Employee Engagement Practices

Here's a sobering set of statistics for your Monday concerning employee engagement practices for workers with disabilities:

Contrary to the opinion of many business owners that the costs of accommodating disabled employees are too burdensome, a Job Accommodation Network study (referenced here) finds that 20% of the cases examined involved no costs.
In the remaining 80% of cases, the median cost was only $200.

Now, here's an interesting point of comparison: Among the nearly 500 small organizations nationwide that completed an application for our Top Small Company Workplaces award this year, those that provide educational assistance provide an average annual, per employee tuition reimbursement of $2,550.

So if your company is among the 4 out of 5 that end up paying to accommodate a disabled employee, the amount you'll spend is only 7.8% what an average company pays to better educate each employee, according to Winning Workplaces' latest employee engagement research.

In other words, accommodating a disabled worker is highly manageable from a cost perspective. I think that this, combined with their above-average job performance (based on a 30-year DuPont study – see this post), should finally put to rest the fallacy that employing these workers is a cost center and does not lead to a more productive workplace.

Your thoughts?