Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University

ROUGH EDITED COPY

Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University

SOUTHEAST TACE WEBINAR

MAKING THE JOB MATCH:

STRATEGIES TO ADDRESS EMPLOYERS “MULTI-TASKING”

Wednesday, March 20, 2014

1:00-2:30p ET

CART SERVICES PROVIDED BY:

ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC

PO BOX 278

LOMBARD, IL 60148

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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> CELESTIA OHRAZDA: Good afternoon. And welcome to 2014's Southeast TACE webinar: Making the Job Match: Strategies to Address Employers "Multitasking." This is the 4th in an 8part series on job development. My name is Celestia, and I'm with the Southeast TACE. The Southeast TACE Center's mission is to improve the quality and effectiveness of Vocational Rehabilitation services, and enhance employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities in the 8 southeastern states.

We're hosting quite a few webinars this year. If you're already signed up, that's great. If not, please visit our website at TACEsoutheast.org to see what we are offering. Before we get started I wanted to share some information and answer some of the frequently asked questions about the Blackboard Collaborate. Blackboard Collaborate is a web conference system that is fully accessible to everybody regardless of the assistive technology they may be using.

The system makes it possible for us to conduct workshops over the internet from just about any computer with an internet connection and web browser. There are many issues that are beyond our control at this point, but there are a few things you can do to enhance your experience.

It's really important you check your system prior to the session, as we're unable to troubleshoot any issues right before the webinar. This session is being captioned. To turn on captioning, please select the CC icon in the upper tool bar to open a separate window with captions. Today's session is also being recorded and archived for future use.

You'll be sent a link to the archive after the session. Please share this freely with your colleagues who may have missed the opportunity to participate in today's session.

And, last, participants may submit questions at any point during the webinar by typing them into the chat area. Questions will be addressed at appropriate times throughout the session, and an open forum at the end of today's presentation.

At this point I'm going to turn it over to Jill to introduce our presenter, Rob Hoffman.

> JILL: Well, thank you, Celestia, and thank you to each of you for participating in today's webinar. Before we get started, I'd just like to draw your attention to the TACE Southeast website. If you punch in TACESoutheast.org, and click on "services," you can scroll down to the word "exchanges," which will take you to the Job Development Exchange page on the Southeast TACE website.

And I draw your attention to this because it will give you information about past webinars that we've done in this job development series as well as provide you information on upcoming webinars and give you links to employment related links to employment related resources that might be useful to you in job development as well as allow you the opportunity to sign up as part of a list serve where job developers with engaging in dialogue with each other as well as engaging in dialogue with National experts like Rob, today's speaker.

So just wanted to draw your attention to that information but without further ado, really excited, today we're talking about Making the Job Match: Strategies to Address Employers "Multitasking." Our speaker is Rob Hoffman, the owner and Senior Consultant at Employment Analytics. He spoke at our first webinar in this series. He is an individual that comes with over 30 years in the field, brings a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experience in employment services, and has a lot of really practical guidance for job developers a based on his personal experience and engaging within this.

He's got an extensive background providing training and consultation and we're really excited that he's here with us today. So without further ado, Rob, would you like to take it away?

> Take it away, Rob.

> ROB HOFFMAN: Thank you, and it's good to be here once again. And getting started on a topic that I think all of us will face at some point, and what we're going to cover today, I'm going to go ahead and just jump right into it.

Also, before I start, if there are questions, we have the Chat box, and what I'll do is be keeping my eye out so if you have a question and I cover something, feel free to type it in there and I'll keep my eye out on it or I'll have some support if I happen to miss it. If it's on your mind, I'm sure it's on everybody else's mind so let's go ahead and put it out there.

What we're going to cover today is, you know, the strategies to address that multitasking requirement, and I would imagine if you've been in the field for any length of time, you've probably heard that and more so probably over the last 5 or 6 years, and it was interesting, I was reading an article in a I subscribe to a lot of Human Resource magazines and journals, and one of my favorite is: Workforce Magazine, which if you don't subscribe to those, I would highly encourage you, because it really gets you information on, you know, what HR is thinking, and, you know, it gives you tips and insight into Human Resources.

And I was reading an article actually, it came a couple days ago, and it was regarding this whole multitasking thing, and they actually kind a phrase when the economy took the downturn, it was called a the term that they coined was a workmore economy so that was basically when employers started laying off tons of people, you know, current employees were expected to do more and what they found is they did a recent study and they've realized that companies now are at a tipping point in risking their future success because of this.

Their best talent is leaving because they're working so many hours, and the pay hasn't gone up and those things. So I think on the bright side, we're beginning to see where businesses are saying: Okay, having everybody do everything might not be the best thing, or kind of reorganizing but either way, we're still going to run into that. I also want to focus on the business side of Customized Employment. And I know Southeast TACE has done a lot of work around Customized Employment but we'll revisit some of that on the business side because really, that's the angle we'll need to be using when kind of faced with this, and developing those opportunities.

And I'm going to frame those around some examples that I have that will hopefully rather than just talking about the concept, I'll show you how I was able to implement some of these.

And then we'll kind of come full circle back to where this all begins, and that's doing effective career planning and discovery. So I'm going to move on to Slide Number 3.

Like I mentioned before, this topic, this is a little bit different webinar because sometimes you come in with these topics that are not necessarily more broad but a focus of everybody's, but this came from a response from a question that we had on the JDX ListServ, and the person that

[All guests have been muted]

saying. Can everybody hear me? It said I was muted.

But the question that was posted was, the first one was having difficulties working with the large retailer, those companies that require employees to perform numerous tasks, and the example I think she used was a loader position, and although the employee could do many positions interested in those, there were a couple that didn't fit, which was, I believe, cutting wood and cutting glass. So using some of those pieces of equipment and everything. So it didn't seem to be a good fit because of those certain essential functions, and her question was: How do you suggest working with this?

I thought it was a great question because it's a topic in and of itself. Again like I said before it's something the likelihood we're going to experience this is pretty high at this point. So this is where this comes from.

And kind of me personally, once it was posed I love those types of challenges and how it's fit into my current and past work, so we suggested that maybe this would be a good idea for a webinar. So I'm going to kind of go through a couple of probably three different ways that at least I can start off with how you might approach this.

But number one is, when we're looking at those positions where the person may not meet all those essential functions, or those specific requirements of the position, there's going to be some kind of customization involved. So really, when we're talking about this, we're looking at those core principles of customized employment, which is that discovery and career planning and relationships, negotiation and proposals. We need to be looking at costbenefit analysis, and ultimately, what fits in terms of how we define customized employment. Is it carving positions? Streamlining or creating? So it's all of those pieces fit in. So, you guys, as we approach this, and, number one, when you look at Customized Employment, it's making a winwin situation for both the employer and the person.

And I think we're pretty good at working with the person. I think where we need to brush up is how we make it a winwin situation for the employer.

When I was thinking about that initial question, my thought was there's three broader ways to address this. The first one is, okay, let's figure out strategies to work with that company that's requiring those the staff to do things that may not fit that jobseeker's interest or skills at that point. Or we could look at similar positions at different businesses, and it would be looking at, okay, what types of businesses may have more flexibility and might not have such rigid job descriptions? Or another option is, you know what? Maybe we should broaden the scope of possibilities and potential job opportunities, so those were kind of the way I framed it in the three.

So I'm going to walk through those three to give you an idea of at least, again, this is my disclaimer is: The person that posed the question, I don't know the person she's working with. I don't know the full story, but I'm framing it broadly around that initial question. So, number one, if I was going to look at working with that company oh, actually, real quickly, I want to say when you're looking at the three approaches, it's not one or the other. We've really got to be looking at all of these, because if we focus on just one, we're really reducing a lot of the other opportunities.

So really, when we're looking at job development and our overall strategies, we need to incorporate all of these. So number one, if we're going to work with that company, understanding it's going to be more challenging but not impossible when we work with larger companies, especially looking at those corporations that have retail outlets. And here's why it's more challenging: The decisions are made, you know, at the corporate level, so their policy comes out of Corporate. A lot of the decisions. There aren't as many of those key decisions made at that retail level.

The second point on there it says current job duties and functions have been developed and analyzed at a high level. So when you understand these large corporations, they have studied, they have done time every kind of analysis they can to look at efficiency and effectiveness and increasing productivity.

Jill, you may know Tom Secrest. He's a colleague and a friend of mine and we've done a number of work but he went from working in this field to basically working with large corporations such as Ford, furniture manufacturing and that's what he does. He goes in and analyzes positions so a lot of these large corporations have really spent a lot of time doing that so hopefully that makes sense to you when we come in and begin to look at trying to customize those, it may be more of a challenge, and how far you have to run it up the ladder to get that decision.

Which leads to the next bullet is, those local managers don't necessarily have that decisionmaking authority to make major changes and adaptations. And then another one that I was thinking of is, when we begin to look at, you know, how we distribute those duties or whatever, they may look at that as an accommodation. And their mindset is those accommodations are for current employees. Not potential employees. That makes it harder for them to get their head around.

So what I wanted to do is kind of put yourself in their position, and kind of understand, you know, "no" may not always mean "no." It might just be, "not right now." But we've also got to look at the time and effort that that Manager or whatever will have to invest in this to make it work for that person. And is the return on that time and investment going to pay off? So hopefully that makes sense.

I'm going to move on to slide number 8. Here's the strategy I'm looking at, because on one site I know about the job seeker. What I need to do is learn more about the business to see if there is that angle that I can come in and make it make sense to them. So from their perspective, I've got to come in and look for gaps, for those opportunities, and really what I look at is three different areas that's going to potentially give me that foot in the door that I can begin this discussion.

Number one is: Is there ways that my candidate can help them increase productivity? Is there a way my candidate can address inefficiencies? And that's in the process. That is, you know, customers not being attended to. Whatever those inefficiencies are.