P&G in Auburn opens its doors to a new kind of worker

Daniel Twitchell is a 21-year-old recent high school graduate who can't vocalize more than 50 or so words. To express his needs, he uses signs, word boards and a tablet programmed with simple phrases and words. Despite this limitation, he landed a job at Procter & Gamble's Tambrands factory in Auburn this summer, and since then, has become the face of P&G's inclusive hiring initiative. When the company on Aug. 2 unveiled a new manufacturing station where Twitchell and other employees with disabilities work, it was Twitchell who cut the ribbon.

Asked whether he likes his job, Twitchell nods "yes" repeatedly, closing his eyes behind his glasses to reinforce the feeling. He has just wrapped up a six-hour shift as one of the company's newest hires in a work-force development program that has been surprisingly successful in its three months of operation.

P&G's Auburn site is the sole manufacturer of Tampax tampons in North America and makes more than 10 million tampons a day, according to the company. The facility has some 500 employees — the vast majority of them able-bodied workers, many of whom oversee machines that in 15 minutes can pump out a lifetime supply of tampons. Although the plant is mostly automated, with silent robots gliding up and down its wide corridors, P&G has recently begun hiring for a new production center it built within the facility to handle customized orders. These orders include, for example, tampon boxes with different packaging shipped to England or Korea. Previously, P&G had subcontracted this work out to other plants, but the company opted to bring the service in-house to save on transportation costs and ensure quality control, according to Human Resources Director Jodi Eller.

While the company was planning its new customization center, P&G executive Miguel Garcia, whose daughter has Down syndrome, proposed staffing it with disabled workers. After all, the center was to be named, fittingly, the FlexiCenter. "Flexibility is the whole concept," Eller says. To research Garcia's idea, several P&G staff visited a Walgreens distribution center in South Carolina where 40% of the workers have a disablity. They were inspired by what they saw, Eller recalls. "It took us a year to figure out the model," she continues, because the company had to learn how to screen, train, compensate, schedule and manage a new kind of worker.

To date, the company has hired 52 people for its FlexiCenter.; about 19 of them have a disability. The plant plans to hire more workers for its customized operation, but hasn't set targets yet, according to Eller. The workers pack tampon boxes that come streaming down conveyor belts, and then stack boxes onto pallets, working alongside retired teachers, college students, single mothers and longtime P&G employees.

"This is not a charity program," Eller says. "The big breakthrough was putting people with disabilities side by side with people without disabilities. We hold them to the same expectations as other employees workers and they're rising to the challenge." All of the FlexiCenter's part-time employees start at $9 an hour and are eligible for some benefits, Eller says. The center runs around the clock, with minimum six-hour shifts.

The FlexiCenter is, at the moment, the most substantial hiring program for those with disabilities in Maine, according to Valerie Oswald, a business consultant for Maine's Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. She says, however, that more Maine companies, including a large unnamed manufacturer in southern Maine, are beginning to rethink their hiring policies, especially in light of P&G's program. "It's only been in the last five years that businesses are starting to catch on to this," Oswald says, "and it all goes back to Walgreens."

Work force potential

Walgreens invites companies to visit its distribution center in Anderson, S.C., to witness its hiring experiment. It even offers a free week-long training program it calls "boot camp" for companies looking for guidance on inclusive hiring. More than 100 businesses have participated, according to Walgreens. Eller participated in the boot camp, where she met Angela Mackey, a manager with cerebral palsy, and some of the 300 or so other employees with disabilities. She called the visit "eye opening."

"Thirty to 40% of the people had disabilities and you couldn't tell," she says.

Dan Coughlin, a vice president at Walgreens, says in the five years since Walgreens opened its doors to the disabled, the turnover among these workers has been 50% lower than those without disabilities. He says their productivity is equal to able-bodied workers, and that the distribution center has seen a 54% decrease in accidents, "because they pay attention … and are not easily distracted." Additionally, he says these workers have had 67% fewer medical claims than their able-bodied counterparts.

These claims, as well as the emotional testimonials they heard from employees and some employees' parents, helped convince P&G managers to mimic Walgreens' program, Eller says.

Beyond decreasing turnover, boosting a business' public image, elevating workplace morale or even creating more sensitive managers, hiring disabled workers can also be a practical solution to staffing needs in Maine — especially as Maine's baby boomers retire. Since the early 1960s, births in Maine have declined 40%, and half the population will be 44 and older by 2018, according to the Maine Center for Workforce Research and Information. With the number of women entering the work force leveling off, growth in Maine's labor force between 2008 and 2018 is expected to nudge up only 2%, down from 7% growth the previous decade, and 11% the decade prior to that.

"At some point in the future, as boomers age out, we'll likely be looking at a labor force decline," says Glenn Mills, the center's director of economic research. While the recession "alleviated much of the labor-force challenges for businesses," Mills says, "eventually we'll get back to a faster rate of growth, and there is reason to believe businesses will be challenged to be fully staffed."

Mary LaFontaine, the manager of Lewiston's CareerCenter, says, however, there's a clear solution to a future worker shortage: people with disabilities, older workers, refugees, immigrants and people with criminal backgrounds. She says these groups represent large pools of untapped labor. Based on 2009 Census data, 42,204 employed workers in Maine had a disability out of the total 610,667 employed. About 7,700 or so disabled workers were unemployed, or roughly 15.4%, compared to a 7% unemployment rate for people without a disability. A further 65,000 weren't even in the work force, although Oswald says many could have been had they been given the right opportunity. (See chart, "Who's working?" this page.)

To help businesses tap the disabled work force, Oswald says her agency is tweaking its systems to support companies as it now supports job seekers. It recently installed a direct line for businesses, 1-800-ALL-HIRE, and is also planning more outreach to companies in the future. "My vision is that someday, and I really hope I see this in my lifetime, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is the same as with abilities," Oswald says. "It should be a reflection of the economy and not the disability."

The learning curve

While interest in the disabled labor force appears to be growing, some Maine companies — such as the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport and Presque Isle's Aroostook Centre Mall — have been hiring disabled workers for years.

Having a variety of employees with different abilities has created a tolerant, understanding and more enjoyable workplace, according to Chip Gray, the Harraseeket Inn's general manager. He says his diverse staff, which includes immigrants as well as the disabled, "promotes more of a family atmosphere. It's a work-family where everyone feels like they're part of it. It doesn't make a difference whether you're a brain surgeon or the maintenance man."

Patti Crooks, the general manager of the Aroostook mall, has hired people with disabilities for 15 years. Currently half of her 25-person staff has a disability. "It has probably made me a better manager, a more compassionate manager," she says. She's hired an assortment of people with disabilities, including autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as a man who had no arms, for janitorial work, maintenance, security and some customer service. "The longevity of these employees is incredible," she says. "They get in a groove, they're happy, it works."

Eller says she's already seen a better-than-average retention rate from her FlexiCenter employees. So far, none of center's disabled workers has quit, whereas two or three of the able-bodied have dropped out. "Here in Maine [at the P&G plant], we have a fairly high attrition rate. But with the disabled population the least utilized, they return you with dedicated, loyal, long-term employment," she says.

While a business might have every intention of treating a disabled employee as any other employee, it will inevitably face some unique challenges. Crooks warns, "It's very much a learning curve." For one, Crooks says she's had to become a more skillful communicator. "I deal with 20 different people in a day, and … to learn those different styles of management has been a career hurdle. You don't deal with an autistic person the same as someone who's chronically depressed or someone with one less limb."

Crooks also points out that scheduling shifts for disabled workers can be tricky because many work part time to avoid losing their public government disability benefits. Disability benefits can also make it difficult to adjust part-timers' pay and hours. The best employee in Crooks' 35-year career was a man with schizophrenia who "truly, truly loved his job here," she says. "I would try to give him more money but he said he can't take it because he'll lose his medical or Social Security benefits. More money would mean less hours doing the job he desperately loved." Instead, she compensated him by making him employee of the year twice and taking him out to dinner.

Training, too, might require slightly more time for some workers with disabilities, according to MaryAnn Schwanda, the employment coordinator for Strive U, a Portland-based social services organization that trains and finds employment for people with disabilities. At P&G, training materials were reprinted with more visual cues, and its FlexiCenter work stations labeled with animal mascots rather than numbers to make it easier for some folks to remember them.

Both Eller and Crooks say their programs are critically dependent on their partnerships with employment agencies. The Maine Bureau of Rehabilitation Services, and other job-services organizations such as Maine's CareerCenters, Pathways Inc. in Lewiston, Strive U and Aroostook Mental Health Center, can supply businesses with disabled applicants. They also perform job assessments and often provide ongoing job support and training, saving some companies from initial screening and training costs.

The Bureau of Rehabilitation Services also gave P&G managers a lesson in disability etiquette. They taught managers to use the phrase, "people with disabilities," rather than "disabled people," and coached them to speak to people directly rather than to their able-bodied partners. The managers in turn trained the rest of the P&G staff. So far, Eller says P&G's employees have been welcoming to the new recruits. Ken Roux, a technician at P&G, says he regularly interacts with FlexiCenter workers in the lunchroom. "They come in and sit with us and talk. They're like regular employees," he says.

Leading up to the launch of the FlexiCenter, Eller says she had no idea how important it would become to her. "I get goose bumps. When I look back at my career, this will have been the most important thing I've done," she says. "When you create a job, it's an opportunity for someone to be self-sufficient; you're giving them freedom."