with Erika Shea, CEO and President, New Dawn Enterprises
New Dawn Enterprises in Sydney is one of Canada’s oldest social enterprises and community economic development organizations. New Dawn prides itself on being a learning organization and recognizes that their greatest asset are their employees. As Sea Change interviews Accessibility Confident Employers (ACE), we look for the shifts they are making to create inclusive and accessible work environments and advocate for social change.
As part of our ACE Employer Interview series, we interviewed Erika Shea, CEO and President at New Dawn, to find out more about their accessibility practices, including their proactive design of a workplace culture of caring, autonomy, and flexibility ensures that employees with disabilities can fully and equally participate and thrive without experiencing barriers.
Deep listening and tangible practices
Since COVID, New Dawn has boosted their employee engagement efforts to create spaces where all staff are heard and respected. They created a Social Justice and Equity Table (SEJAT) where staff are listening, learning, and acting together. Additionally, they are consciously building a workplace culture where managers and supervisors are encouraged to view each member of their team as a whole person – whose physical, emotional, and mental well being, availability, and abilities will change throughout their lifespan. This is helping managers develop and refine practices to recruit, retain, and promote individuals with disabilities.
Some of New Dawn’s tangible strategies include statements in job postings, reducing or eliminating physical barriers in workspaces, and empowering managers to develop accommodations with staff who require them. Currently, they are doing audits of the physical spaces in all of their buildings to identify barriers and to create universal accessibility so everyone can navigate their spaces with dignity and independence.
Erika Shea, President and CEO, says that while these practices are important, they are the “absolute minimum that an organization can be doing.” Tangible Accessibility Practices at New Dawn (4:36)
The other perspective takes a proactive approach to disability inclusion by thinking holistically and creating and nourishing a caring culture in the workplace.
Employee autonomy, higher purpose, and retention
New Dawn believes that people, regardless of ability, know best how, when, and where they can do their finest work. There is an understanding that autonomy, empowerment, and flexibility can change ways in which organizations have operated (often via assumed, unexamined, and/or inherited habits).
New ways of working at New Dawn post-COVID have led to a staff and culture that is generally happier, healthier, and more engaged, and where there is respect for and attention to emotional, physical, intellectual, and social health. Erika Shea discusses organizational culture and autonomy (5:34)
Impact of organizational culture change and accessibility
In 2019, the Institute for Corporate Productivity released The Inclusive Talent Pool: Employing People with Disabilities report. The most notable benefits identified in this report were that inclusion of workers with disabilities improved employers’ diversity and inclusion capacities across the organization and that disability inclusion makes workplaces stronger.
As an organization in the process of consciously creating a caring culture, New Dawn notes that is a constant and iterative process, one that is full of with impacts that they did not expect. For example, staff feel increased levels of safety when disclosing diagnosed and undiagnosed disabilities. Erika Shea discusses impacts of shifting culture (2:09)
Importance of manager autonomy to lead with the principle of caring
The importance of autonomy is a main feature of organizational culture at New Dawn. They provide the support and tools to ensure managers have the autonomy to make accommodation arrangements with members of their team with the understanding that they can always do more to support and care for their people. For organizations that are client or service-based, often care is primarily extended to the client (as is the case for New Dawn), but there is a shift to extending the same level of care to employees. This new view sees staff, not as assets to get the work done, but as full and complex humans.
Shea expresses, “We take that approach with our colleagues and the employees whose lives have been in some manner entrusted to us just as the lives of our clients have.” Erika speaks about the importance of Manager autonomy and caring workplaces (2:47)
Through deep listening, and intentional culture building, New Dawn is learning and innovating its way to being an inclusive and accessible workplace. They lead with principles of autonomy, respect, independence, and care. Shea notes, “We really are just trying to foster the notion that everybody knows what works best for them and we’re here to support that because we’re all adults and deserve to have as much decision-making autonomy as possible.”
By moving towards an organizational culture that centres caring, holistic, accessible approaches New Dawn is having an incredible impact on employees with disabilities, as well as on all staff.
New Dawn’s work is ever iterative, and as Shea states, they are just getting started. “I think that it is really a work in progress, and we’ve learned a lot but also feel like it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s fair to say that in the last three years we’ve started to awaken as able-bodied individuals to the experiences of individuals and organizations and parts of our community who don’t experience the physical environment and the employment environment in the same way and it feels like we’re just getting started.”
Image Description: New Dawn President and CEO, Erika Shea speaking in a recorded interview from her desk. She has brown hair, a light blue collared shirt, heart-shaped earrings and behind her are green plants and framed art on a white wall.