Welcome to Indiana’s Largest Pool of Untapped Talent
Workers with disabilities are waiting to show your company what they can do. Are you ready to dive in?
This guide is a brief introduction to standard disability employment rights. This guide is for informational purposes only, and is not legal advice. For questions about your personal employment situation or legal issue, consult an attorney.
Discriminating against employees or job applicants on the basis of disability is prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This protection against discrimination includes all aspects of employment, including the application process, hiring, firing, pay, and promotion.
A “disability” is an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity. If you have a medical condition that negatively affects your ability to do activities such as walk, communicate, hear, see, or eat, then you may have a disability and be protected by the ADA. …Click to read more…
All too often, employers are scared to hire people with disabilities because of the cost of accommodations. However, most accommodations are less than $500, and there are a variety of tax credits to help cover the cost. And there’s another reason to not fear accommodations: making disability accommodations can help all of your employees, whether they have disabilities or not.
Before we get to why, let’s define our terms. An accommodation is an adjustment to a job, the work environment, or the hiring process. Even if you have no employees with disabilities, you have probably already provided similar adjustments: letting employees work from home when their children are sick, adjusting schedules so an employee can go to school or a second job, or providing step ladders when employees are not tall enough to reach high shelves. Disability-specific accommodations are really not that different.
Providing accommodations gives your organization the opportunity to reexamine how you do things. An accommodation for one employee can be a test case to see if this new process, policy, or procedure should be the standard for your entire staff. You may discover a way to make your staff more productive, or to reduce employee turnover.
Let’s look at some examples. …Click to read more…