Focus group happening soon!

Well, we’re working hard to get a good range of employers to come to the focus group which is scheduled for next Thursday at 5.30pm. It’s not easy trying to persuade business people to give up their valuable time, even when we’re offering food and drink! It’s been an interesting exercise for the team, as the general lack of knowledge about disability can even put up barriers to people just coming to talk about it! We’re still hopeful however of getting around 10 people to come along and share their thoughts and concerns, but also provide us with some good ideas about how we can get some positive messages out into the business community.

Focus group - engaging with employers

The first step in our 'thinking differently' project is to run a focus group early next month, so the Supported Employment team are working hard to get some employers along so that we can pick their brains. We're looking for a good mix of those that we have a good relationship with now, those that we are hoping to engage with in the near future and some that we haven't approached as yet. That way we will get a range of perspectives on how they make their decisions about hiring people, what different influences can effect taking on someone with a disability, and how we can start to break down some of the barriers. We want employers to tell us how we are best communicating with them, what support and guidance they need and how we can make the process easy.

Why we are thinking differently?

Enrich+ has received some funding from the ‘Making A Difference Fund ’ (managed by the Ministry of Social Development) to help us to understand the barriers that the people we support face in getting mainstream work, and also get some positive messages out to the general public about the benefits that employing someone with a disability can provide to both the employee and the employer. 

We will be running some focus groups with employers to get a better understanding of why they may or may not be willing to take on a disabled person in their business, what influences their decision making processes and how we can support them to 'think differently'.

We will be collecting a range of stories about successful placements of our clients and turn them into articles for local newspapers, which will help to highlight all of the positives that can result from someone gaining employment. We know that some employers often hesitate to take on someone with a disability, and yet in most cases they will discover that the person is just like anyone else in that they work hard, they are reliable, they develop friendships and they add value to the workplace in many ways.

We want the articles to demonstrate that the benefits can be significant for both the employer and the employee, and we want a wider section of the public to understand that. While it would be tempting to focus on just telling the employer and the employee’s stories, we also want to hear from co-workers and customers about their positive experiences.  

By telling these great stories, we hope to change a lot of people’s attitudes towards employment for disabled people, and therefore influence the key decision makers to change their perceptions as well. We are also  keen to use some professionally produced video stories to help get the message out as we know that they can spread quite quickly and extensively through the internet, and will have a longer life than a brief article in a newspaper.

We are very excited about the fantastic exposure that this project will give to the work we do with our service users to get them into paid work, and we are hopeful that it will produce some real progress in our goal of breaking down the barriers