In Conversation
Creating Better Opportunities for Employees with Disabilities: Lessons from the Workplace
By Kristin Harold, Director of Communications and Marketing at CAOT
Michael MacDonald has given a lot of thought over the years to what creates a positive relationship between a client and a health care provider. As someone with hearing loss and who oversees the disability management team for Jazz Aviation, an airline with 4,500 employees across Canada, he has found the secret to success is embracing flexibility, exploration, and curiosity.
More than 3.8 million Canadians live with a disability, according to Statistics Canada (2015), but Michael has found that many workplace and health care teams still don’t receive enough training to help them determine how best to collaborate with clients with disability related needs, including communication, relationship-building, and addressing internalized ableism.
Michael says his workplace at Jazz is a safety- sensitive, fast-paced, and highly regulated environment developed to meet the strict aviation standards. These conditions have created a rigid structure that doesn’t leave room for much accommodation for employees with disabilities.
However, Jazz looks for opportunities to help individuals with disabilities succeed with their work goals and optimize their required tasks and roles. Michael, who has a Master of Education, says his team began to ask employees and job candidates how the organization could support them to navigate access needs in current or future positions. With greater attention focused on the physical environment and a more inclusive organizational culture, disabled employees and employees with disabilities were able to obtain positions previously unavailable to them."
“One thing I’m particularly proud of is that we hired a new employee named Madison with a congenital hearing loss who is a graduate of the Atlantic Provinces Special Education Authority,” he says. “She wanted to be an aircraft maintenance engineer, which is unconventional in many ways since it’s a male-dominated industry and there have always been strict requirements about hearing capabilities.”
Michael consulted with occupational therapists, audiologists, and other health care practitioners to determine what accommodations could be made. Then he relied on their expertise to create technical recommendations for Madison. These efforts were documented in an article he co-authored with Dr. Lynn Shaw, Director of the School of Occupational Therapy at Western University, and audiologists Mary Beth Jennings and Janine Verge. Entitled Use of the Person-Environment- Occupation (PEO) Model as an analytic tool for audiology, occupational therapy, and workplaces in generating solutions to support workers with hearing loss succeed at work, it appeared in the Canadian Audiologist online journal in 2019.
The article documented several factors that contributed to Madison’s ability to succeed in the role, including the long-standing history of diversity and inclusivity at Jazz and their receptiveness to exploring options to maximize occupational performance. The authors concluded that the PEO model offers a valuable framework for those with hearing loss aspiring to enter, remain, or return to the workplace, while giving professionals and companies concrete solutions which enable workers to achieve the best possible outcome.
“Madison has now been successful in the job for the last eight years and is very well respected,” says Michael. “In fact, her presence in the workplace has created some changes to the safety procedures that have benefitted all the workers in her area.” He adds that her achievement is an excellent example of what is possible for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in a safety critical job.
“I’m now in a position where I can help dispel myths and that includes assumptions that both employers and those with disabilities have themselves,” says Michael. “My greatest success has come from when people are curious about what I can do rather than focused on what I can’t do. And then I pay that forward to the clients that I support.”
That’s where occupational therapists are important, Michael adds, because they can effectively identify opportunities and partnerships for clients with disabilities to better create flexibility and social change within existing infrastructure and diagnostic guidelines.
“That is a really important point because as an OT, you can make certain assumptions clinically and it’s best to make sure that you’re listening to what the client actually wants and needs,” says Michael.
He adds that he’s worked hard to create collaborative health care relationships in his personal life, but it hasn’t always been easy.
“The health care community wasn’t really well suited to support me, despite my success being a good advocate, whether its dealing with clinicians who can’t understand that masks make it very hard for me to understand them or audiologists who make unacceptable recommendations.”
He refers to a quote written by a friend and author that aligns close to his personal philosophy. In the book, Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, Todd Kashdan writes “Curiosity creates possibilities; the need for certainty narrows them” (2009, p. 23). Todd later elaborates, writing: “Curiosity creates energy; the need for certainty depletes. Curiosity results in exploration; the need for certainty creates closure” (2009, p. 23).
Michael says these are the key principles behind his work as he manages his interactions with his clients, and what he recommends to occupational therapists.
“It’s important to keep an open mind and it definitely requires a lot of self-advocacy and self-awareness,” he says. “Every good outcome I’ve been able to make happen is borne from that commitment to curiosity. All my frustrations with clinicians trying to support me have been a direct result of the provider being too fixated on certainty. It’s important that they remember to grant each client their autonomy and agency for self- expression.”
References
Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Curious? Discover the missing ingredient to a fulfilling life. HarperCollins.
Shaw, L., Jennings, M. B., MacDonald, M., & Verge, J. (2019).
Use of the Person-Environment-Occupation Model as an analytic tool for audiology, occupational therapy, and workplaces in generating solutions to support workers with hearing loss succeed at work. Canadian Audiologist, 6(3), 1–9. https://canadianaudiologist.ca/ use-of-the-person-environment-occupation-model-as-
an-analytic-tool-for-audiology-occupational-therapy-and-workplaces-in-generating-solutions-to-support-workers- with-hearing-loss-succeed-at-work/
Statistics Canada. (2015). A profile of persons with disabilities among Canadians aged 15 years or older, 2012. https:// www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-654-x/89-654-x2015001- eng.pdf
This article first appeared in OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY NOW July/August 2023 VOL 26.4. Permission for posting was granted by CAOT. CAOT holds the article copyright.