Page 35 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

which employees could train. As people started hearing about us, they just started showing up. We found one woman who had heard about the opportunity in San Diego, and moved across the country with her daughter. They both now work in that distribution center. The only reason I know of her is because we sent a film crew down there to talk to team members, and the film- maker happened to come across them in the interview. In some ways it’s like that line from Field of Dreams: Build it and they will come.
CC: Typically, you’re going to be hiring workers within a certain radius so the commute is not too brutal.
RL: We started working on the transportation issue real early. We went in saying, ‘OK, when we’re done, we want to have an example to show other businesses that this is a sustainable model. This is not charity.’ So we purposely did not do things that would make the project seem like charity. For instance, we did not put in our own transportation system. We said that’s what the com- munity is supposed to do, so we worked with the com- munity and they came up with a busing system to help our team members get to work.
CC: There are companies, though, that run car pools, where they own their own vans and transport workers to and from work.
RL: We might do car pooling with our employees, but traditionally we have not gone out and picked up employees. I don’t think we would do car pooling in this case, unless we could make the right business case for it. So far, it’s a bridge we have not crossed.
CC: I think the business case is that people come to work less tired.
RL: If I extended it to that community, I’d probably extend it to everybody.
CC: Oh, absolutely. You’re 100 percent right. I’m just saying—because I know of a company that recently looked into it... They decided to invest in vans and offer it to all employees. What they also considered was mak- ing some, if not all, of the vans accessible for individu- als who might need a lift, so to speak. They actually came to us and asked, ‘Is there a place we could get a deal on a fleet of vans?’ But they were all over the place. They hadn’t done their homework.
In terms of the business model, have you been able to figure out whether there is a savings via your automated distribution systems compared to the conventional approach?
RL: The building is 20 percent more efficient than any other building we have. We built it that way without regard to the work force we’d be using.
Transportation is limited. They probably have difficulty with the application forms. They don’t learn the way we’re used to teaching or on the timetable we tend to use. They may look different. On and on and on.
So when we started building new distribution centers with a lot of automation, we thought: Can’t we just take a different approach and maybe make this easier for people to do this job? Then we thought, Well, let’s get rid of the keyboards. What made the job difficult were the keyboards and words. So we said, ‘Let’s go ahead and make our systems with pictures and let’s use touch screens instead of keyboards.’
CC: So you already knew some of the technology was available because of your son?
RL: I knew some of the technology because I knew some of the struggles Austin had, and I happen to know the technology because that’s our business. From build- ing distribution centers with automation, we’ve known about touch screens for a long time. I’ve learned about the icons through working with my son. Also in retail, you go into any quick service chain today, and they’ve started using icons. Plus with all the struggles with dif- ferent languages, people think in pictures, not words.
So we got down the road and we said, ‘How many peo- ple, let’s say, with autism could we hire?’ We said we were going to hire 600 people, and we just talked to somebody and said, ‘Well, gee whiz, nobody’s ever done that before.’ Without job coaches, ongoing support and peer support, how many typically-abled people would we need on the line working, side by side, for each person with autism? And the guess was two. So we said we we’re going to hire 600. So 2-to-1 means we can hire 200 people with a cognitive disability, and that was our objective from day one.
Then we started working towards that end and went to our partners. When we picked a prospective city for our operations, we went and talked to the different partner agencies and said, ‘This is our objective. We’re going to hire 200 people with disabilities—and not just the easy disabilities, but people who might not have ever worked or who have had long-term struggles.’ And they believed in it. We said we were going to make it happen, and lo and behold, we did.
CC: How did you find that many candidates for work within a geographic area?
RL: Well, first of all, we knew we were going to hire 600 from day one. We’ve got about 300 now, and about 40 percent of those have a disability. We’ve got autism, retardation, cerebral palsy and lots of physical disabili- ties. We started working with agencies such as Voca- tional Rehab and the Department of Special Needs in South Carolina. They put in a training center, found a building and staffed it, and then we put in equipment on