Thank you. As you said, I was the former senior vice-president of logistics and supply chain at Walgreens. Part of my responsibilities were 20 distribution centres, fulfillment centres, to service our 8,000 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
In 2003, we began planning a new generation of fulfillment centres with two objectives: one, to be one of the most efficient centres in the world; and two, to have an inclusive workforce, with people with disabilities composing one-third of the workforce.
We knew we wanted a sustainable model; that is, people with disabilities and people without disabilities doing the same jobs, working side by side, making the same pay, held to the same standards. We knew that we needed to have an overriding philosophy that we would be consistent in objective but flexible in means. For instance, when we started, we knew that our traditional method of filling out a request and looking for qualified applicants would not be sufficient, so we opened a side door, so to speak, in the hiring process, an intern to hire, where people could demonstrate their capabilities and avoid some of the trip-ups in the hiring process: the exact match to our job description, the continuous job history, the interview for fit. We engaged outside agencies to help us find that workforce, train them, prepare them, and help them through the transition.
The first centre opened in 2007 in South Carolina, where 40% of the workforce have a disability. The second building opened up three years later in Connecticut, where almost 50% of the people have a disability. These are the most efficient centres in the 100-year history of our company.
No doubt we've changed lives. For instance, when I was in Connecticut I talked a young man who has multiple seizures a day who told me he had been looking for a job for 17 years and had been unsuccessful until then, or the terrific HR manager we got with CP, cerebral palsy, who made all As in graduate school, and had 30 in-person interviews and not a single job offer, or the 50-something man with an intellectual disability who took his first paycheque home and came back the next day and asked his supervisor, “Why did my mom cry?” There are stories like that on and on. We're lucky to have them, but with our traditional thinking and processes we would not have hired a single one.
What is astounding is the impact on the entire workplace. We have had to learn to treat each person as an individual instead of an interchangeable part, something we say we do lots of times but in real practice we fall short of. We've learned that disability is just a matter of degree, that we all share a level of brokenness deep down, and that we are more alike than we're different. In the end there is no “them”; it's just “us”.
More important, we've learned that the satisfaction of our own success doesn't compare to the joy of making someone else successful. As one manager put it, in this place, people think of each other before they think of themselves. When you have a workplace where everybody is focused on common goals and making each other successful in achieving them, it's like lightning in a bottle.
The idea spread. It spread across all 20 centres, and within four years we had hired 1,000 people with disabilities, and we opened up all the centres to the world to come and see for themselves what an inclusive workforce can be. I would invite you to also come and see for yourself. Hundreds of companies came. Many launched their own initiative, like UPS, Procter & Gamble, Lowe's, Toys“R”us, Marks and Spencer in the U.K., and so on.
When I talked to those leaders about why they launched their own initiative, a cost-benefits study rarely comes up. It's usually a version of, we recognized that we were leaving behind a group of people who can and want to do the job.
We need more leaders and companies to show the way for others to follow, to help companies overcome the fears that this will cost more, this will take more effort, it will make them less competitive, or they will make mistakes and be punished for it. We need more help as employers in finding and supporting that workforce through the transition to successful employment.
This is an idea whose time has come, and we need to make employers the offer, as Don Corleone did in The Godfather, the offer they cannot refuse. We need to be able to tell employers, “If you will consider that there is a group out there that you cannot have access to with your current methods, that can do the work, and wants to do the work, and will likely improve the workplace; if you would just entertain that idea, we'll come and understand your jobs, find and screen the workforce that we believe will be capable and successful, and support them all the way through.”
As I said, this is an idea whose time has come, and for those who have been involved in this, this is the best work of our lives.
Thank you.