Impressions - August/September 2023 - 32

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Jed Seifert
Jed Seifert, co-founder of Ohio-based Stakes Manufacturing
In this excerpt from the Impressions " Ask the Experts " podcast
and online video series, Impressions Content Director,
Adam Cort, talks with Jed Seifert, co-founder of Ohio-based
decorator Stakes Manufacturing about how hiring the disabled
doesn't just provide an opportunity for the person being
hired-it's also good business
Adam Cort: To start out, what I fi nd most
striking about hiring people with disabilities
as you describe it is that when done correctly
it really is a kind of ultimate win-win. As an
employer, you're not only helping someone
with disabilities lead a productive, fulfi lling
life, you're also, in many cases, aff ording yourself
the opportunity to hire some of the best
workers you could ever hope for.
Jed Seifert: Absolutely. When you're hiring
people with disabilities, it has to be meaningful
employment. It has to be mutually benefi cial.
If you're doing it for charity, if you're doing it
to get the warm and fuzzies, it's going to be
short-lived. You have to have accountability.
You have to have a performance metrics...at
the same time, at Stakes what we've seen is that
the benefi ts that the company received and the
benefi ts the non-disabled employees received
were just as substantial as the individuals with
disabilities. It has taught our managers and our
employees empathy and teamwork. It brought
people together in a manner that we had never
seen, both within individual departments and
cross-departmental. It helped our managers
become better managers, because they were
P.32
forced into tailoring their management and
training style to the individuals with disabilities...[which]
the reality is they should be
doing that with all employees. Our goal and
job as leaders, owners, managers, supervisors
is to really cultivate people's strengths and
mitigate their weaknesses, to put them in a
position to be successful. It's no diff erent with
people with disabilities. And while we often
talk about people's disabilities, a lot of folks
with disabilities have superpowers in other
ways. Somebody with autism, for example,
might have certain social challenges. But the
fl ip side of that is they're more detail oriented
than your average person without disabilities.
AC:Could you give me a few examples of some
of the people with disabilities now working
at Stakes Manufacturing and the roles they
are fi lling?
JS: We have a spectrum of people with disabilities
who work for us. We've got folks with
autism, Asperger's, cerebral palsy, some that
aren't even diagnosed right, but are defi nitely
on the spectrum. We started out in our warehouse
for a few reasons. To me it was sort of
ImpressionsMagazine.com Aug./Sept. 2023
the most natural fi t... It was also because our
manager in the warehouse is one of our most
empathetic managers, and we wanted to make
sure we had buy-in out the gate, because it
can be intimidating for folks who have never
had somebody with disabilities in their lives.
Since then we've expanded beyond that. Our
top shipper, for example, out of about 30 shippers
is a gentleman with autism. He applied
to work with us because he saw in one of our
ads on Indeed.com that we hire people with
all abilities. He's got speed, accuracy and, by
the way, he's got perfect attendance on the
year and he's excited to come to work....We
[also] expanded into our heat-transfer application
department. Th ere was some hesitation
at fi rst. We're using 300-degree palettes. Are
they going to close them on their hands? But
the reality is, once we did the safety audit to
make sure it was going to be a good position
and how we trained and all that, we realized
that all the things that we did to make sure
that we were going to be safe for the disabled
we should have been doing with all employees
from the beginning. We've also got folks that
are helping with our cleaning. We've got folks
that are water spiders moving stuff around
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Impressions - August/September 2023

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