Inclusive Employment –It’s Just Good Business: Vancouver Airport Authority
Craig Richmond President & CEO of the Vancouver Airport Authority and I'm Co-Chair of the Presidents Group on persons with disabilities.
One of our mottos at the airport is to make air travel accessible to everybody. We believe it's everybody's right to fly and that means you have to be accessible to anybody and any ability or disability they may have.
So it just made sense to us to be part of the Presidents Group and to try to hire more people with disabilities, to have them as part of our team.
I think that a lot of people that had disabilities might have thought, "Well what can I do at the airport? I'm not a pilot. I'm not going to be lifting bags.”But I have over 300 jobs in one of the most accessible offices in the Lower Mainland so to break down that barrier and say, "No you can work at the airport." Was tremendously important.
I like the old term barrier free. Accessibility is very good as well, but I always think there's no barriers. And if we're doing our job for everybody, you shouldn't notice.
You should just be able to come on to the airport and go flying, or come to work and not notice any kind of issues. We have to do everything we can to make it comfortable for people to say "We welcome you no matter what.”
This may be one of the last conscious biases that employers have. When a young person comes through the door and has an obvious disability, you initially will say, "This is going to be hard.”And I'm here to say it's not. It costs an average of $500 to modify somebody's work station no matter what their disability, and you’ll find these people are fantastic workers, they will stay with the company 3 times as long and you will find that your company will be better for it.
Getting these people employed is only good for them and for society, and the more we can get employed, the better they do, the better they feel, it changes their lives, but it also changes companies.
So with Steven, it was a co-op student and he has sight issues and has a service dog and he was so good at what he did that we just continued on and offered him a full time position. And I have to say his service dog is now probably my most popular employee.
We want to be known as one of the best places in Canada if not the world for any person with a disabilities to get hired. But I'd like to get the point where we're not celebrating 3 or 4 or 5 people being hired, but hundreds. There are very skilled people out there who want to work for you who
for some reason have either self selected themselves out or they're just not aware that your
company would like to have them onboard and if we get past that, get them into the workforce, you as an employer will benefit hugely.