Hidden Gems Ready to Shine – Disability Employment in Indonesia
There are 11 million people with disabilities in Indonesia. Despite having laws that support initiatives in hiring people with disabilities, the differently-abled workers still face difficulties in gaining employment. Disabilitas Kerja Indonesia (DKI) is a social enterprise that specializes in disability employment in Indonesia. DKI strives to be the most preferred and trusted partner by their clients and disabilities candidates by providing excellent ready-to-work disabilities workforce with a variety of differing roles. DKI’s mission statement goes, “Giving them a chance. Not charity.” embodies their social mission to make a truly positive difference for differently-abled workers. DKI also empowers disability workforce via training to increase their competitiveness for the industry. However, DKI experienced challenges to place the visually impaired into organisations due to pre-existing social stigma. Furthermore, with the ongoing pandemic situation, several companies have also rescinded their engagements with DKI. This initiative was taken to examine the current disability employment landscape of Indonesia and the key challenge is how to convince companies to be more inclusive and employ visually impaired workers via employer branding ideologies.
Through this international project, students were able to apply their employer branding knowledge and solve real-world problems on a global scale. The main focus of the project is to develop ways that DKI can use to influence hiring practices of Indonesian organizations (start-ups, SMEs, government agencies, and large conglomerates) to be more inclusive and, subsequently, engage DKI as their recruitment consultant of choice. This presents the students with the opportunity for data collection to better understand the vastly different cultural perceptions in Indonesian with regards to hiring differently-abled workers, develop targeted recommendations and translate the benefits through a business pitch. Ultimately, the students developed an evidence-based recommendation to elevate employer branding by introducing the “Asset-Based Community Development approach”, which is in line with the social-enterprise goal of empowering the disabled. To further maximise the employer-market brand via the integration model, the students also developed an industry dashboard and a targeted client analysis that allowed DKI to take immediate action. Additionally, working beyond the geographical boundaries, students learned to be more culturally sensitive and gain a greater appreciation for cross border collaborations. On this journey, students were able to further enhance their entrepreneurial, problem-solving and communication skills not just within a classroom setting but through interactions with industry partners.
“Being my first client-based project, my Employer Branding journey was like boarding a high-speed thrill ride and seeing the satisfactory smiles on the client’s faces on the D-day made it all worthwhile. Through the course, my perspective of the DKI case evolved, I became more aware and cognizant about the potential positive social impact of the project on Indonesian society. The case shine light on social empathy and made me see visible growth in my emotional maturity. Our professors also emphasised learning by observing resolutions to unscripted, unplanned and rare occurrences that happened in class. From there, I took home dynamic capabilities like adaptive thinking, which is central to the VUCA environment today.” - Li Mingyao, Student, Lee Kong Chian School of Business