Emerging Trends: Walgreeens Leads the Way in Employing Workers with Disabilities

This paper is due by Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015 at 10:00pm.
Assignment Choice #1: Emerging Trends: Walgreeens Leads the Way in Employing Workers with Disabilities
Read Case 3.1 in Managing Human Resources. After reading the case, please complete the following items:
Write a summary of the case,
Answer the critical thinking questions, and
Elaborate on two key learnings from the case related to equal employment opportunity and managing diversity. Be sure to clearly state the two key learnings and defend them in well-organized, scholarly responses.
A key learning is defined as significant knowledge gained from reading the case. You may choose to explain your key learnings by offering a real world application, personal insight, your thoughts and opinions about what was stated, how it is handled at your company, etc.
Please arrange your summary, questions, and key learnings in a well-organized, scholarly response of 2-3 pages. Support your observations and opinions with citations from 2-3 credible sources documented according to the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA Requirements. The CSU-Global Library is a great place to search for credible and scholarly sources.
Case 3.1 Emerging Trends 
Walgreens Leads the Way in Utilizing
Workers with Disabilities
In 2008, Walgreens, one of the nation’s largest drugstore retailers, opened a state-of-the-art distribution center in Windsor, Connecticut. It is the company’s second facility designed specifically to employ people with disabilities and patterned after a similar one that opened in 2007 in South Carolina. Managers at both facilities share a goal of having people with disabilities fill at least one-third of the available jobs.
Walgreens has developed a reputation as a company that offers meaningful jobs to people with diverse backgrounds with equal opportunities for advancement and job mobility. Company leaders intend to open more distribution centers that employ disabled workers and plan to use the experience in the facilities in Connecticut and South Carolina to provide managers in other units with information that will result in the hiring of more people with disabilities.
The South Carolina distribution center has a workforce of 400, with 40 percent having a disclosed physical or cognitive disability. Yet the facility’s efficiency increased by 20 percent since it’s opening, after technology and process changes originally intended to accommodate workers with disabilities improved everyone’s jobs. The experience of creating a disability-friendly environment in its distribution centers has been a transforming event for the company, according to one of Walgreen’s corporate executives of human resources.
Many employers do not share or practice Walgreens’ level of long-term commitment and investment in hiring people with disabilities, but demographic trends suggest that more companies should, and will ultimately have to, as growth of the traditional labor pool slows, the workforce ages, and disability rates increase. As more business executives recognize and support the hiring and development of workers with disabilities, a chronically underemployed group, the business benefits of tapping this talent pool becomes clear.
Critical Thinking Questions
1. What are the tangible and intangible benefits that Walgreens receives by being a leader in hiring employees with disabilities?
2. Only about half of the disabled people who want to work are employed. What barriers do people with disabilities face in obtaining employment that are not concerns of other groups protected by the EEOC, such as minorities, women, or the aged?
Team Exercise
A serious barrier to employment of people with disabilities continues to be a perception problem. Managers and coworker lack knowledge, awareness, and comfort in working with disabled employees. Form a team with three or four classmates and develop a strategy to overcome misperceptions surrounding utilizing employees with disabilities. Be ready to present your team’s ideas to the rest of the class when called on by the instructor.
Experiential Exercise: Individual
The purpose of this exercise is to raise your self-awareness of some of the problems faced by disabled employees in the work- force. Assume that you have had an accident that will restrict your mobility for a year and that you will need to use a wheelchair while you recover from the accident. Consider how the restrictions on your mobility would affect your life as a student. What accommodations would your teachers need to make for you so you could attend your classes during the academic year? If you were employed on a part-time job, would you be able to continue doing this job as before in a wheelchair? If not, would the employer be able to restructure the job in a way so you could make a significant contribution as an employee? How would the job change? How could you convince your employer that you should be retained in your job? Be prepared to share your answers to these questions with other members of the class.