The authors of the same study (Hernandez et al., 2008) concluded that although costs associated with employing people with disabilities were minimal, and employing them helped create an overall more positive work environment, managers are still biased against hiring workers with disabilities. From a business perspective, these kinds of biases are very problematic, as it is the manager’s duty to select people and manage operations in a way that maximizes profits and shareholder value. Excluding people with disabilities ex ante can therefore harm the economic performance of the firm, and ultimately place a business at risk for losing customers to its competitors. The following examples are meant to highlight best practices and to advocate disability inclusive hiring.
In 2007, the American company Walgreens opened a distribution center in which more than 30% of the 800 employees lived with a disability. The result was surprising, as the center was 20% more efficient than comparable facilities without disabled workers. In addition, employee turnover was half that of other employees, and people with disabilities had a third fewer incidents or accidents than their non-disabled colleagues (Kaletta et al., 2012). To successfully integrate and to take full advantage of the skills and capabilities of people with disabilities, it is often sufficient for the company to make small changes to the people’s workplace or production process. This can be done, for example, by creating a little more space for a wheelchair user or by breaking a production step into two simpler individual operations. Besides changes of work tasks and physical adaptations of the workplace, it may also be enough to change working time (Kuznetsova and Cerdeira Bento, 2018).
People with intellectual disabilities often work more concentrated and accurately, which is why they perform repetitive tasks particularly well. One company that relies on this strength is the Asperger Informatik AG (Conza and Juric, 2013). The Swiss company prefers to employ people with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. People with Asperger’s are often intellectually gifted, have a quick grasp, high attention to detail, extreme ability to concentrate, tenacity and perseverance. These are ideal conditions for a company working with information technology. In order to be able to use these special abilities, the company creates a low-irritation environment for its employees, minimizes stress and pressure, finds suitable task areas and plans the work processes as accurately as possible (Conza and Juric, 2013). Despite these advantages, applicants who mention their Asperger’s syndrome when applying for an accounting position receive about 26% fewer expressions of employer interest (Ameri et al., 2018). This percentage value is counter-intuitive and can only be explained by either a lack in knowledge by the hiring manager and/or a conscious or unconscious bias against people with disabilities.
Even severely handicapped people can contribute to the economic success of a company, if they are deployed correctly. Computer-assisted activities in particular can also be performed by blind people or people with severe motor disabilities. Since they are usually also dependent on technical products in their private lives, there is often an increased interest and an above-average understanding of technology and information technology. The increasingly frequent possibility of working from home also facilitates the integration of these people into the world of work. This is exactly what the more than 100-year-old American company Alphapointe—which offers manufacturing, assembly, and contract management—does. The company employs more than 120 blind employees, which make up more than 50% of the total workforce. According to an article published on July 23, 2017 on the New York Post website, Alphapointe’s CEO confirms that “People who are blind are capable, productive, skilled and loyal employees when given the opportunity to prove themselves. Truly, hiring someone who’s blind is the same as hiring someone who’s sighted”.
