ML Journal

Angela Accurso, a Next-Generation Leadership winner, shares how accessibility through tech and training can bring untapped workers into manufacturing. 

 

Penelope Brown: Hello everyone and welcome to our latest edition of Executive Dialogue and I’m happy to be here today with Angela Accurso who was one of our Next-Generation Leadership winners at this most recent year’s Manufacturing Leadership Awards. We had a really great crop of young leaders honored in this category this year and Angela, of course, had some really outstanding accomplishments.

Angela it’s great to have you here today.

Angela Accurso: It’s great to be here thank you for having me.

PB: And I should back up a bit. Angela is the director of workforce programs at the MxD, so much of her focus is on accessibility in manufacturing and that’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit today.

Angela much of your work is about making manufacturing more accessible to those with disabilities, so how do you define accessibility?

AA: Great question and on the baseline level, it really truly means that everyone – regardless of disability status or any other characteristics – has access to and can fully engage within the workplace within manufacturing. But as I think of it, it also goes beyond that so what can manufacturers and the workplace do to meet the physical, social and cognitive needs of every employee and also foster that sense of inclusion where everyone feels valued, everyone feels heard and actually feels that they’re a part of something larger and are appreciated for who they are as a person and what they bring to the table.

PB: Let’s talk about some of those specific things that manufacturers can do. How can a manufacturer take stock of their accessibility? And what are the some of the things that they might be able to do to improve it?

AA: There are a number of different ways to do that. First is really put in the work to undergo the training it’s not a surprise that perhaps not many workplaces have really invested in disability inclusion or disability accessibility training. There are a number of different partners within communities – whether that’s a community-based organization within your network or other folks or consultants that specialize in disability inclusion – those are certainly really great places to start.

“[Accessibility] truly means that everyone – regardless of disability status or any other characteristics – has access to and can fully engage within the workplace.”

 

MxD is developing an accessibility training for manufacturers as well as university and community college partners, and we’re developing that in partnership with Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago, which is a community-based organization here in the Chicagoland area and they’re part of a national network for centers for independent living and we’re developing that. Currently we’re actually undergoing in-person trainings with manufacturers across Illinois and Wisconsin, but we are developing a training that is going to be a virtual course on our virtual training center platform so individuals who would like to really prioritize disability inclusion can take those courses and understand how to learn the language of disability, how to understand how your operations can be improved, and they can do that from anywhere in the world. That’s going to be dropping in just the next month or so,  but if you’re really prone to wanting to work with a community-based organization, your own community is a really great way and place to start. Doing the work and walking your talk is a really great place to showcase to your employees that you do care about disability inclusion.

Other great ways to do that are doing a full audit. How do you empower your staff to actually feel comfortable coming forward if they do have a disability? One thing I’ll illuminate to manufacturers is that you very much have employees with disabilities already working with you right now. There are 61 million people in the United States who identify as having a disability. While the rates of unemployment are higher for individuals with disabilities, there are certainly individuals with disabilities  represented across every sector in the United States including manufacturing. Manufacturers may just not know that an individual has a disability because they don’t feel comfortable coming to disclose or feel perhaps their job might be at risk. We know that about 76% of employees with disabilities do not disclose that to their employer. And so employers may be thinking “Oh that’s not a need I have to meet on one side because I don’t have an employee that has actively shared that they have a disability.” Whereas employees are saying “I don’t feel comfortable fully coming forward and I can’t fully engage with work the way I want to.” So being able to analyze your current practices and how you could make your workplace more inclusive from the get-go from anybody would be a great place to start. Analyzing policies and procedures, do you have accessible infrastructure, do you have a ramp that could be useful for somebody that uses a wheelchair, those sorts of things.

A lot of those are relatively simple fixes. The median cost of a reasonable accommodation is only $500, so for relatively small investment, employers could be making really great headway for individuals who work for them.

And then also thinking about technology. Technology not just for innovation’s sake, but how you can actually use technology to create accessible working environments because we believe that technology can actually be something that levels the playing field for all individuals in the workplace.

PB: Yes, let’s dive into that a little bit. I mean obviously here at the Manufacturing Leadership Council our focus is very much on shop floor technology, so how can that be something that can bridge a gap for workers with disabilities?

AA: Some of the technologies that we discuss as emerging technologies are great use cases for disability inclusion: augmented reality, virtual reality, the use of drones or robots. You know those are things that while they have a use case for innovation that we talk about time and time again, we don’t necessarily talk about them being something that can actually support disability inclusion.

“The median cost of a reasonable accommodation is only $500, so for a relatively small investment, employers could be making really great headway.”

 

For an example, augmented reality. We have this on MxD’s factory floor tour. We demonstrate augmented reality in an assembly line fashion and it essentially projects through light-guided systems work instructions onto an assembly line table and provides turn-by-turn instructions for an individual to actually go through the assembly process, which is really great if you think about an individual who perhaps has a disability that impacts their memory, being able to have the turn-by-turn instructions is a great way to ensure that they’re fully comfortable with the process.

Virtual reality is also a great way to simulate what a working environment can look like before an individual even starts the work process and is great for an individual with a disability to be comfortable with what the environment will look like and gain that spatial awareness.

There are a number of different use cases where we talk about technology being a catalyst for innovation but also being a catalyst for disability inclusion. We challenge manufacturers to think a little bit about it being a win-win scenario: not only are you investing in emerging technology to help your operations run better, faster, smarter, more efficient, but you’re also allowing a whole crop of really talented people and an untapped talent pool to be able to participate in work that they perhaps haven’t been able to before.

PB:  Let’s talk a little bit about that untapped talent pool because obviously manufacturers, are struggling to hire. At the end of June there were something like 900,000 unfilled jobs nationally in manufacturing and maybe that figure has been updated but I can’t imagine it’s moved very much. So I would think that creating a more accessible workplace would help to address some of that issue and could bring in more talent to a manufacturer?

AA: Absolutely. We know exactly 900,000 open manufacturing jobs and then a grimmer outlook too when you’re thinking about the end of the decade when a projected more than 2 million unfilled manufacturing jobs are expected to be lost due to a skills gap and due to retirement but also not being able to build up that talent pipeline. And we can’t keep thinking about if we, perhaps, have a vision of what an ideal worker in manufacturing looks like that doesn’t include untapped or under-engaged talent including individuals with disabilities, black and brown communities, veterans, women – these are all talent groups that really have not been engaged as much as they should be within manufacturing. As a result, we don’t have that talent pipeline to build up.

Some really great organizations including MxD, including other Manufacturing Innovation Institutes (MIIs) and other community-based organizations have seen that this is really an opportunity for manufacturers to think outside the box of what their traditional thought process is behind an ideal individual to work in manufacturing. But that also requires manufacturers to have to do the work to make sure that they’re creating workplaces that are incredibly accessible and inclusive because we’ve heard time and time again employees say, “I did the work, I went through the training, I dedicated my time to get a certificate in what my employer said, but at the end of the day I didn’t feel comfortable working there because I didn’t see myself there, I didn’t feel that I had the infrastructure there to support me, whether that be time off to leave early and pick up my kids from school or take time off for leave or at the very basic level there wasn’t a ramp for me to be able to enter the building  if I use a wheelchair.”

There’s certainly a lot of individuals who understand what a great career at manufacturing can be but we need manufacturers to really understand they have to do the work to make it a great place to work.

“We need manufacturers to really understand they have to do the work to make it a great place to work.”

 

PB: Let’s talk a little bit about your career background. Before you came to MxD, you were working on strategic programs at YWCA, which is obviously a much different organization than heavy industry or manufacturing. How did that experience inform what you’re working to accomplish in manufacturing now?

AA: Yeah, you’re totally right. It was a completely different industry in that I came to MxD without a whole lot of technical background on manufacturing, but I certainly knew what a great economic opportunity it could be to have a manufacturing job. And the programming that I led at YWCA Chicago was aligned mostly toward their mission to eliminate racism and empower women. We had a number of different programs to do that including economic empowerment programming – programs to help women and black and brown communities get into trades jobs. That could include electricians, it could include manufacturing, but we had a number of programs to get folks into the trades and we saw individuals have just the most incredible success stories. Going from working $12 an hour to going through a 12-week training program at YWCA Chicago and graduating after that 3 months making $65,000 starting salary and with benefits. That is huge, huge, huge and it speaks to the potential of a manufacturing career. When we think about manufacturing jobs I think they can be a catalyst to rebuild the American middle class, can be a source of financial sustainability, and really making sure that folks who have not had access to those job opportunities or those career opportunities it really is a game changer for economic and financial sustainability.

These are really strong family sustaining wages that have been very strong for a really long time and is one of the really wonderful perks that manufacturing offers and a lot of what I saw at YWCA Chicago has guided the design of our MxD programming as well.

So how do we engage the under-engaged including women, minorities, veterans, individuals with disabilities and you-name-it, but also how do we get the word out about what I think is just a really great kept secret – and I don’t want it to be a great kept secret anymore: American manufacturing jobs are really, really strong and they can be such a source for economic vitality within the United States.

PB: In your nomination for the Manufacturing Leadership Awards last year, a theme that kept getting repeated over and over again was your ability to really create collaborations, especially across organizations. What do you think are keys to creating a successful collaboration?

AA: As much as I would like to say that MxD, alone, is going to close that 2 million worker gap, it’s just not feasible. No single organization is going to be able to do this alone. When you find those right partners that have that shared mission, that vision and goal are really going to be key to a strong collaboration. Often we get bogged down in the day-to-day and think that we’re the only ones focused on this work, but in reality there are a lot of really great organizations that are so aligned and so eager to partner. It could be a community college that is really ingrained in their community and really understands what their community needs and it has tapped into high schools and employers needs as well. And then perhaps how can we support them in getting great content? Or how can we be thought leaders about American manufacturing jobs and the importance of an inclusive workforce? And there is also an employer that says “I’m on it. I absolutely believe what you’re putting down and now I’m going to go out there and hire more individuals with disabilities, but I do need your support in helping me do the work.”

That’s how we can support and help with our training courses. So I think that mission alignment and goal alignment and the shared values are going to be key to really setting up any collaboration for success.

PB: Well, all of this is incredibly important and shows why you are one of our top Next-Generation Leadership winners last year. You have some tremendous insights on all of this. Thank you so much for your time today and for sharing all of this with us and we’re really excited to see what you do in the future.

AA: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to be a part of this process.

PB: Thanks, Angela.

AA: Thank you.  M

About the Interviewer:

 

Penelope Brown is Senior Content Director for the NAM’s Manufacturing Leadership Council