Put Ability to Work Narator: These leaders have put ability to work in the 21st century. Millie Hewett (MANPOWER, Inc.): The challenges we were faced with do to the labor shortage of the past several years and low unemployment is that we had to change our traditional recruiting strategy. The basic initiatives that are vital to our success are the three Rs, Relationships, which far exceeds any contractual partnership, Resilience, which means we had to be easily adaptable to change, and Return on Investment, which is how our profits are measured. Narrator: All three organizations had business partnerships that developed into relationships. MANPOWER is the national vendor to SunTrust and has been providing staffing services to the banks in Richmond for two decades. SunTrust one of the top ten banking institutions in the country has a successful history of hiring people with disabilities, as well as, marketing their products and services to customers with disabilities. Both SunTrust Bank and MANPOWER sit on the Charter Business Roundtable at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Workplace Supports (VCU-RRTC). Paul Wehman (VCU-RRTC): The keys to solving the problems of unemployment with disability are long-term strategic partnerships between the public and private sector and MANPOWER and SunTrust have shown the way with that. It was SunTrust that got with the Department of Rehabilitative Services to develop a strategic relationship for the placement of disabled people into appropriate SunTrust positions. VCU's role is to work with community service organizations that have severely disabled people really and send them to MANPOWER and then let MANPOWER use their expertise for placement. This project is working beautifully. C.T. Hill (CEO, SunTrust Bank): MANPOWER shares our vision and is able to place people with disabilities on a very regular basis and many of those employees end up becoming full time associates here at SunTrust. Virginia Commonwealth University's Research and Training Center helps our supervisors and managers understand the needs of this population of employees and very quickly get us up to speed on what it means to us. So it's a great relationship with both Virginia Commonwealth University and MANPOWER. Katherine McCary (SunTrust Bank): MANPOWER and VCU Training Center have supported this initiative through their own resources. MANPOWER's expertise in supplemental staffing resulting in assessing and assigning individuals with disabilities into our workforce helps widen access and eventually hire more individuals with disabilities. VCU in addition to its research, which really backs up our experiences has provided us with training for HR professionals as well as first line supervisors. Narrator: To insure that the relationships resulted in a return on investment MANPOWER committed to embracing change, being resilient. Howard Green (VCU-RRTC): It's important that we try to dispel some of the myths and fears that rehab agencies have with staffing businesses. We have been doing various activities and developing products and disseminating those products and developing training and conducting training across the country to help dispel these myths. When we interviewed about 50 HR managers and 200 first line supervisors it showed that actually people with disabilities were seen by employers as just as productive as other workers, their work speed was just as good, their timeliness and punctuality was great, and actually the cost wasn't a big issue in employing people with disabilities. Katherine McCary: Hiring people with disabilities is a business initiative for us at SunTrust Bank. We recognize that our competitive advantage is our people and in light of the impending labor shortage it is important that we reach out and include individuals with disabilities not only representing them in our workforce but also recognizing the opportunity to sell the customers in our marketing place. Because of this we have also taken the lead in the Business Leadership Network in Virginia. This mission is to increase workforce diversity by including individuals with disabilities. Narrator: Corporate diversity initiatives are increasing the awareness of this untapped talent pool. As a result workers with disabilities are increasingly finding employment. Paul Wehman: MANPOWER is clearly as I pointed out to the U.S. Department of Education the premiere staffing company in the world and as such when the people started coming to them with significant disabilities MANPOWER attacked it like they would any other population and has already made placements of 13 people that local community organizations have been unable to deal with. This past Friday, January the 31st, I spent some time with the Assistant Secretary of Special Education and Rehabilitation, Bob Pasternack, who coincidentally had just talked to the Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, about just this problem; the unemployment of people with disabilities and I had an opportunity to share with him the relationships we have been building with MANPOWER and SunTrust to try an alleviate this problem. In a word he was absolutely thrilled. Howard Green: We have a model employment program here in Richmond with MANPOWERs and that model program is trying to get the Community Rehabilitation Programs and Rehab Agencies to refer people with disabilities to MANPOWER for employment. At the end of the fourth quarter we have seen 72 individuals with disabilities referred to MANPOWER and 30% of those folks are working today, another 50% are in some type of skill training or soft skill training as we speak. Paul Wehman: The Ticket to Work Program is the newest Social Security Administration initiative to help persons with disabilities who have been on the Social Security disability rolls for many years get off those rolls and get to work. It is an exciting program but it can only work if you have a really top-notch employment network that knows how to get people jobs and keep them employed. This was a natural for MANPOWER. C.T. Hill: I think the return on investment in hiring people with disabilities comes in two of three different ways. One, it helps us from a diversity standpoint with our employee base which is very important to SunTrust. It helps us develop products and services that are needed by this population of folks. It helps us serve the communities in which we operate and reach out to entire communities but at the end of the day it is good for the company, it's good for the share holders, and it's good for business. Katherine McCary: MANPOWER, SunTrust, and VCU have developed strong alliances over the past years and we look at opportunities to share our best practices with others. We regularly present at SHRM and Business Leadership Network events, as well as others. Internally both VCU and MANPOWER help us in presenting to our own diversity site council and in support of National Disability Mentoring Day. We have received regional, local, and national recognition for our effort in employing individuals with disabilities and reaching to customers with disabilities. We've been recognized as a disability friendly business, which is good business. Millie Hewett: We've come full circle with the three Rs, Relationships, Resilience and Return on Investment we want to thank you for listening to our presentation on diversity and how it pertains to people with disabilities. We hope that you will add a fourth R, Replicate. Narrator: We invite you to share in our return on investment. Focus on the three Rs and you can put ability to work.