Retaining a job

Retaining a job as important as finding a job. As I have mentioned in my earlier post, it’s important to make a conscious decision before accepting an employment offer. As you spend your initial time to get acquainted with company, people, its processes etc., company also invest in you to help you gain knowledge that is needed to work for their organisation and that investment is actually beyond what they pay you salary such as assigning another resource to provide you training, get the right tools for you etc., If you leave that job soon, while you need to invest your time to learn about another organisation, even company needs to invest the same on another hire. So it’s very important to think carefully before accepting an offer.

Once you accept an employment, you must adhere to policies of the organisation, perform duties that are assigned to you; Now-a-days, in a lot of companies specially in multi-national companies and especially for people who are working in the field of accessibility domain, it’s our responsibility to be proactive. In my past several years of experience, there are a lot of instances, where I need to decide what I need to do and not that my Manager has assigned something to me on daily basis. This is because sometimes hiring manager may not have full knowledge about domain that you have hired for. Hence it’s important we take proactive measures and have company move forward. While taking such proactive measures, one should start asking a question “Does this makes sense or relevant to my company?” and not that “does this get me additional knowledge?”. Yes, self learning is important, but at the same time work you do must be relevant to business objectives of the organisation.

No company in this world will have a perfect environment as there are no perfect people in this world. There will be some problem or the other in every organisation. Based on the issue, we should work with relevant teams, sort out and move forward. This is more important for people with disabilities because major factor in many companies is that we find inaccessible infrastructure including digital infrastructure. We will find less problems with companies who have track record of working with people with disabilities for a long time but we will find more more problems at companies who may not have exposure of working with disabilities. However, even such companies are responsive if we go with right approach. Firstly, we should stop with a cribbing approach. We should write to relevant teams explaining situation and propose a few possible solutions. While providing solutions, be as cost effective as possible. If solution is too expensive, often it takes a longer time for companies to address  the issue. Take one issue at a time or club relative issues together. To make your work place inclusive, while offering advice to relevant teams, you should express taking ownership of the process. This does not mean that you should join in people team but spend some of your time to drive such initiatives. This is important during initial stage of building diversity and inclusion at a company.

In the next post I will talk about when one should consider switching a job. All the best; stay safe and Stay home.

Let’s gear to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day on March 21, 2020. This year, most events take place virtually and HelloA11Y is one such event with great speakers.

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Srinivasu Chakravarthula

Srinivasu is an accessibility evangelist with 16+ years of experience. Currently works as Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Watermark. Previousely held several positions at companies like BarrierBreak, Yahoo, PayPal, Deque, HCL etc., He believes in the teachings of Shri. Adi Sankaracharya, Swami Vivekananda. He is also Founder of ServeOM Inclusion – a platform to pormote accessibility.