't a reasonable accommodation request either so disclosure, absent, work barrier or request is not a request for reasonable accommodation and also workplace adjustments available to employees without disabilities. So if it's something that you provide to all of your employees, say, for instance, a comfort keyboard, then that isn't necessarily a request for an accommodation that's something that one provides to everyone so it doesn't need to be seen in that context which means you don't need to engage in the interactive process. There are also appropriate times when an employer initiate the interactive process. Even when an employee has not requested accommodation. So these conditions are, when it's known that an employee has a disability and it's known or there is reason to know that the employee's experiencing a workplace problem because of the disability.

And it's known or there is reason to know that the disability prevents the employee from requesting a reasonable accommodation. It's also important to note

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the request for accommodation occurred during performance appraisals. Sometimes this is not very well received from employers and they think that this is rather extraordinary but I can tell you in JAN's experience it really isn't extraordinary. With the nature of some disabilities for instance mental health conditions the employee may be unaware of their behavior which causes -- which is causing a challenge at work, or this person in particular with the mental health condition may have phased such discrimination in the past they they not ask for accommodation until their job is at risk so this is not really unusual and while the EEOC doesn't necessarily say you need to discard that like performance appraisal and you talk about improvements then you don't need to negate that performance appraisal but you do need to change hats if they disclose a medical condition again and a limitation or impairment that is causing challenges at work.

Then at that point you need to switch hats and you need to begin to engage in the interactive process so now let's talk about what really is the interactive process? This is a collaborative effort. We often call it a negotiation to identify effective accommodation solutions and it's that simple. It can be initiated at any time during the employee life cycle. It could be an applicant, a candidate, it could be a current employee. This process really facilitates communication and inclusion. It shows that people -- it shows to people with disabilities that you're interested in providing support for them to be able to do their job successfully. It demonstrates good faith and leads to compliance and inclusion.

Now JAN has an interactive process that we will often suggest that people will follow and if you have one in place and it's working already by all means stick with that, but if you haven't and you're wondering exactly how to develop this then by all means consider adapting ours so the six steps are recognizing an accommodation request, garbage information.

Exploring accommodation options. Choosing an accommodation. Implementing the accommodation and monitoring the accommodation. Step five and step six in my experience tend to be the most problematic for employers. Sometimes people don't really understand the full breadth of implementing the disability. So, for instance, if you are implementing an accommodation and someone is purchasing something like a screen reader and oftentimes there isn't the work done internally to talk to the IT group to make sure that interoperable issue is overcome or that the person receives training on the screen reader.

We see this happen so often groups have or companies have a legacy information system. And that system is being updated and since there isn't an accessibility person at the table when that system is being updated, then oftentimes interoperability issues maybe that didn't even exist before now exist with the new information or case management for HR system software. So it's important really to monitor the accommodation. Make sure that it's working and if there are any internal changes at work, for instance, the -- there's a front door that is particularly heavy or difficult to open.

And it's been changed out and now you have a more accessible door that opens itself. Then, you know, that may be the entrance for employees with disabilities. Even though traditional entrance is the entrance in the back of the building with -- where the employee parking is. So from this suggested process you can see there's nothing really mystical about providing accommodations. It's simply a problem solving process to remove the barriers from inclusion. However, let me note that over the years we've seen many employers mismanage the process. So

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the pitfalls that we've seen most often are failure to recognize an accommodation request and engage and usually this is with hiring managers or supervisors.

That's who we see this happens to most often. So in your training efforts, of course, everyone needs to be trained on this initiative and people need to be trained on what exactly disclosure is and a request for accommodation but those two groups in particular we would suggest that you focus resources on. Failure to exhibit empathy and to actively listen. It's really essential for when you put on the hat of someone who is receiving a disclosure or request for accommodation, that that person really be a customer at that point put the hat on of a sort of customer service representative and really be able to stop for a minute and I know our workplaces are very busy.

We're all very busy and moving too fast. We all don't make eye contact enough and listen to each other enough but in this circumstance it's very important if you're really seeking inclusion and seeking effective conversation to actively listen. Failure to respond in a timely manner. Sometimes you can't meet those timelines and that's okay. Just document that. So -- you have procurement glitch and you're not able to purchase the piece of assistive technology as soon as you need to then by all means, just note that in the notes and communicate that to the person who is to receive the accommodation. Failure to document. Failure to work collaboratively with the employee. Times we'll be guiding an employer through the accommodation process and we'll realize they didn't have any input and sometimes this is very well meaning employers who are out to spend a lot of money to provide an accommodation.

And then they engage with the employee upon our suggestion and find out that that is really not what the person needed they simply needed usually something that's cost effective and sometimes at no cost whatsoever. Making excuses for why an accommodation can't be provided. You really need to do your discovery and start eliminating possibilities before you start making excuses. Failure to communicate to essential personnel. So it's really important that, true, the supervisor doesn't need to know the diagnosis of a person with a disability but they need to know the person because they're on a new medication and need a more flexible schedule over the next few weeks until the medication is fully in their system they'll be in at 9 o'clock instead of 8 o'clock so it's really important that once you're in the point of contact person is aware of the accommodation being granted that that be communicated to their supervise so there's no miscommunication that creates problems between the employee and supervisor and failure to follow up on this as well. So let's look at the types of accommodation and I offer you this because a lot of times you get stuck in what you may have offered in the past so say, for instance, if you bought somebody assistive technology. Every time you think of an accommodation you may lean toward a piece of assistive technology. This is more towards the full breadth that we suggest is offered all the time and heading that list is modifying schedule or allowing leave time. That tends to be very important towards inclusive workplaces so making the work place or workstation accessible. That could be through an ergonomic assessment. Modifying methods and that could be tests, communications, or training. Modifying or creating policies. So say, for instance, you have a policy that nobody is permitted to eat at their desk.

Perhaps it's a call center setting and you have someone with diabetes who needs to eat on a regular basis then modifying the policy may be that that person is maybe -- we're seeing that people will have small refrigerators in their cubicles or in their space and that they are able to eat on a regular basis every two

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hours or something like that for instance. Purchasing or modifying equipments or products which I think we're most familiar with. Purchasing a service like a reader. Restructuring a job in such a way that the more marginal tasks may be negotiated away and of course the last resort of that.

So if a person is no longer after been accommodated and a number of ideas have been proposed and have not worked then reassigning them to a job that's open at the organization then that's another type of accommodation and then of course there are a number of other telework, I justing super -- adjusting supervisory method. Let's shift a bit.

I talked about the process you need to get right. Let's talk about some others, more specifically disability related practices. This area continue to grow as more and more companies move along the inclusion continuum that I spoke of earlier so practices for recruiting and hiring include include people with disabilities and diversity goals. Create partnerships with disability-related advocacy negotiations. Contact career centers and colleges and universities. Post announcements on publication websites and job fairs. There's so many job banks for people with disabilities.

So make sure you're working with at least one of those job bank to really find that talent that you need. Establish summer internships and mentoring programs for targeted for youth with disabilities so that could be emerging leaders or career opportunities for students with disabilities or The National Technical Institute for the Deaf has a very -- I hate to use the word again but robust internship and cooperative program. So, I would suggest that you start exploring all of those. In addition, training. The next slide will look at training and training hiring managers. Make sure that they really understand disability etiquette and awareness. Make sure that they know what to ask and not what to ask during interviews and also what accommodations are most frequently offered during interviews. Have a solid actionable reasonable accommodation process that I spoke of and make sure, again, that everybody is aware of it and knows how to use it.

Have an internal disability point of contact. So when that person, who say, for instance, is a wheelchair user after they've had the phone interview and now this is the second interview and they're coming into the workspace and you want to know what the accessible rooms you can use for interviews and you know somebody who is a wheelchair user is coming in for an interview and have that single point of contact where you can discuss or there's other accommodations where you need an interpreter. Having an internal point of contact, a sort of subject expert onsite is one of those best practices. The metrics to hiring managers. Performance reviews. Ensure the accessibility of your applicant tracking system or career portal. Also insure the accessibility of your preemployment hiring. The practices that you want to embrace while specifically pertaining to applicants are give them alternate way to submit applications. So say for instance a person because their impairment is not really able to use your applicant tracking system or use it effectively.

Then give them an alternate way to submit that application and make that known and very prominent on your career portal. Describe the hiring process for people. Because if you start talking about preemployment testing where there's other things that people need to go through, then if I'm a person with a disability and, say, you know, I've had my first interview over the phone you may not know that I have a certain impairment or disability. Then if you describe the process fully to me then I will know whether I need to ask for an accommodation or not. Inform applicants ahead of time about employment testing. Inform applicants about how to

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request accommodations. We always suggest when we look at applicants tracking systems for some valued customers of ours we'll look and review them and we'll let them know, put your EEOC statement or the note that if you require a reasonable accommodation, make sure that's always three clicks or less from your front page of your career portal. And follow up on requests without delay. So that's all real important to embrace, again, if you're creating that inclusive workplace. So in -- and it's also important if you're recruiting and hiring people with disabilities to make sure that your applicant tracking system is accessible. So here's some tips. Conduct an accessibility review and JAN is available for that. We can provide a confidential review of your applicant tracking system. We will review the career portal and make a report card with tips toward making the site more accessible. We try to make it really easy for you. Have your EEO statement no more than three clicks from portal entry. Use text descriptions for visual materials. Make sure you have those videos of processes and make sure they're captioned. Make sure you design the website consistently so it's easy for someone with a cognitive impairment to follow. Ensure all the documents linked from the site are accessible. Now some tips for pre-hired testing. Prominently feature the accommodation request procedure. And this will encourage of course someone if they need an accommodation for your pre-hire test. Choose your preemployment testing vendor wisely. Insure the accessibility of its product. So it's up to your employee to make sure that the test is accessible. If you're using a vendor as many large companies do then you want to make sure you've spoken to your peers and if you don't have any answers or you haven't any peer to rely on then maybe you'll want to talk to a member of the United States business leadership network or the business council. Those are two group that come to mind pretty quickly about -- and they would certainly have peers, other companies that you can talk to about that. Make sure you charge your vendor with modifying the test process. When you write that contract for that vendor that you're using, that third party vendor, you want to make sure that accessibility is written into the contract to know it's their obligation. While it's your obligation under the law it's their obligation since you're buying the product to make sure that product is accessible. So push back a bit against the vendor and if you need some kind of accommodation then they really need to propose or modify the test first or the testing process to make it accessible. If you find out that that vendor or particular product cannot be made accessible for that individual then have a process in place where that person is very quickly the person who needs the accommodation and who is not able to be accommodate -- and make sure there's a person that is responsible in HR or diversity in inclusion so that that person -- that applicant, that candidate, doesn't get lost in the process.

And then ultimately consider waiving a test. This is rare from what hear from our business partners but, indeed, it does happen sometimes. So be ready to waive a test if that is necessary. So let's talk about some inclusive onboarding practices. So inform new hires of the reasonable accommodation process.

Again every stage of the way, everyone needs to be informed. And that right away and someone of those signs. It is a sign that you are an open environment, an inclusive environment, flexible environment. And that you're looking for the best talent and you value everybody's contribution. Inform new hires of safety evacuation procedures. This is really important when you're looking and you have hired somebody who is blind or somebody who uses a wheelchair so make sure that -- that's one of the first things you do is go over the safety evacuation procedures. Make sure all your employment materials, those used for training or

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those used -- or your orientation manual for instance is available in an accessible format. Maybe large print or audio or braille. Speak to the person with the disability and they will tell you what they need and if you can't find it call us. And we'll find it for you. Address communication and computer technology issues. So straight away you want to start thinking about what this person requires.

Again, talking with the individual that you're onboarding but then also talking to your IT team.

So you're going to be serving as liaison between the team to really figure out how ZoomText, for instance, can be installed on this computer.

Or exactly what is entailed in making sure that these things -- these software programs work together. So address accessible parking in any business or rather building access issues. And in that example is a keyless entry security issues, restrooms, break rooms, etc. so with that I will end with the last slide you see there. If you're not that familiar with JAN, just know that we've been in business for over 30 years. We have expert consultants, masters level, Ph.D. level consultants that can guide you through the accommodation process and answer any questions that you may have about assistive technologies or we can refer you out to organizations in your local area. We have more than 250 publications all online.

Easily accessible. Most people go to our website. They look at A to Z which is the third category over on the top banner of our website. Search by disability topic or limitation. We have research libraries that provide all the guidance although we have teams of people that can do that as well. We have a sensory team, we have a cognitive team, and ADA lineup team that can answer any of your questions more concisely then you going through a 72 page EEOC guidance document. We have a quarterly eNews that we can send out to you we also have free webcast series and training modules on the interactive process, for instance. And we're very easily accessible. With whether it be our website or our 800 number. Ever popular and growing in popularity is our chat service available off our website on the right-hand side a box that is near the middle of the website you'll see live help. If you click on live help you go right to our chat tool and you can capture all of that information and cut and paste that and put it in your file. JAN on demand. And also the social media tools as well. So that's just a little bit about JAN so that you're familiar with us so if you do get stuck and are not sure what a disclosure is and you get stuck during the interactive process know that we are there. We are free, confidential, national, and we're really experts at workplace accommodations with the ADA. I will turn it back over to you, Ann, and perhaps we'll start the question and answer.>> Terrific. Thank you. So thorough, Lou, and just great overview of dos and don'ts. I can't imagine that people don't want to read the 72 page EEOC guidelines but I would say that they're probably, you know, it's probably smart to go to you whether or not they read them. To get your expert advice. We really appreciate the partnership we have with you to bring this webcast to our partners in the business community. I would like to open it up to questions.>> We see a few here on our screen. Before we do that I want to mention another initiative that we did together recently and we're very excited about and we're very grateful for Deb and family and work institute and that's a 15-minute role-play video that we're beginning to market and to share with everyone and do presentations on the first seven minutes being an ineffective interactive process and the last statement being an effective interactive process so we're very excited about that video. We've launched it at the United States business leadership network during

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what we call the JAN academy. We know that's where employers get stuck and where most risk is opened up and it's during that interactive process. You will definitely see more I know that Ann and I and Tyler and other members of the families and work institute team will be working on producing some other tools related to this video.

So we're very excited about that and I just wanted to publicly let everybody know and also to think FWY.>> Oh, thank you. Lou. I was going to let everybody know that that will also be on our website as part of a toolkit that we're putting together around this issue. So we will send you all of that information. We'll send that to our leadership circle members and anybody else on the call.>> Great.>> Today. Registered for the call. So do you want to take some of the questions? Any -->> One of the easier ones is what is the most popular job sites for people with disabilities and I would offer you getting hired.com. Americas job exchange. And if you're looking to recruit interns or young people that typically are in their third and fourth year of university or college, at -- you may want to look at the work force recruitment program. Those are all programs -- I mean those are all job banks that you can certainly access. There's the one more way foundation and that's out of The Sierra Group if you put Sierra Group in your web browser so there are a number of job banks that one can look to the question here can you provide an example of adjusting supervisor method. One of those things might be that with a supervisor somebody who has maybe a cognitive impairment or a mental health impairment as well that perhaps they don't process information as quickly as other people and -- or perhaps they get caught up in the emotion of the information being exchanged.

So perhaps a face-to-face supervise isn't the best for some people and what that means is that instead, if there is vital information that's substantive to that person's job or that person's behavior, the employee's behavior that that be exchanged in an e-mail format instead or perhaps that means if a person isn't meeting their goals and they're not understanding why they're not meeting that goals then hyphened coaching and that may be conducted via e-mail or perhaps that means that the supervisor meet either on Monday or Friday and either start on Monday with a checklist of the things that need to be accomplished that week or meet with the person on Friday and this isn't something that that supervisor would normally do so those are two types of examples of adjusting supervisory methods so let me what others are here.>> Can I ask a question. I'm going to take my prerogative here because I'm interested in whether you feel that companies should encourage voluntary identification. I know that's something that we, you know, companies that we work with struggle with to what extent should they be encouraging this.>> I think what we're really saying is that those companies that have section 503 responsibility there are no holds barred. They are doing absolutely everything they can to encourage voluntary identification. Whether it's using that newly released OFCCP video or whether they create their own video. I've seen a number of video where is companies are encouraging voluntary disclosure and also they're integrating it into, again, the sort of life cycle of the employee. Which means that that whether you're an applicant. Whether you're being on Boarded, whether your an employee, that they're gleaning that information from all of those groups. Again, they're looking at adding that to their employee satisfaction surveys that they may do

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annually so there are a number of techniques that we see being used and it seems like every time I talk to another employer about this there's a more creative way that they're finding and integrating but the most important thing I think, the point I can make most about that is that you can't really do that in isolation. You really need to put this infrastructure in place that I've been talking about and that Ken was encouraging us to put in place to create that inclusive workplace. That's essential because if people don't feel comfortable disclosing, people don't think that other people are being accommodated when they need to they're not comfortable bringing their whole self to work. Then they're really not going to voluntarily disclose. They're going to think it's for other reasons and we're all so protective of our personal information these days. So it really needs to be a multi-tiered, multichannel effort I think in order to get people to voluntarily disclose.>> Thank you.>> So we have a few other questions here and I know we're going to talk to Deb as well and if there was anything specific that she could add but at this point we are at the 3 o'clock ending point for the webcast. So certainly from our side, from the JAN side we thank you very much for participating and, again, thanks very much for the opportunity that FWI has offered. Ann, if you want to close us out?>> Yes, thank you, everyone for, you know, for participating, for attending, for asking your questions. We can answer them even after the webinar closes. So we will try to get back to you with some answers. And, again, please stay on the line for -- or the webinar for another thirty seconds or so to complete the evaluation form.>> And -- I'll just grab it -- I'm sorry, Deb, to step on you there. I also just wanted to mention that what -- what we've created at JAN is a landing site that we've provided to FWI with many of the resources related to the information that I provide today. So it'll just be an URL that FWI will be sending out to all the participants and if there are questions that are unanswered which I see a few on the screen we'll make sure they are on the landing page. That landing page will also include the presentation itself and we just want to make sure everyone knows that this will be archived and it's fully captioned as well so it's accessible. So -- yeah.>> And thank you to alternative communications services for providing the captions and with that thank you all for listening, for participating and we will follow up with you with all of this information and more.>> Thanks, everybody.>> Have a good rest of the day. Bye.>> Bye-bye now.