Abstract
In this paper we have described the specific social and cultural drivers, influencers and enablers which specifically impact the employability of People with Disabilities (PWDs) in India.
While there has been an increased focus from a policy and institutional level on key ways to increase hiring of PWDs in the private sector, a few organisations or institutions have worked on the needs and aspirations from the perspective of PWDs and the communities they come from, while keeping in mind the needs of other stakeholders across the employability chain including employers, NGOs and government agencies.
In the paper by the International Labour Organization on the Specially abled sector in India, the challenges across employers and prospective candidates and the ecosystem at large has been enumerated to be:
1. Companies – Presently private sector companies and government departments or companies owned by the government are the largest hiring partners of People with disabilities (PWDs).
Job reservations under Diversity and Inclusion norms are ineffective in increasing the number of PWDs in employment. The larger challenge companies face is there is a mismatch in terms of skills and education requirement among PWDs, even post completion of training through NGO partners.There is considerable reskilling needed in terms of alignment to the market needs.
Further companies need support in terms of guidance towards process systems reorientation, infrastructure needs assessment etc for hiring PWDs. Personnel such as Human resource managers and learning and development departments in these companies, which are responsible for hiring and monitoring performance, have limited awareness and have limited understanding on systemic changes needed to integrate PWDs in the workforce.
2. NGOs- There are over 9670 registered NGOs working across various segments of skilling, education and medical support to PWDs across India. With funding constraints, scalability is always a challenge for these NGOs to skill and place more PWDs. Other challenges include lack of best practices sharing among NGOs, training and capacity building of trainers and proper infrastructure to skill more PWDs in line with market requirements.
3. PWDs- The challenges the PWDs face, go beyond the physical and into the realm of socio-cultural norms, for example, Parents are reluctant to take the children to social functions considering social stigma associated with disabled children, educational institutions lack adequate infrastructure for PWDs which means most of them pursue distance education or remain uneducated. Due to the lack of public transport facilities that are disabled friendly, often PWDs cannot travel distances for work and either seek employment near their homes or remain unemployed. Culturally certain communities will not allow their children to work in certain trades. Example: Across south india there was a reluctance to undertake sales oriented trades, as culturally sales is deemed to be a less respectable profession.
These gaps point to the lack of ecosystem collaboration between stakeholders to facilitate more employment opportunities for PWDs. Over the years organisations like Youth4jobs, Enable India etc have created the marketplace for employers to list job requirements and PWDs can then apply for them solving challenges around discoverability.
However one key area that has been missed is to focus on aspirations as a key driver PWD’s for increased employability. A focus on aspirations will also help map skills to available job roles by employers, which can facilitate increased employment.
Through our work with multiple livelihood organsiations, we have been able to observe the key role ecosystem marketplaces have played by linking the aspirations of the PWD’s with the skills needed by employers, addressing the concerns of parents while ensuring that NGO’s as training partners are capable o equip the PWD’s with the skills required to gain meaningful employmen
The study of TRRAIN showed the impact ecosystem platforms can have in addressing the above gaps by working with partners. TRRAIN through its platform works across the spectrum with employers, NGO partners, employment platforms and PWDs to facilitate employment of PWDs in the retail sector. Over a short period of time since inception TRRAIN has been able to identify over 26000 + PWDs and place them in retail spaces across the country by building on
Change the view of organized ratil within the communities of the PWD’s by focussing on social and cultural roots.
Maintain high levels of employee confidence during the employment period, including ensuring recognition for jobs well done.
By recognizing the level of trust between the PWD and the trainer and using this trust to create program retention and create a network to share and learn from others.
Acknowledgements will be added when paper is finalized
Background
“Gautami was diagnosed with motor disabilities at birth. This meant that all her life, society kept telling her she is a burden on her family, even though her family felt otherwise. For three years during COVID, she confined herself to remaining inside her home being scared or under-confident to interact with anyone after completing higher education.” (footnote of source)
“Sindhu is an individual who is suffering from vision impairment who faces multiple challenges such as continuous beratement from parents and relatives for her having a low vision, which made her dependent on people. Lacking confidence to travel, even if it was short distances, and more importantly people telling her she was a burden on her parents and she should resign to her fate.” (footnote of source).
Gautami’s and Sindhu’s stories are typical of what PWDs go through..As per the World Health Organization, about 15% of the population of the world live with some form of disability, with over 80% of that share living in low and middle-income countries. In India alone, as per the 2011 census, 2.2% of the Indian population is disabled which translates to about 3 crore PWDs. However, less than 1.3 crore PWDs are employable. Currently as per Indian Government estimates about only 34 lakh PWDs are part of the workforce in India. . Further, post-COVID, and across the world, even in developed countries like Australia, PWDs are experiencing increased mental and psychological distress due to economic slowdowns and isolation. Since many were employed in the retail sector, they were hit hard because the retail sector was badly affected during Covid. Over 57% of PWDs reported facing severe financial crisis during COVID 19.
Existing infrastructure for PWDs:
Government: The Indian government through citizen and NGO (Non Governmental Organizations) support has been actively pushing inclusion of PWDs through policy and funding in the mainstream workforce. In 2016, with the aim of including more people with disabilities in mainstream employment, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act, 2016 was reclassified to include 21 different categories of people with disabilities.
With the delineation of more disability categories by the government to aid policy-making, the disabled are to have increased access to entitlement, financial and livelihood support over time.
Keeping in mind the growing employment gap and the need for better diversity and inclusion at the corporate level. The Indian government in May 2021 through the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), that governs the listing requirements in the country, introduced the Business Responsibility and Sustainability reporting (BRSR) framework. This encourages the top 1000 listed entities to report their initiatives under Sustainability, one pillar of which includes Diversity and inclusion. One of the aims of the government has been to encourage more corporates to employ PWDs and the scope of the BRSR reporting will also extend to unlisted entities over the next few years.
These initiatives have resulted in an increased employment of PWDs in crucial sectors such as retail industry and hospitality. Post introduction of BRSR the gross number of PWDs being employed in the retail sector has doubled from 531 PWDs employed in 2022 to 1111 PWDs employed in 2023. Though this still remains to be 1% of the total workforce employed in retail sector this is a move in the right direction toward encouraging inclusivity at the workforce level.
NGOs
NGOs presently are grassroots enablers who work with PWDs on an ongoing basis on skills development, employability facilitation, education, life skills training to entitlement access and medical support. These NGOs play a crucial role in educating, training and facilitating employability and social and economic integration into the society through employability.
NGOs in India have been crucial bridges between the community and corporates at large while also working with government organizations on policy development. In the disability space a large part of hiring in the PWDs segments in corporates happened through NGOs.
As per a Research paper by Randstand India Over 27.19% of corporates responded that they hired through external partners who filled the gap of building employability skills in candidates since their own HR teams or consultants are not equipped on being able to guide management on better PWD integration into their workforce. Further, NGOs had a direct connect with communities and there was a high trust quotient which eased the process of hiring and integration.
Other social enterprises like Youth4jobs and Enable india have individually democratised the marketplace for discovery of PWDs by bringing forth technology portals which have built the crucial infrastructure allowing for discovery, skilling and placement of students through online platforms.
However, most of the training and hiring in this segment is focused on specific disability profiles on PWDs across 4 main categories; Speech and hearing impairment, Orthopedic disability, low vision and slow learners. These portals focus on jobs discovery across various sectors from IT and ITES, Manufacturing, engineering, education, and retail.
TRRAIN partners with organisations like Youth4jobs to train and place students with a deep focus on placement of PWDs in the retail value chain across junior and middle level profiles. TRRAIN is different from other NGOs as in being an ecosystem partnership facilitation platform.
TRRAIN - Ecosystem partnership facilitation
The vision for Trust for Retailers & Retail Associates of India (TRRAIN), a public charitable trust, was in their Founder’s forceful words:
“...To facilitate employment for 1 million people with disabilities in the Retail sector. Retail is the second largest industry to employ people in this country after Agriculture. And through TRRAIN our aim has been simple that every shop floor in the country should have disabled people working in them. We will continue to call it disability till it's so common for us to see people with disabilities working in mainstream contexts that it no longer strikes us as different.”
In 2022, TRRAIN approached Impactree and Lumiere Business solutions to undertake research of TRRAIN extensive stakeholder network across the country and identify opportunity areas in taking the next strategic leap for TRRAIN.
TRRAIN wanted to specifically understand the effectiveness of their current strategy at scale and the systemic changes they would need to make in order to ensure their partnership network with NGOs and PWDs can be scaled and made sustainable in the long run.
Impactree and Lumiere Business Solutions worked with TRRAIN to use Impactree’s Prabhaav-Big Data analytical platform to study over 1970 individuals (5 distinct stakeholders) across 11 states in India working with PWD inclusivity in the retail sector. From their experience of how culture is built into corporate employability, cultural embedddness was a key factor to evaluate various stakeholders like employers, candidates, ngo partners and trainers who are crucial to making the partnership network work,
Many factors influence culture and candidate readiness for learning, training, seeking employment and staying on in their jobs.
The population of PWDs varies by state/region and the culture and readiness varies accordingly. Recognizing this TRRAIN keeps the PWDs and their community at the centre of their work to ensure cultural connect and trust in the process of mobilization, training, recruitment, placement and while they are in their jobs. In order to maintain the connection throughout and enable scale, TRRAIN has partnered with NGOs on the ground who have direct contact with the community. TRRAIN builds the capacity of NGOs and their staff and trainers.. The community leaders and the NGO staff play a crucial role in building trust and understanding the key needs and aspirations of PWDs, their families and their cultural beliefs. Due to this community-oriented strategy, TRRAIN has achieved much success. Since inception TRRAIN has placed over 26000+ people with disabilities in the retail sector with 73% placement success with attrition less than 4% post 2-3 years of employment.
Working with retailers closely throughout the process to ensure retention:
Employers increasingly recognize the benefits to productivity and organisational culture resulting from hiring persons with disabilities (PWDs) (Lindsay et al., 2018). However, despite several studies demonstrating the benefits of an inclusive culture and workforce at the individual, organisational, and societal level (Tompa et al., 2021) a specific roadmap for implementing this type of corporate culture remains elusive.
A sustained strategy to promote this for PWDs in retail is being attempted by TRRAIN. A leading head of a retail chain in India said he sees hiring PWDs having social benefits at two levels. First, a higher recall value of store operators with disabilities among customers –in some cases even actively seeking out store operators with whom, over time, they have built a relationship with while buying. Second, PWDs tend to be more punctual and meticulous at work.
With this in mind, three key initiatives were promoted by TRRAIN to value and recognize retailers with PWD inclusive hiring practices. First is an annual event on December 12 called Retailers Day or RED that is exclusively dedicated to retail employees. RED was conceptualised by TRRAIN and is celebrated in partnership with RAI (Retailers Association of India). Every year customers are encouraged to give a rose to the retailer and stores across the world recognize and award high performing retail employees. This small gesture on customer parts rings a sense of satisfaction among retail employees recognizing their role and contribution to the retail ecosystem at large. Retailers Day is now a global movement adopted by multiple retail chains globally. This is also meant to increase pride among people in working in the retail ecosystem which is crucial if PWDs need to overcome barriers around cultural hiring in the retail ecosystem.
Second is the TRRAIN Retail Awards which are the only retail awards in India, and perhaps in the world, that recognise, acknowledge and felicitate front end retail associates for excellence in customer service. The awards are given to the ones who have walked the mile, and are pivotal to encourage organisations which have built successful disability models for PWDs to do well in their careers. Apart from fostering recognition, these awards lead to networking and best practices’ sharing among retail partners which will improve inclusivity in the retail sector as a whole in the long run.
Third, TRRAIN also launched a technology platform — TRRAIN Circle — which can be used by retail organisations to re-skill their workers on job as also for continued workforce development through expert talks, webinars and sharing circles. During COVID this became a crucial focus for mental health support to retail workers who came under critical manpower categories.
Impact of TRRAIN initiatives through their approach has been:
Candidate Level
Income Change - 36% of candidates earned an average income range of $1800-$2400 per annum post being placed in the retail sector, which matched the retail industry average income of $1927 per annum for an able-bodied person.
Household impact - 60% of PWDs post placement were able to contribute in some way to financial expenses at home. While 7% purchased an asset, 6% took loans, and 22% made small investments in savings. The biggest win for PWDs is that 24% of families are involving PWDs in decision-making at home as they are income contributors. 30% of families felt now communities are starting to respect them which resulted in a 19% increase in socializing. Over some time this would break down social barriers for these PWDs which have existed for a long time..
Employer level:
1. Higher employee loyalty:
PWDs are high performance workers among which 39% of the partners felt that they are more punctual to the workplace, 25% show more productivity in the work, 22% are more loyal to the organization and 14% of the PWDs take fewer
days off.
2. Reduced attrition: Employers who recruited PWDs in junior levels said their average attrition rate for PWDs was only around 4% with industry average for able bodied workers being as high as 19% in the retail sector.
3. Increased customer satisfaction : Key to increased hiring by employers was customer satisfaction. Of the 73 employers across the country who participated in the impact survey, 57 employers experienced an increase in customer satisfaction in outlets which hired candidates with disabilities.
Customers who shopped there were quoted as saying “I come to this coffee store every morning to get my morning coffee. It helps that the staff are super cheerful and sweet but also I have noticed that they employ people with disabilities. I feel that by coming to this store I am adding to their income and contributing to their growth. In a way I am doing good karma.”
Additionally, 21% noted that hiring candidates with disabilities demonstrated a commitment to diversity and inclusivity as well as improved their brand image.. Given that 80% of jobs in the retail sector involve customer interaction, employing candidates with disabilities has the potential to raise awareness and promote sensitivity on a broader scale. Furthermore, 12% mentioned that employing candidates with disabilities reduced recruitment costs due to higher retention rates.
These outcomes create a positive atmosphere for business and boosts the overall reputation of retail companies.
Drivers, Influencers and Enablers for TRRAIN’s success.
Drivers: Drivers are those that motivate the candidates to pursue something. In TRRAIN’s case a key driver was their desire to support their families because of financial issues, especially due to compromised food security because of the pandemic. Those with disabilities feel they are a burden and need help. Nearly 63% of students who were employed are from daily wage earner families. 35% of them come from farming families who are economically marginalised and PWDs in their families require extra care and cost.
Influencers: Influencers are those in their immediate families or circle who either encourage or discourage the drive that is shown by the candidate. In TRRAIN, influencers were parents, alumni of the program and trainers who were from the community itself.
Parents of PWDs played a pivotal role in their lives, and help make a lot of crucial decisions for them. Knowing this, some crucial steps TRRAIN took in this regard was regular parent teacher meetings, focusing on gauging parents’ awareness of the retail space and their receptiveness to their child working in a customer facing job. For example, in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Telangana, there was less enthusiasm in communities to send children for retail or sales oriented jobs. As culturally these jobs are seen to be of a lesser status than desk jobs. Hence, though they may be open to having their children complete training for the purpose of obtaining a certificate, they are not keen on them accepting a job offer in such roles. This is true more for girls than boys who are undertaking employment training.
The course being free for women aspirants also influenced the families to support. 86% of current PWDs said that their parent's support in completing the training course was crucial in helping them solve challenges and move forward. While 90% of alumni said that their parents were their backbone when it came to continuing employment. Friends and similarly disadvantaged and/or disabled who had been for training were influencers, particularly since they mentioned that their self-confidence improved after the training.
The influencing role of alumni was picked up by TRRAIN. TRRAIN specifically worked with the NGO partners to standardise the training experience all the way from curriculum to placement and post placement support, with the aim of developing brand recognition and pride among alumni over the long run. 35% of the children enrolled in the course due to the counselling provided by NGO partners and trainers.
TRRAIN also focuses on building the capacity of the trainers from the community itself to deliver the training so that both the community and trainers are vested in the employability of the PWD. Over 65% of the trainers were from the community itself. They engaged with students over a period of 60-120 days. The trainers were key for the transformation of students.
“Its not about just placement of these students madam, for years we have lived here and seen these children who are our friends, neighbours drop out of school, face neglect and land up wasting their life. When they come to our centres and we see them developing confidence and being able to start working we feel we have transformed lives. In fact we also accompany most of our students with disabilities to their interviews till they are placed. Many of them the come stay in touch with us even after placement. When they come back with their first salary and contribute at home the pride we feel is priceless.” – Trainer in one of TRRAIN partner NGOs centre.
Enablers: Enablers are broader ecosystem support services (beyond the family and immediate community). In a sense, TRRAIN’s initiatives built the enabling ecosystem where very little existed before by: working with existing NGOs to train their trainers to deliver better in market standards; working with corporates involving recognition based awards and working through technology for skills and upgradation. As the impact section below will show, retailers are experiencing higher economic value through increased customer footfall, enhanced brand image and lesser attrition all which makes a case for increased hiring in this space. Apart from driving crucial recognition mentioned in the retailer recognition strategies previously, the initiatives serve a very important place in bringing together various ecosystem partners to collaborate, network and ideate for creating a more inclusive ecosystem in the future.
Macro-economic impact: Opportunity Areas
While this model has already ensured that employability facilitation has happened for many candidates across the country and they have been placed in the retail ecosystem there are inherent macroeconomic alignments that will have to be made to ensure success of this model at scale.
1. Recognizing the economic value of employing PWD’s:
Though 71% of employers confirmed that PWDs were part of the regular salary increment systems. PWDs interviewed reiterated that this often was not the case.
Employers accepted that they often had to incur considerable expenditure to reorient their supply chains and work places to being disabled friendly (including workstations, toilet infrastructure, specialized SOP’s).
As a part of their inclusion readiness programmes 43% of the retail partners have adopted a mentorship system to ensure PWDs can successfully integrate with the workforce. 34% of partners undertook additional awareness sessions with existing employees before hiring PWDs. 22% have implemented flexible working hours as a policy for PWDs.
The table enclosed table encloed here shows the typical salary increments received by PWD’s in the retail value chain. 57% of the retail partners admitted to giving less than 10 % increments, which is just enough to beat inflation.
Unless the economic value of benefits gained from employment of PWDs is quantified and set the same off against expenses or if the government were to subsidize the expenses initially made till economies of scale is achieved, the economic benefits to PWDs might be delayed. With increment cycles not even matching inflation trends and PWDs getting some part of that economic value earned, attrition increases after 1.5 to 2 years of employment.
2. Needs and aspirations mapping - There needs to be differentiation based on aspirational and needs-based, geography and region-wise differences for PWDs when they are looking for employment and a career. When employed PWDs were asked their career goals, 17% wished to pursue a corporate job in any sector and 47% wished to pursue front and back-end jobs in retail. Significantly, 36% said they wanted to start their enterprises in the future. This was due to the fact that the rural candidates come from agrarian households who derive their incomes from multiple livelihood sources. For them pride is in self employment and, hence, even after placement they were not very keen on pursuing jobs in retail. Further, there were limitations imposed by cultural restrictions observed by communities which meant PWDs were reluctant to travel to other places for work.
However, this does not mean that there is no demand for the services of PWD in retail. While interviewing employers to understand their top priority areas for hiring, 32% of them said sales functioning as a hire was crucial, 25% hired for customer service roles and 14% hired for field assistance, and 30% hired for other roles. However, post placement, a key challenge for the PWD’s is the mismatch in the actual resolve against the role promised. In addition, there was no roadmap for the PWD’s to achieve their aspirational goals.
This mismatch can be because of cultural differences or geographical constraints, due to which while employers want to hire PWD’s they are still reluctant to put them into customer facing roles.
While cultural and geographic constraints can be resolved over time. interim steps would need to be taken to create better awareness on sales jobs and the potential they hold for scale and growth both socially and economically.
Further as these PWD’s are from an agrarian background, retail employers need to remember that self-employment is always in demand. Hence, they would have to build processes that allow people to work in retail ecosystem while being self employed. Retailers across the country in India like D Mart are already moving actively into tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This will allow candidates to be closer to their home town and pursue multiple livelihoods with a stable salary that work in retail provides. This trend is more pronounced post COVID -19.
4. Technology platforms: While technology platforms are very crucial for post learning candidates with disabilities are often dependent on their trainers for regular support and capacity building during their work. Technology platforms greatly helped during COVID with over 56% of the PWDs actively using them in COVID for various reasons such as mental health counselling, re-skilling and job searching.
Post-COVID there has been a sharp decline in engagement. This is largely due to the nature of the retail industry where PWDs spend over 10 hours on the retail floors without access to their smart devices. After work in the evenings, many of these candidates who become more confident and social (because they did not have access to their devices) now prefer to continue personal interaction with each other or their trainers. Hence physical spaces for candidates to share their experience, reskilling and communicating with each other is crucial as over a period as it will build their confidence and also encourage more PWDs to seek employment in retail. Reskilling through a mix of online and offline focused on creating solidarity spaces where retail employees can share and interact with each other and network could be crucial in the long run to increasing the number of people in the retail sector.
Working on creating a technology platform to support trainers and community leaders work better with the candidates over the long run will allow for better transfer of knowledge and skills. It will allow for trainers to be better equipped in dealing with changing trends and best practices while hand holding the PWDs in their workplace in the long run.
5. Health factors: Most PWDs who were employed for over 3-4 years in retail often complained about physical health concerns like back pains, varicose veins, and muscular discomfort. This was largely due to the expectation that retail workers need to be standing during their entire shift for 10-12 hours which comes from norms in the service industry where standing is believed to signify a more attentive employee and company. This practice is particularly challenging for PWDs who have physical limitations. In smaller towns retailers are now doing away with this practice and creating small spaces where employees can sit at the time they are not serving a customer.. However, larger retailers are still reluctant to adopt these practices due to global operating procedures and the brand image concerns. With a customer base which is increasingly becoming empathetic, small changes to the global practices in the long run will increase the participation in the retail sector.
By Rajashri Sai, Deepa Soman and Vanita Viswanath
References