Tool 8 - Federal Contractors: Encouraging Employees to Self-Identify as a Person with a Disability
The Communication Tools to Support Disability Inclusion Toolkit includes 11 templates to help managers with disability inclusion:
- 1. Why this matters
- 2. Setting the tone
- 3. Building trust
- 4. Defining disability
- 5. Working together
- 6. Getting talent
- 7. Disclosing a disability
- 8. Federal contractors
- 9. Accommodation at work
- 10. Our manager resources
- 11. Our employee resources
What’s Tool 8 About?
This message applies only to employers who are federal contractors or sub-contractors. Section 503 rule changes require employers to make progress toward having an applicant pool and workforce with at least 7% of people with disabilities.
Tips about the Tool 8 template:
- The purpose of this message is to activate managers and supervisors to play a role in ensuring that applicants and employees with disabilities respond to data collection efforts required by Section 503. However, most employers use this data not just for reporting purposes, but also for internal assessments of their disability inclusiveness efforts.
- This message also emphasizes for managers the importance of the confidentiality of this data.
- Here is more information about the invitation to voluntary self-identify.
You can copy and paste the template text below into a word processor and customize it for your organization.
Federal Contractors: Encouraging Employees to Self-Identify as a Person with a Disability
Supporting Self-Identification
Collecting data is part of (COMPANY NAME)’s effort to track the success of our disability inclusiveness goals. This is also part of our reporting responsibilities to the federal government. Our managers and supervisors play a key role in this data collection.We collect data about both applicants and current employees. All job applicants are invited to voluntarily self-identify as a person with a disability during our hiring process. Also, all current employees are invited to self-identify about once every 3 years. Managers and supervisors should never collect or view the self-identification forms of individual employees. Rather, you will refer applicants and employees to the (LINK OR LOCATION TO BE USED BY APPLICANTS/EMPLOYEES TO RESPOND TO THE FORM).
As a manager, remind applicants and employees to respond to this invitation to self-identify—to stand up and be counted. When doing this, also remind applicants and employees that this personal disclosure data is confidential and that individual data will never be available to managers or supervisors or to anyone else making decisions such as hiring, performance, promotion, or termination. To find (COMPANY NAME)’s form for voluntary self-identification as a person with a disability, go to (YOUR COMPANY'S LINK TO INFORMATION AND FORMS ABOUT INVITATION TO VOLUNTARILY SELF-IDENTIFY AS A PERSON WITH A DISABILITY).
Want to learn more?
For more about this topic, visit northeastada.org or call the Northeast ADA Center at 800-949-4232.If the above text pastes into Microsoft Word with unwanted gray shading, select the text and use the Paint Bucket tool to choose No Color for the fill. Or, when pasting, try choosing Edit > Paste Special > Formatted Text (RTF).