DECEMBER 7, 2006 VCU WEBCAST Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. >> TERI BLANKENSHIP: Good afternoon. Welcome to Virginia Commonwealth University. I'm Teri Blankenship. Thanks for joining us today. Today's webcast is on the nuts and bolts of Telework: Increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities. The webcast is sponsored by the Telework USA project, which is funded by the Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy. This will be a 45-minute presentation, followed by a 30-minute on-line chat room session. We have three presenters for you today: Richard Horne, Jane Anderson, and Richard Salnick. Richard Horne is our first presenter. Richard is the supervisory research analyst for the Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy, and supervises all the research activities for ODEP. Today he will be discussing the Federal Government's interest in Telework and some of ODEP's initiatives in this area. I'll be introducing the other presenters later in the webcast. Let's go ahead and get started with the first part of the webcast. I'll turn it over to Richard Horne. Richard? >> RICHARD HORNE: Thank you, Teri. And welcome to the webcast. Today we will be talking about the nuts and bolts of Telework in terms of increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities. My name is Richard Horne. And I'm with the office on disability employment policy at the U.S. Department of Labor. And I'm happy to be here. I'll talk about what we call ODEP today, as well as why the Federal Government is interested in Telework opportunities for people with disabilities, and a little about the initiatives that we have been implementing over the last five years. First a little about ODEP. Our vision is to eliminate barriers to employment for people with disabilities and to support their inclusion in the community, promote their economic independence, and opportunities, expand their work options with meaningful employment in competitive employment out there in the community, and promote and encourage their self-determination and choice in terms of their employment. Our mission is to provide leadership to increase employment opportunities, for youth and adults with disabilities. Our interest in Telework begins with the status of people with disabilities and their employment opportunities. We know that there are more than 33 million people with disabilities who are aged 16 to 64. We know that the employment rate among the working age people with disabilities is about 56 percent, far below the rate of people without disabilities. We know that within the Federal Government, that about a third of the federal managers believe that full-time positions can be relocated to home-based or other facilities in terms of Telework. The president has led our federal interest in expanding Telework options and opportunities for people with disabilities through the new freedom initiative. Also, the congress has demonstrated its interest in Telework in promoting employment opportunities for people with disabilities through the appropriations process. Beginning in fiscal year 2002, again in 2004 and in 2005, congress mandated that my office implement programs to promote Telework opportunities for people with disabilities. Our interest in Telework actually began with a survey that we conducted in 2001 with Cornell University. We asked many questions of federal managers and supervisors, human resource and equal employment opportunity professionals, about their perspectives on employing people with disabilities through Telework. We found that 33 percent of white-collar and only 6 percent of blue-collar supervisors believe that current full- time positions could be relocated through Telework. Most believed that new full-time positions should be split between being in the office and Teleworking at various places. We also learn that from these managers and supervisors that the Telework arrangement must be formalized. We also know from our work in the Federal Government that federal workers' comp costs are quite high. The costs are more than $2 billion each year and more than 2 million work days annually. The president further promoted Telework through the SHARE initiative. He launched the initiative that cited benefits of Telework. We know that we have been a country at war, and more than 25,000 seriously injured service members are returning to our country, and we have tried to support those returning disabled service members through several initiatives, through our real lifelines initiative, and our disabled soldier support programs. The congress has also showed its interest. In 2002, it provided appropriations to ODEP to launch some Telework pilots in federal agencies. In 2004, congress expanded our pilot projects with an emphasis on strategies that were likely to yield the largest number of Telework positions for people with disabilities. Just as recently as fiscal year 2005, we replicated and expanded a successful model that we developed in concert with the Department of Health and Human Services, center for Medicare and Medicaid services. Here is a little about some of our initiatives. In 2002, we funded one single project and that project focused on pilots exclusively within federal agencies. We focused on Telework home-based programs within the Department of Labor, at their call center, at the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. You are probably familiar with 1-800 Medicare and with medical transcription services through the Veterans Administration. Our definition of Telework focused on home-based 100 percent of the time. Par we tested various models and we noted the benefits and challenges of Telework. The models that we developed were deemed successful and we replicated them within the Internal Revenue Service. As I mentioned earlier, in 2005, we expanded the programs that we had started with the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. In 2004, we were provided with additional appropriations to fund three research Telework projects. We were pleased to fund those projects in the states of Virginia, Minnesota, and Connecticut. We focused these projects on two populations. The first population was the returning disabled service members, and also people who were on state or federal workers compensation. The projects have operated in two phases. In the first phase, the projects conducted a lot of questionnaire data collection. We talked to a lot of employers, talked to a lot of service members, talked to a lot of people on workers comp to find out their interest in Telework and what their perspectives are in terms of both the benefits and barriers for increasing Telework opportunities for the employment of people with disabilities. Based on the questionnaire data collection, we went into a phase of developing models and testing those models across the country, in both one-stop career center, centers across the country, as well as in several states. One project specifically focused on developing a tool kit for our one-stop career centers. As we have looked over the last five years at Telework, our interest has focused around several critical issues. The first is, we want to understand employers' conceptions about Telework as an option for the employment of people with disabilities. Both at the hiring end, as well as in the retention and promotion end of the employment spectrum. We want to understand the challenges and barriers that may limit implementation. Is it technology? Is it supervision? Is it the being at the office, versus being at home? We are interested in what those barriers and challenges are. As the president has emphasized and congress has emphasized, we want to look at innovative models and, generate , and we want to develop strategies to address those challenges. My two fellow speakers will be talking about successful models, innovative strategies that can work for many employers. We want to provide data. We want to be able to provide the case studies and the examples that encourage Telework from the perspective of that employer, as well as from the perspective of a person with a disability. We know success matters. And hearing from the employer and hearing from the person with a disability is the great encouragement to implementing and promoting Telework. We developed a great Website, and I encourage you to go and look at that Website. It's called, teleworkusa.net. On that Website, you will find a great deal of information about our three projects, additional links for Telework, models and strategies and success stories. It has an employer side. It has a consumer side. It will provide you with a great deal of information about Telework. We encourage you to go to that Website and we hope that you will find useful materials there. If you would like additional information about ODEP, please go to our Website at WWW.DOL.gov/ODEP. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be with you. >> TERI BLANKENSHIP: Thank you, Richard. Next we are going to hear from Jane Anderson, who is the director of the Midwest Institute for Telecommuting Education, MITE, a nonprofit division of RESOURCE, a large human service agency in Minnesota. Jane has trained over 12,000 employers on strategies for Telework start-up and management. Jane is joining us from Minnesota today. Let's go ahead and join Jane Anderson in Minnesota. Jane? >> JANE ANDERSON: Hi. My name is Jane Anderson. And I am the director of the Midwest Institute for Telecommuting Education, known as MITE. We are located in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in Minnesota. We are a large nonprofit agency that has worked with people with disabilities for many years. We have helped them find Telework options. I'm really glad to be here today. In the Twin Cities area, it's 58 degrees, which is a little bit unusual for cold Minnesota. But we have shed our parkas, and we are ready to go! I'd like to start today, and give you a quick overview, the first ten minutes or so of the presentation are going to be about Telework in general, definitions and a few things to think about as an employer. The second half will be about specifically employees with disabilities who have moved into Telework jobs, and giving you some insight about the innovative ways that employers have used to hire people. First of all, we should look at what is Telework? Telework can have a broad definition, but for our perspective today, we are using the definition that it's an off-site work arrangement, that allows people to work either part-time, full-time or as- needed, in a remote location. That can be in your home. It can be traveling. It can be at another site. It can be in a Telework center. What we are finding today is that work is really becoming very agile, and so people are working at multiple locations. One is, if you look at your job or a similar job as a professional individual or employee, you may be working at two to three different sites during the day. You may be working while you are commuting, or during a commute time. You may be working at home, or after hours. You may be working in the office, or at meetings or after meetings. So, we are finding that technology is very mobile. So work is really becoming much more mobile too. The agile workplace has four types of work. The first is where you are totally a virtual worker, where you rarely go into the office. Often sales forces have been defined as virtual workers. They are out on the road all the time. The second one is a mobile office worker, which is a, an example, persons who are employees, who are working at meetings throughout the day, are in a building, but you can't find them, but they are working, or they are on the phone, or checking E- mail, and just communicating with others outside of the building. So, those types of work tasks are work, and they are very important part of our work. The third is a type of Teleworking which people are working totally at home. So they spend over 90 percent of their time working in their home office. Often, a lot of individuals work in entry level jobs too, because they are doing repetitive work, and they find they need more flexibility. The fourth type of Telework is working from a Telework center, in which a pool of employees or workers go to a remote site and work from there. We are going to mainly address today the types of Teleworking with people, people are either working full-time in the home or are working part-time in the home and part-time at work. I'd like to give you an interesting statistic. Out of 104 million workers that we have in the United States, over one third do some type of work at home or work tasks. So first of all, that sets the stage for that workplace agility. Secondly, 41 percent of these millions of workers have multiple work locations. So they can be anywhere at any time, and you have seen that the blackberry, voice mail, E-mail, pagers, PDAs, all relate to mobile work. When looking at Telework, we often think of, it has to be a Telework job. Actually, it's always tasks within a job. So if you looked at your job description and said, what tasks could I perform and Telework, it might be analyzing. It might be writing reports. It might be budgeting. Any of those tasks where you need quiet time. So Telework has taken a much broader definition. Some of the tasks we have listed here are repetitive types of tasks, but also tasks that professional employees do. So this is a wide variety of tasks. One example I'd like to share is, we placed an individual who was a former rock musician, and our agency had been working with him. He had good communication skills. He wanted to be in the customer service. The reason he needed to be in a home office was that he had a hearing sensitivity in which any outside noises were very painful to him. So he could not work in a regular, regular office. So, we placed him in the home. And he did dispatching for a large technology company, which helps technology repair people's service, outside customers. You may think that a rock musician doing an 8-hour a day, repetitive work, doing customer service, how would a rock musician ever fit into a Telework job like that? Well, when he went to interview with the human resource director at this company, one question that was asked of him was: How do you handle repetitive work? He responded, "I handle repetitive work very well. I played Proud Mary every night for five years as a musician. I can handle repetitive work." He was immediately hired. They realized he had been doing the same thing over. He could concentrate. He could complete tasks, and so they found that he had some really good skills. So he ended up working full time for this company. He has been working for them for 13 years as a dispatcher. He knows every field engineer. He knows all the customers. So he is really well-versed and well-based with their customers. That turned out to be a real advantage for him. Also, we had a major blizzard in the Twin Cities about 13 years ago, where no dispatchers showed up for in-house work. The three dispatchers that had disabilities ended up working a 20-hour, in a 20-hour time frame, and were able to capture the national customers, because when you are in a call center, people in Texas don't really care, don't care if you have a snowstorm in Minnesota. They want their computers repaired. We found out it was an excellent disaster recovery. Before we get started, I think it's important to think about Telework thinking tracks. And we all have them. For example, if people are at their desks, physically located behind a desk, they are working. Now, think about that. Are you always working when you are at your desk? It's not true. A lot of people are doing other things while they are at their desks. When we think about managing time, if you are sitting in the office in a busy office, research shows that out of every 8 minutes you are working, you have one interruption. And therefore, by the end of the day, you have about three to four hours of interruptions. Now, granted, some of those interruptions are work related. But, they have found that almost 80 percent of the interruptions you will experience in an office have little or no value. Therefore, when we think about work, really work is being able to concentrate, being able to analyze, being able to focus on a job. If I think about a remote control device, I think about that allows me control over the TV set, or over the LCD, or VCR player. But, what kind of control do we have in the workplace? I go into the office, and I go into the office for two reasons: To have meetings, and to be interrupted. Therefore, my actual work, amount of work time is much less. The second assumption we have is that it's about the manager losing control. So, Telework, for Telework, Teleworkers and the manager who supervises them, you have lost complete control. Well, now, think about that. Does a manager have complete control? No. Is a manager able to measure performance deliverables and to set those goals for employees? Yes. And that's where the bottom line comes, is that the employees really are responsible for meeting performance deliverables, and what are those, and how do we measure them? Example, I love this cartoon. It's a picture of a Teleworker who is sitting at his desk and he says, "oh, it's wonderful working at home, except my boss drives by every morning and blasts his horn to make sure I'm awake." That type of management is old style management. It's passe. Management today is more looking at the information collected, information sent, information received, and the quality of that information. When we think about Telework, we have to talk about work. We look at what is real work? Realtime work is when you really are accomplishing something, getting something done, without interruptions, and Telework does allow that. We also need to look at how are Teleworkers accountable? And how are they accessible to other coworkers, supervisors, and customers? So first of all, how am I going to be accountable for my work? How do I track that? One really good question. And then, when are the times that I'm accessible to other people? And have I designated those times? Third, often we found with Telework, a manager might say, "I don't know how to measure someone that's off-site. How do I know that they are working?" Well, if you have performance deliverables, the manager needs to sometimes refine those, and adapt as needed. It's often a way to further hone the way that you measure performance. Sometimes I see in an evaluation of an employee, you see "good communication skills." For me, what does that mean? Does that mean that I connect with people on a regular basis, that I get back to people? So we never really define good communication skills. Actually, for a job, what does that mean? Then finally, Teleworkers have a certain amount of trust that's implied from their supervisor. With Teleworkers that are working pretty much at home, they are really empowered because there is a certain level of trust that a supervisor allows for them and gives them. You think about empowering people to do more work, do more productive work. How can I, the supervisor, help them to do this? We are going to focus on Teleworkers with disabilities now. I'd like to share with you some different ways of thinking about it. First of all, can we generalize Teleworkers with disabilities? Can we generalize that definition? No, we cannot. Because each person with a disability is different. They have different needs. They have different work styles. They have different work tasks. It really is on an individualized basis. One thing we found is that some Teleworkers with disabilities, they have mobility difficulties, or they have very long commutes. If they are using alternative ways of transportation, it may take them two hours to get to the office. In thinking about it, why couldn't they be working at home in the morning, or why couldn't they be working at home one to two days per week, and not have to worry about commute time, yet be able to get their work done. Other types of disabilities deal with chronic illness. It's more dealing with symptoms of chronic illness such as fatigue, pain, and less stamina. How can we help people with disabilities better manage their symptoms, so that they work around the symptoms, or are not actually fatigued by commute times, coming into the office, and would they really use their energy to be productive at work. So any type of disability, such as a chronic illness like multiple sclerosis, respiratory or emphysema, heart disease, cancer, any of those kinds of disabilities really would be great for Teleworkers to be able to better manage their symptoms. Finally, in any given work force, we have people with disabilities and current employees who need to Telework, because they may have a chronic illness. They may not outwardly express they are more fatigued or more tired, but in thinking about as most work forces get older, they may have more symptoms of a certain type of chronic illness. I think it's really important for employers to think outside the box and/or cubicle. In working with employers as a human services agency, we found it's better, if an employer can work with an agency, to think about what types of individuals do you serve? What types of skills do they have? And how might we tailor jobs to help them find work? In 1991, our agency started to work with united Way in the Twin Cities. They currently have taken over the 211 lines for the whole state of Minnesota. But we started with six people with disabilities, who were hired to work second and third shifts, and on weekends, and holidays, to help cover the customer response help lines. These lines were used to help callers find out about community resources, such as food shelves, housing, emergency medical care. So they call the call center to find out, how do I get help right now? They found that they could not get people, surprise, to come to downtown Minneapolis for later shifts at 11 p.m., and also late at night, or at 5 p.m. and after work. People were not willing to drive downtown, park, walk, and come down to the inner city. So they worked with us and we helped them supply their call center with remote employees, who were trained by United Way. They answered phone calls from callers for 20 to 30 hours per week. They all had chronic illnesses, but because they weren't overworking, they weren't commuting, they were better able to provide more coverage. The call center was able to provide 24-hour coverage, seven days a week. And it was able to fine tune their customer service better to the community. When we think about Telework, we have to think about the fit. I advise and in working with agencies too, for employers to think about five or six factors. The first are, what are your requirements for an employee to Telework? And what are the traits that you need to have in that employee? One is that people have to be self-disciplined. They need to be independent, and proceed with their work. They also need to ask questions when they don't know or when they need to ask a question. They need to be confident about doing that. They also need to be productive, and be independent in a home office when they are alone. Some people socially use their work and love to be in the office. So sometimes those individuals may not be the best for Telework types of jobs. The second, job tasks, number of Telework days, we placed a woman who had a chronic illness with a public agency here in the Twin Cities. She had worked two days per week, where she worked off-site. She had multiple sclerosis. She found that Wednesdays were hard days for her because she became more fatigued as the workweek went on. They decided that, we will find a way to, she can work Wednesdays and Thursdays, and work at home, do reports, do calls, keep in touch, and do face-to-face meetings on the other days. That was a perfect way for an agency to think about how do we better help this person keep her job. She had almost 15 years experience working with the agency, and they didn't want to lose her talent. The third is how much does the individual need to be supervised? What we often think is that we need to supervise people but often, it's looking at the performance deliverables, what do I need from that individual and when do I need that? When we think about Teleworkers, they do not work in an isolated room. They work with coworkers. They work with customers. What if putting the person off-site is the impact on customers? Are we able to provide seamless coverage to those customers? How do we do that? These are all questions that it's important for an employer to ask. Technology and connectivity. When I first hired an individual with a disability to work as our program secretary, full-time, off-site, I thought, I'm going to go the cheapest route possible, and that is where, she had one phone line. She went back and forth between E-mail and phone line. I learned very quickly that that is not a productive way for her to work. She needed two phone lines. She needed an extra Fax. She needed the equipment that allowed her to do her job productively. Because if we are not equipping people properly, we are doing the employee a disservice. She ended up being able to work many more hours than she thought she could, and she provided after-hours coverage for people that would call in after I had left the office. The other thing is that for an efficient work site, it must be ergonomic and comfortable for people and it must be safe. Setting up guidelines for these kinds of situations are important, particularly when you are serving a person with a disability or employing them because they need to be comfortable for a number of hours. I'd like to share with you one company that worked with us, and it was a small business. They had no customer service follow-up. It was Precision Tune which fixes brakes and did automotive repairs. They came to our agency and said, we don't have any way of following up with our customers. So could we hire people through your agency, to work as contractors at least to start, to do after-hours phone calls to our customers? It worked perfectly. People with chronic illness were willing to work 20 hours a week. They worked out of their homes. We hired them as temp employees. It allowed the company, Precision Tune, to get to know employees. They hired them as regular employees down the line. It worked well for the Teleworkers with disabilities. It worked well for the business because they expanded their customer service coverage. And they started and implemented a new customer service program, which they didn't have before. One thing we like to ask is that employers think creatively about how might I hire a person or start a person into Telework with a disability? One thing that we found is that you can do a job trial, where the person may come in-house, or, and/or Telework for a short period of time, and then they get to know the corporate ways of doing things. They get to know their coworkers. But it's just a part-time kind of arrangement, in which after a month, you assess how they are doing. And then make improvements as needed. It doesn't have to be where the person may work full time all at once. Sometimes that is a little bit scary for employers and for supervisors. Think about getting gradually into Telework and helping people get acclimated to it, both as an employee and as a supervisor. One thing that we found worked very well was hiring an intern for three months. And the person would work at home, but they would have a direct supervisor. That was a way in which they could try out the work in another way. People and, can be hired as contractual employees, or be their own business. Sometimes that works well, particularly if people need more flexibility in their work hours. So, we often had people that were doing clerical tasks for a small business, in which they could work any hours they wanted to, but they were contractors. Think about also taking some of the repetitive tasks you have in different kinds of jobs, and uniting them into one job. For example, my secretary who worked full time off-site worked for two programs and divisions. She worked for accounting and worked for our program, that helps place people with disabilities. She had two supervisors, but it worked well. It gave her flexibility in the job and she was able to work full time instead of working part time only for my program. Think about what types of job tasks you have currently, or in which employees get tired of doing, and they would rather move to another type of task. Think about that. Look from outside that cubicle. The other thing is that small businesses, and sometimes large employers, have really busy periods of time at the end of the month, in which they get a lot of customer requests or they have peak periods. Is there a time when you can hire people temporarily to work during those time periods? We worked with one company, service 800, which does outbound customer follow-up. It was interesting, people worked totally full time in their office. They hired 13 individuals from us in the first two years that we worked with them. All of these individuals had chronic disabilities. But, they also had some customer service background. They had some office work background. What was interesting is that they found that they had much better customer follow-up. They kept good touch and kept in touch with the Teleworkers. They almost considered their Teleworkers as their total work force. They moved from hiring about 20 percent of their work force as Teleworkers into 90 percent at this time are Teleworkers and work full time from home. Once again, they find that people who work from home and they are doing more repetitive job tasks will stay with the company. They retain their jobs longer, because the Teleworkers has that kind of flexibility. One company that we are currently working with is willow CSN, which is one of the largest virtual inbound call center providers in the United States. They have corporate clients that work with them, and in which they provide entry level call center types of services. All of their employees and contractors are virtual, and remote. They work totally in their home offices. But what they found is that because these contractors with disabilities have flexibility in scheduling their hours, once again they are more likely to retain their employees. They spent the last ten years in refining Website technology, to help people work from their homes, be able to listen to customers and respond to customers, and to be more effective in covering customers' needs. I think they found that more companies are wanting 24 by 7 types of customer service, and this was one way in which Teleworkers could fulfill that need. Some of the things you think about in, for in terms of an employer, what do I need to think about in hiring a person with a disability? One is that, am I covered under the ADA accommodation? Telework is not a required ADA accommodation. But most often, it should be considered as an option for people who are having fatigue, mobility, pain issues. So, it's not always the best option. But it should be considered. It's really important. With the increased employer flexibility trend, where employees are wanting and demanding more flexibility, Telework accompanies that very nicely. If you have a flexible work policy, then Telework fits nicely as an option into that policy. When you start to think about hiring people with disabilities, start to think about the pockets of possibility and opportunity in your own company. Perhaps there is a division that has a high turnover. What is a way that they can reduce their employee turnover? They might try Telework with one or two people and get a pilot started in which you start to iron out the glitches and see what works and what needs to be improved. Telework doesn't have to be started on a huge basis. Often with one or two employees, it's a good way to start. One thing, time to implement. And we often forget about this, but if you hire a person with a disability to work as a Teleworker, it may take anywhere from one to three months for that person to get up to par in being productive, because they are learning, they are working with a company technology, they are working with their supervisor. They may be learning new time management strategies. Often, a person at first in becoming a Teleworker is not as productive as they could be, but by the third month of them working off-site, they have become more productive than the person working in-house. So give people a little bit of time. You may have managers that are very resistant to Telework. We found that within companies, don't start with them. Start with a manager that has a bottom line business need to get Telework started, because they need better customer service. They want to reduce their employee turnover. So start with receptive managers, that's one of the better things to think about. So find those receptive managers within your company. And, look at why are we implementing Telework? Not only as an option for people disabilities, but also why businesswise should we do this? What are our competitors doing? One thing we ask of employers is they set basic guidelines and policy at the beginning. One is, what are your employee selection criteria? What do you expect? What kind of traits do you want from an employee? You want independence? You want a problem-solver? You want people that will take initiative. These are bottom line requirements. Put those down in writing. Also, look at what are our dependent care obligations. People should not be working in their homes with young children around. Confidentiality and security measures, what do we need to be doing to ensure that paperwork and also customers' confidentiality is upheld. What are we going to provide for equipment, purchase, use and maintenance. Who owns the equipment? Who maintains it? Put these down in writing beforehand. Also, for home office safety, how do we ensure that the office is ergonomic. One thing we found is we have a quick start MITE telework agreement that employers may utilize, and it's an arrangement between a supervisor and Teleworker that helps get you started in looking at the types of issues you need to think about. Overall, Telework helps you see deficits more clearly. For example, if you are having a work process within your organization, and you are seeing that, boy, in having Teleworkers off-site, we are seeing their typing speed is really slow. And I thought it was higher than it was. So often when you put people off-site, you will start to see performance measures that you might use, or deficits that you might address, because you start to see it. When people are remote, you start to see things that you have not seen before as a manager and as a company. The deficits tend to be technology support, management practices, managers that really are uncomfortable with managing by deliverables, work processes that aren't acclimated to Telework. So these are good things to talk about your supervisor with before you implement a Telework arrangement. Telework is not a noun. It's an active dynamic process. It's a means to an end. The good news is that by hiring persons with disabilities, it helps you get your bottom edge, or your bottom business line edge, and get a competitive edge in reaching customer service goals, in reaching your business needs. The bad news is, once again, it will start to show deficits. For persons with disabilities, really, Telework is all about work, period. Whether you are remote, working at home, or whether you are in the office, less distractions, less interruptions, the ability to concentrate at work, is what we need in our agile workplace now. So, in closing, it's time to let some of your employees go, home. If you have other questions, we have a Website that is very active, and you can look at resources there. Also you can submit questions about Telework and people with disabilities on our "ask the expert" E-mail. Feel free to use our Website, WWW.MITE.org. And we would be glad to answer any questions. So, thank you, and I hope you gained some information and insight about working with people with disabilities and Telework options. >> TERI BLANKENSHIP: Thank you, Jane. Our last presenter today is Richard Salnick, the CEO of Expediter corporation. Which specializes in finding guaranteed nationwide employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. They provide guidance, support, and accommodations to enable individuals to return to work quicker. A quick reminder before I turn the program over to Richard. Please join us in the chat room following the webcast, and if you don't mind take a couple of minutes to complete our on-line evaluation either following the webcast or the chat room. Thanks again for joining us. I will turn the remaining part of our program over to Richard Salnick. Richard? >> RICHARD SALNICK: Thank you, Teri. First thing I'd like to do is express how pleased and proud we are to be working with Virginia Commonwealth University on federally funded research programs to help individuals who have been disabled. What I'd like to do today is share experiences that we have gained over the years in helping individuals, and in developing and enhancing return to work programs, and home-based Telework programs. What I mean by that is, working with employers as well as medical professionals and vocational professionals, to help individuals who have become disabled to become employed and to be effective and successful in working from their homes for their employers. Expediter offers nationwide customized programs that enable individuals with disabilities to be productively employed within their restrictions. We have been working since 1990, and facilitating effective and appropriate employment opportunities for thousands of individuals with disabilities. We have dedicated ourselves to continuously improving and that's been able to maintain our position as an industry leader. What we utilize is state-of-the-art accommodations, and unique and customized management and mentoring techniques. Those are the two things I'm going to focus on mostly in the next few slides in hopes of helping employers employ productively people who would be working from their homes. What we do is work with experts in the design of, design and development of special accommodations. We don't design them. But we work with the folks who do, and we turn the science basically into real-life tools that people with disabilities use to be effective in their employment from their homes. We have been able to help people with disabilities as severe as quadriplegia in returning to work. What we have to do with these accommodations is recognize how individual the needs are. The things that we have done are focused on things like voice recognition software, on-screen keyboards, voice activated tape recorders, hands-free handsets and things such as Jaws which allow people with visual impairments to be productively employed. The Office of Disability Employment Policy put together some information that we thought was very interesting regarding what can be done to help individuals with psychiatric disabilities, and what we have found and what we have been working with are accommodations that are very much in line with those recommendations. And that is, working from home, part-time employment, flex time schedules and the ability to take breaks whenever necessary. By continuing to improve our programs, and the management and mentoring techniques, what we have been able to do is maintain a leadership position, so that we can help more and more people. The effective management and mentoring techniques are what I'd like to focus on next. And the first thing I'd like to say is that, when you are looking at managing someone who has a disability, we need to take into account not only working with the disability, but the human factor. One of the most important things is the attitude of the individual, and making sure that, maintaining a positive attitude on the part of the employee is just key and critical. In terms of the elements that are important for management to express to their employees in home-based Telework success, management has to maintain credibility, you have to be real and believable. Empathy, you have to be able to understand as much as you can the situation that the employee is in. And you have to have clear expectations set forth for the employee, and perform regular performance reviews. And while you are doing these things, you have to maintain consistency. One of the things that you don't want to do is, if someone is out of sight, out of mind. You need to make sure that you are consistent in staying with your employees that are working from their homes. We have found that beginning the program with an individual is very helpful to start at an entry level, and taking small steps with opportunities for advancement. When an individual can't do the kind of job that they used to do, because they have been disabled, and they are entering into a new career, these types of things are very very helpful. As I said before, we have to be consistent and maintain constant communications. And that's key in making sure that the employee knows that he or she is important. If someone is sitting at home, and they don't hear from their employer, they may start to think that what they are doing isn't important or doesn't matter, and so sometimes attitude suffers. So it's real important to stay in constant communication. We also highly recommend constant and continuous consultation with medical and vocational experts, because people's conditions change. There might be a need for different or additional accommodations as medically determined and there may be needs for vocational help as well. Some of the companies that Expediter has been able to work with and help in home-based Telework initiatives are, marketing research companies, payroll services companies, office equipment providers, marketing incentive companies, the travel industry, international spas and salons, and the healthcare industry. As I said, since 1990, we have been doing this. And we are very happy to have been able to provide some benefit to companies in the categories that I just mentioned. When you implement home-based Telework, everybody wins. The employer wins and the employee wins. That is something that we are very proud to be part of. I'd like to share a few success stories with you. The first one is David. David works from his home in Ohio. Dave has worked in a factory and hurt his back, and still works with a spinal stimulator and does a wonderful job from his home. This is Mike. Mike is working in Michigan. He was a truck driver, and hurt his back as well. He has, you can see, working in different positions to be comfortable while he is being productive, and Mike does a great job for his employer. This work station is a work station from Diane, who is in Ohio. And Diane was not able to have herself in the picture because she lives by herself, and had to take the photo. But she does a great job working from her home. She does customer service work, data entry work. She builds databases, and so on. And she really enjoys her job. How can Expediter help you, the employers who are participating and watching in this webcast? Basically, what we can do is provide experienced trained Teleworkers that can work for you from their homes. They can work in areas such as customer service, data collection, client follow-up, Internet researchers, data entry, and so forth. Expediter is able to provide employees who have been trained and certified by Washington state university as Teleworkers, and we are proud to be able to do that. The other thing that we can do is provide some training to your employees who have been injured, or disabled, as well as your management team. So we will be happy to do that as well. We will look forward to questions that you have for us in the later session. Thank you. ****** 1