Lesson 8: Employer Relations


Attention

employee employer relations

The United States of America and much of the world practices capitalism as an economic reality.  The basis for capitalism is that a product or service is offered and customers purchase it for a monetary amount less than it costs to produce.  Employees of these business make the product or provide the service.  When employees work efficiently, provide good customer service and maintain a sense of urgency usually the business thrives.  When the cost of production increases to a sum larger than sales income a company goes under, fails and ceases to exist.  Employees are a key to a profitable business. People with disabilities can become excellent and productive employees when they do the work assigned within the established standards set by management.  Understanding these standards and some variables that impact these standards is the core of this weeks lesson.


Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

  • Students will describe the employer perspective in terms of profit, production, human resource function and overall efficiency.
  • Students will experience external influences in a business cycle and describe some of the barriers to these uncontrollable variables.

Teaching

Reading Assignments

  1. Review the free online course on Work Support.com called Disability Awareness HR Management Online Seminar (you will not be tested on the specific content of this online seminar. But you should gain an employer perspective that will increase your effectiveness in communicating with employers around hiring individuals with disabilities.) This page is full of information and easy to navigate. One area of this page I think you will find helpful is within the link "my story." It will take you to a Web board on the VCU website. 
  2. Play the Lemonade Game 5 times (5 days) at The Lemonade Game 
  3. Record your observations as you experience uncontrollable factors like the weather  or lack of customers. Keep in mind ways that these variables can be presented to a consumer to keep them functioning and provide the needed support.    

There are many college degrees, books, and far more detailed explanations about business operations than this week's topic will present.  The objective of this lesson is to provide some basic understanding of the world of business. Without some basic understanding of business you may have difficulty communicating with business owners about why they should hire individuals with disabilities and how it will benefit their product sales, service and customer satisfaction. This is a starting point. If you have some business experience, this will remind you of some of the challenges; if you have no experience with business, your understanding begins with this week’s topic.  As you do this work you will gain insights about human resources, business operations and the overall concept that individuals with disabilities can and do benefit employers in many important ways.


Assessment

Lesson 8 Discussion

Summarize your results from playing the Lemonade game 5 times. What was your profit each time? How did you feel about the changing weather and the effect it had on business? Consider if you were the owner of your own business. What would it be like if your employees behavior changed like the weather?   Sometimes our client's behaviors may undergo fluctuations like this...how can supported employment help both the employee and the employer work through these situations? Be sure to incorporate some of the information you leared from the Disability Awareness HR Management Online Seminar

Share any thoughts or experiences you may have about dealing with people with different personalities in the workplace. What was done well? What could have been improved?

Lesson 8 Assignment

In this assignment you are going to learn how to access our online database of peer-reviewed articles, find a specific article (see below), and then utilize a special application to annotate the PDF of the article. Rather than take notes, this app allows you to open up the PDF and add notes, highlight, and even copy sections of the article into a workplace as "notes".

Step 1: Access EBSCO through the KVCC Library website

  1. Go to the KVCC homepage - www.kvcc.me.edu
  2. Click on the Library link on the right side of the screen
  3. Click on EBSCO Journal Databases
  4. Log in using the user name "ken" and the password "valley"
  5. Select the database(s) you want to use to conduct your search (I sometimes simply select them all)
  6. Press "Continue"

Step 2: Search for the article listed below and download it to your iPad

You might try typing in the title of the article into the search box and selecting the "Title" field.

Hartnett, H., Stuart, H., Thurman, H., Loy, B., & Batiste, L.c. (2011) Employers' perceptions of the benefits of workplace accommodations: Reasons to hire, retain, and promote people with disabilities. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation. 34(1). 17-23.

Once you have downloaded the article in PDF format to your iPad...you are ready to use the app!

Step 3: Using Liquid Text find the answers to the following questions and create notes (highlighting the text in the PDF and dragging the text block to the workspace to create a note...be sure to write a comment indicating which question the selected text block is answering - this will make more sense once you start using the app!) Here are the questions (remember, you need to answer each of these questions by creating a block of text from the PDF):

1) What serves as the nation’s most comprehensive resource on workplace accommodations?

2) Who agreed to participate in this project and who do they represent?

3) What are the key goals for rehabilitation professionals and social workers?

4) In a study conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce, employees with disabilities are said to be ________ __________ and ___________.

5) What is a “third party benefit”?

6) How many employers participated in the research study?

7) How was data collected for this study?

8) What did the participating employers in this study report as the most common accommodation solutions?

Liquid Text is an app designed to allow you to annotate and note a PDF. The tutorials are built right into the app.

The app allows you to access your DropBox account to load PDFs into the app...so you might place the PDF of the article in DropBox and then access it that way.

When you have completed using the app to create notes in the margin...you can send the Liquid Text formatted document to your instructor in email, or uplaod the Liquid Text formatted document back to DropBox.

(Remember, in order for your instructor to see the notes that you created, you need to send them the Liquid Text formatted document.)