Hiring people with intellectual disabilities: employers are discovering that with a little help, workers with such disabilities can take on a wide array of jobs

HR Magazine, July, 2005 by Linda Wasmer Andrews

Supermarket Experience

Throughout the country, companies of all sizes are creating their own success stories in helping people with intellectual disabilities get jobs. At Cub Foods, with three supermarkets in Peoria and Bloomington, Ill., four employees with intellectual disabilities have been hired as baggers. All have been with the company at least a year, and one has been there for a decade--much longer than the usual tenure of the teenagers who often fill such positions.

Sharon Riley, an HR specialist at Cub Foods, says all four have proved to be assets to the company: "They've been very open and friendly with the customers. They're eager to work and learn different tasks, and their attendance for the most part has been very good." A vocational rehabilitation agency coach helped each employee learn the ropes of their job.

One issue is transportation. When managers have had to schedule one of the four employees during hours when public buses are not running, Riley says, agency staff members or store employees have been able to provide a ride.

At the outset, "other employees were kind of standoffish," says Riley, and some teenagers would tease one of the men about his slurred speech. But the teasing stopped, she says, when she told the offenders that it wasn't acceptable. Employees have come to like and feel at ease with their co-workers who have intellectual disabilities, she adds, "and understand that they're looking to make a living just like the rest of us."

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Manufacturing Success

While many companies have diversity initiatives that include hiring employees with various disabilities, a manufacturer in Tennessee has taken its commitment to a new level. At Habitat International, a privately owned firm in Chattanooga that makes indoor-outdoor rugs and artificial grass, at least 80 percent of the employees--who number 40 to 80, depending on the season--have some type of mental or physical challenge. About 15 of the current employees have intellectual disabilities, says co-founder and CEO David Morris.

In 1993, Morris began hiring individuals with intellectual disabilities. He also hired Connie Presnell, a job coach for the state, to coordinate the effort. Presnell cites the company principles guiding her work: "to believe in each other and not set limits for the people with disabilities."

Morris notes the results of his approach: high profitability, frequent expansions, back order and return rates that are "almost zero," little absenteeism, low turnover attributable to job dissatisfaction, and no accidents among employees with disabilities. Habitat International has since garnered several awards and is the subject of a new book, Able! How One Company's Disabled Workforce Became the Key to Extraordinary Success, by Nancy Henderson Wurst (BenBella Books, 2005).

"We expect the best out of each person, and we challenge them to do things they have never done," says Morris. Workers with intellectual disabilities are "doing everything from running a hundred-ton die-cutting press to rolling and cutting carpet," he says. "No matter what the mental or physical disability, everyone is pretty much required to learn every job in the building."