A Fine Line: Running a Business and Balancing Abilities (Editor’s note: After working for others in the food business for eight years, Laura Kolb began managing facilities in OOD’s Business Enterprise (BE) Program in 2004. Here are some thoughts she has as a business owner and also as someone who believes in coaching employees facing different barriers along the road.) “When I was an employee, I was able to see how other visually impaired people accomplished tasks that a sighted person might do differently,” Kolb recalls. “It comes down to being extra diligent and organized, and that’s a skill I learned from other visually impaired business owners. I feel like there isn’t a better type of person to work with people with disabilities than another person who has a disability.” For the last two years, Kolb has managed a fast-paced cafeteria at Columbus’ 41-story Rhodes State Office Tower. “Regardless of what level you’re working with people, it’s important to maintain a positive attitude and never give up on anyone, even if it means that you’re not the right person to work with that person,” she explains regarding the stress of personnel issues. “You want to be compassionate. There’s a fine line, though. A lot of people are depending on me to make a profit from my business, to get equipment, to pay employees, to run our whole program even the staff of Business Enterprise. A lot of other people are counting on us.” Several interns taking a second senior year at the Ohio State School for the Blind work in Kolb’s cafeteria four half days a week. Kolb explains to job coaches what needs to be accomplished,
more quota-like for the first time in some sense,” says L. Scott Lissner, ADA Coordinator and 504 Compliance Officer, The Ohio State University. “The original proposal for this was not an aspirational goal, but a more solid requirement.” Photo Caption: L. Scott Lissner is pictured in photo. In the final rule, a seven percent disability hiring and retention rate across all levels is indeed at the status of aspirational goal. But Lissner explains that like many other government aims, these words have a punch. “It is a reporting target. There will be some requirements to collect data, produce it, demonstrate that you’re making reasonable efforts to recruit qualified people with disabilities, and that your hiring practices are across the board, not all entry level or all a particular class of jobs.” According to Lissner, “They’re going to collect data for three years, and if we’re not reasonably denting the problem, there will be ‘non-aspirational targets.’” Starting in March 2014, disability questions will become a new category as part of annual reporting, applying to contractors with a federal contract or subcontract of $50,000 or more and 50 or more employees. Said contractors must document and update several quantitative comparisons for the number of people with disabilities who apply for jobs and how many they hire. As the government sees it, having this data will assist contractors in measuring the effectiveness of their disability outreach and recruitment efforts, as well as providing hard data not previously available on the disability employment picture. Both current employees and applicants will be asked for voluntary disability disclosure. Employees will receive disclosure requests
every five years on an ongoing basis once the initial request is put out. Lissner views the new disability questions as a positive step. “You wouldn’t be obligated to accommodate someone, because they said ‘yes’ to this question, for this purpose. You would still have a separate reasonable accommodation process that might ask for evidence of the need for accommodation.” However, “There is a reminder of your obligation as an employer to provide reasonable accommodations to people who request them. So there’s a reinforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). I think that we’ll see requests for accommodations go up. This will make people more knowledgeable that accommodations are possible.” Lissner lists “refusal, resistance and hesitation” to make recommendation requests right now as the major reasons why some employees with disabilities never leave the lower echelons of the job front to utilize their full potential. As a result, some employees are far less productive than they could be. Supervisors may mark performance to factors outside the disability realm without realizing that many issues can be taken care of through flexibility or accommodations that are simply never put on the table as an option. These new reporting requirements offer two expanded options to the vocational rehabilitation (VR) community. First, VR professionals should get a grasp on what major federal contractors or sub-contractors are in their area, since this knowledge creates opportunities for outreach and dialogue. “One of the things that is in 503 is that how you advertise and recruit has to be documented,” Lissner says. This may mean that many more employers will turn to the VR community to target
applicants. “You have to reach out to that population. Saying ‘If we work together and do this well, you’ll never have a quota and only have an aspirational goal and be happy with your workforce’ is how I might sell it to the contractor who isn’t sure about the idea.” Second, counselors may find the regulations a means of encouraging disclosure as a positive benefitting consumers, overriding the fear of reprisal or discrimination. Lissner sums it up this way; “I think that the way that they’ll require disclosure will make it more obvious that I can ask for reasonable accommodations as an employee of this company. That’s not always as clear to people in companies as I might want it to be. When people disclose and get the accommodations they need, there’s no reason to expect that people with disabilities wouldn’t be promoted at the same rate as everybody else.” How Are the Feds Stacking Up Here? According to the “Employing People with Disabilities in the Federal Executive Branch” U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) report, more people with disabilities are working in Federal service both in real terms and by percentage than ever in the past 32 years. By the end of FY 2012, total permanent federal employment for people with disabilities had increased from 203,694 in FY 2011 to 219,975, an increase from 10.97 to 11.89 percent. New disability hires totaled 16,653, representing an increase from 14.65 percent in FY 2011 to 16.31 percent in FY 2012. Since 2010, new disability hires have reached over 50,000, more than half of the 100,000 goal President Obama set in 2010 to realize by 2015.