FEBRUARY12, 2015
VCUWEBCAST
BRIAN PHILLIPS
Services Provided By:Caption First, Inc.
> Hi. My name is Brian Phillips. I'm here today to talk about a project that was completed with the support of Virginia Commonwealth University's Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on the Employment of People with Physical Disabilities.
This project was conducted with a team that included myself, Jon Deiches, and Blaise Morrison, Fong Chan, also from University of WisconsinMadison, as well as Jill Bezyak from University of Northern Colorado. The project I'll talk about today is on disability diversity training.
The focus of the project was to get into the literature on diversity training generally, and see what has been done, what we know about effective practices, and then to look more closely at how those practices might translate into disability diversity training, as well as the consideration of what disability diversity training is already being practiced and what we know about the effectiveness of those training efforts.
As a overview, we will talk about diversity in the workplace generally. We need to have a discussion before I can get into diversity training, about how disability has been included or how much it's been included in diversity considerations in the labor market, and I'll then talk about diversity training, what it typically looks like, what the goals are, and effective practices. Then we will look down more specifically at disability diversity training, what has been practiced and what we know about its effectiveness.
Then I'll talk future directions for disability diversity training. At the outset I'd like to mention, our research efforts in this project were really focused on looking at what we know from peer review literature as well as from what we could find in online resources.
The one element to that is that much of the diversity training that takes place in the labor market, and there is a lot of activity around diversity training, doesn't make it to the peer reviewed research. You as a listener might be listening to this thinking that you know of other resources or training exercises or programs that aren't listed or discussed. It is likely those omissions occurred because we haven't adequately tested those in the research, and have them included in peer reviewed resources as though we were able to find and include them.
As with many stories about employment, ours starts with the consideration of the disparities, in employment for people with disabilities in relation to people without disabilities.
Relatively unchanged over several decades, we view that people without disabilities have a employment rate approximately 70percent, versus that of at about 20percent for people with disabilities.
So this story begs the question of, what are some of the causes? Certainly there are many. One thing we know from the research as a cause for this disparity, are these employer knowledge and attitudes, knowledge and attitudes that have been shown to be barriers for employment of people with disabilities. Numerous studies have been conducted, many of them with employers and supervisors, to understand better these barriers of attitudes and knowledge.
For example, one study conducted in 2005 was a sweeping effort, the Department of Labor, where they looked at in focus groups across 13 cities with employers and supervisors. What they found was employers need more accurate information about disability to dispel the misconceptions and concerns that they have about hiring people with disabilities. In another study, employers, both supervisors and managers, said they needed increased and improved training on disability related issues.
Finally, the research, it has been suggested that changing employer attitudes and increasing awareness would be key aspects of improving employment outcomes for people with disabilities.
So we have the research telling us that employers and supervisors as well as people with disabilities are seeking understanding, they are seeking improved knowledge about disability.
I'd also like to point out that the timing may be right for these efforts. We have recently seen federal legislation put out in increased focus on employer engagement and hiring people with disabilities, and for rehabilitation counselors and rehabilitation service providers to be more engaged with those employers in that effort.
The first I would mention is updates made to section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act. In these updates, the affirmative action in place was strengthened, such that federal contractors and subcontractors are required to provide written assessment of recruitment and outreach efforts to hire and retain people with disabilities.
This requires an aspirational 7percent utilization goal for qualified employees with disabilities. What we hope and expect from this legislation is a greater employer motivation towards hiring people with disabilities, and when it falls short of the utilization goal, that they would be more reflective on their recruiting and maintenance practices of those who have disabilities.
Another legislation, we have the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Again, just recently this was put in place. In this legislation, among many other things, we see an increased focus on demand side employment by expanding the services of public VR agencies, in what they provide to employers. So it can be seen here in this slide, section 109 states, training, VR agencies can expend payments to provide training and technical assistance, to employers, regarding the employment of individuals with disabilities, including disability awareness and the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 as well as other employment related laws.
So right in the WIOA Act we see a invitation for VR counselors to engage employers with disability awareness training. I just pause to state that that further moves us in this direction, the employers are asking for, to be able to provide the information and the understanding that employers are asking for in relation to employing people with disability.
I'll pause just a moment, as a segue to the next slide, to mention disability awareness is often discussed in our culture as a synonym of diversity training. But are they the same?
As I move into the coming slides about the definition of diversity, I'd like to point out that awareness may not have the same positive meaning, or understanding that diversity brings.
So we would argue as we do in this project that we should focus on diversity more than awareness. To get to that point, disability as a form of diversity, begs the question of whether disability is included and to what extent.
The term, diversity, is typically used to reflect groups whose differences are celebrated, and perceived as having the capacity to enrich an organization. Really from the outset of using the term diversity, in our labor market conversations, it's been used positively, as something that would enrich or help a business rather than something that was a moral obligation or something that might pull down a business.
Again, based on that previous conversation I just had, awareness doesn't carry that same positive valence, that same idea that by definition the term is positive.
And that is one of the advantages of speaking of these trainings as diversity trainings, rather than awareness trainings, when referencing disability.
So diversity is commonly included, consideration of categories like gender, race, ethnicity, and more recently sexual orientation. Disability is too often neglected as a form of diversity.
In order to illustrate this, Ball and colleagues in 2005 looked at Fortune 500 companies looking at the top 100 companies who made their diversity statements public. What they found was that only 42percent of companies in these fortune 100 included disability as an aspect of their diversity policy.
This reflects what we find more broadly, and that is that oftentimes employers fail to recognize disability as part of the diversity that might be celebrated and enriching for their companies.
But why the neglect? It is a important question we need to ask.
What we found in the research is that the disability is often viewed not as diversity but rather as deviance. And of course, based on that earlier definition of diversity, we can see that deviance really is a word that conflicts with diversity.
So, employers hoping to minimize risk appear to have more difficulty viewing disability as a form of diversity when they see it as a problem to be corrected.
Stensrud did work in 2007 where they conducted focus groups with employers and found a general theme where participants and I'll quote from the article, view disability as a problem to be accommodated rather than a difference to be celebrated. It seems very likely that these views of disability held by some employers would cause great difficulty, and encouraging employers to view disability as that form of diversity that can enrich.
What we do know though is that employers who do make this switch, this view of a more accurate understanding of disability as diversity, in other words, as something that could enrich their workforce, that it influences their recruitment and hiring practices, and improves the likelihood of have people with disabilities in their companies.
Greater knowledge about disability in the form of diversity has been associated with more positive perceptions, in employer behavior, as well as increased hiring and improved work environments for people with disabilities. So now that we have laid a little of that groundwork about what we mean when we talk about diversity, and some of the challenges in including disability in notions of diversity, it's time to talk about the literature review that we accomplished where we asked the question of what has been tried and what works in diversity training.
Because there's been little empirical effort, comparatively little in disability diversity training, we started with a more general coverage of the literature, looking at diversity training that has been conducted with other populations as we mentioned on topic of gender, race ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and otherwise, to find a lot of our effective practices research.
What we found first of all in workplace diversity training is that it's a intervention intended to improve intergroup relations and reduce prejudice in the workplace. So our goal of diversity training is to essentially unleash or to utilize what might be those expected strengths that would come from diversity and allow them to flourish in a company organization.
Diversity training programs typically are designed to improve knowledge, attitudes, behaviors or motivation to interact effectively with diverse others.
And a typical diversity training program as found by Bendic and colleagues involves one or two trainers, about 20 to 30 trainees who are receiving these services, and training that lasts anywhere from about four to ten hours.
Now, this is the typical. We of course found many exceptions, and a much more varied approach to diversity training, but this is traditionally what we will see.
Regarding current state of diversity training in the workplace, Kulik and colleagues in 2008 found that about 57percent of organizations will report some use of diversity training. Again that speaks back to the idea that diversity training is a widely practiced activity in the workplace and labor markets. It's widely accepted as something of a norm in our labor market for producing good results and improving performance and of course, helping diversity.
Businesses are increasingly focused on building a diverse workforce for several reasons, including the opportunity to expand the talent pool, for reasons of being socially responsible, to provide employees who are better able to meet the needs of a diverse customer base, to create a competitive advantage by expanding the experiences and opinions used to inform innovation and decisionmaking.
As an aside, on a related project with Virginia Commonwealth University, I recently was on a team where we looked closely at a private instructional technology firm in Chicago called SPR Companies, where we looked at their disability practices. We chose this company because they have been very focused from the top all the way to the bottom of their organization on including people with disabilities in their workplace.
We went in with a qualitative approach to understand better their motives for not only their diversity training but also for their diverse practices in recruitment, hiring and maintenance. We found exactly what you see on this slide. Their motives were varied, and they often worked together.
We learned from FPR Companies, this company in Chicago, that one of their great interests was a business advantage in IT, but it was also along with that primary goal, they had goals of being socially responsible, of providing better services for those customers they serve, and for that expanded talent pool which hopefully resulted in a business advantage for them.
Continuing with the current state, I want to emphasize one of the great efforts in diversity training is on this business case or making a business case, so the competitive advantage that comes with including diversity, including better organizational flexibility, enhanced marketing efforts, greater innovation, this is one of the great pushes of including diversity in our labor market.
Now the components of diversity training. As mentioned previously, diversity training is a very, there is lots of variance in how it's provided and practiced.
For instance, diversity training may be a single session, or multiple sessions over time. We found the research that many include trainers within the organization, while others brought in someone from outside the organization to provide the training.
Many focused on specific groups while others did a more general application. For example, we saw some trainings that were explicitly focused on sexual orientation or gender, where other trainings talked about differences in a more broad umbrella term, and tried to bring understanding in a general way.
We also saw many different pedagogies when you look through the literature. Some were lecturebased. Others had video materials, simulations, problem solving exercises, role playing, discussion, case studies, and of course many provided something of a mix of all of these.
One other point of variance that we saw interestingly in the labor market was that some are voluntary, meaning that all employees or supervisors or managers who wanted to go were who ended up being in attendance, while in many organizations, they were made mandatory, so people attended without consideration of whether it was selfselection or not.
Common goals for workplace diversity training, include creating a more successful organization, with better performing employees. This is usually noted as the primary goal. Others include changing employee behavior towards socially disadvantaged group members, increased compliance with legal and ethical standards, and finally greater harmony within the workforce.
We often see a split in what the primary goals are in diversity training across whether it's awareness training or skill building. In other words, whether we are looking to improve knowledge or skills. Many did both, while some just focused on one.
In awareness training, we saw an increased focus on just understanding the issues that might arise from differences. It could include discussion, sharing personal experience, and education.
When we looked at awareness training, we often saw something that was about having a conversation, getting into a dialogue, and coming to see each other's perspective better. In skill building, or these behavior based trainings, we may still see what we saw in awareness but we will see a emphasis on improving or changing behavior. What we will often see is that focus on improved communication, in increasing the likelihood of engaging with others who are different from the core inner organization as well as improving interpersonal skills or styles as employees engage others from diverse backgrounds.
The assessment of diversity training outcomes follows suit. You will see assessment of outcomes include assessment of knowledge, or cognitive outcomes, these are measured usually by measuring knowledge and learning of diversity training content. So often what we see is a pre, post test of how much they knew about the content being covered in the diversity training prior to training, and then whether their knowledge is improved afterwards.
The second form of assessment is that of affective outcomes. So whether attitudes have been changed and not just knowledge. So whether there is a greater diversity selfefficacy has been tested or even a greater motivation to embrace diversity in some way in the organization.
This is the most commonly measured outcome that we saw in the research, were these effective assessments. Finally, perhaps the least common was the assessment of behavioral outcomes. Measuring changes in behavior, including the ability to resolve conflicts, selfperception, diversityfriendly behaviors, objective observations of changing behaviors, or changed behaviors in the workplace. Again, these, although powerful in many ways, we could argue are slightly less common in the research.
When we look for best practices, we found that they could be categorized into three primary domains. This framework is largely pulled from Kalinoski's analysis conducted in 2013. But these effective practices are broken down by design, duration, distribution and method of delivery, the content taught including the number of topics covered, the level of participation, interaction and the goal setting or mentoring that might be included, and then the third component is the participants, so whether upper level management was involved, and even the composition and characteristics of the group being taught, as well as whether the program was voluntary or mandatory.