Cushman & Wakefield today announced that the firm’s Brazil office has been awarded the Global Recognition: ‘Good Practices for Employees with Disability’ award by the Brazilian State Secretariat for the Rights of the Person with Disability. Alessandro Vay, Cushman & Wakefield’s HR Regional Director, accepted the award last week on behalf of the firm during a ceremony at the United Nations Headquarters in the official commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Having operated in Brazil since 1994, Cushman & Wakefield offers advisory expertise and third-party facility management in the real estate industry, with approximately 1,500 direct employees.
In 2014, after undergoing various inspections and signing two tripartite agreements to comply with the country’s disability hiring quota law, Cushman & Wakefield initiated a cultural change process to allow for full inclusion of people with disabilities.
According to a 2013 publication by the Brazilian House of Representatives, only 8% of Brazilian companies had met their quota for hiring People with Disabilities. “For many years, our operation in Brazil was among the 92% of companies that failed to comply,” said Mr. Vay, “and we wanted to turn that record around. Today we are pleased to say that we are true ‘inclusion facilitators’, fully complying with the hiring quota.”
With most of Brazil’s 1,500 employees working out of client sites, Alessandro, who spearheaded the project, said “a huge adjustment needed to be made to our structure in order to provide proper support and achieve buy in from clients.”
Celina Atunes, CEO of Cushman & Wakefield South America, agreed that doing the right thing wouldn’t be an easy task. “We understood that we would have to go beyond to actually fulfill our social responsibility role,” she commented.
“The Brazilian team began acting as “inclusion facilitators” – looking beyond the physical or mental issues,” explained Alessandro. “We started interviewing people with disabilities for vacancies just like we would any other candidate – and began to understand that the greatest limitation to hiring such individuals was our own ignorance.”
To help guide the process, HR introduced the following “three pillars”, based on:
1.An understanding that it is achievable to integrate People with Disabilities into the organization;
2.That HR is dedicated to this challenge, and will integrate their staff and prepare the company for the change;
3.That the program would be implemented and maintained with a new view towards People with Disabilities based on the "abundance" of skills that these employees bring, not on the "missing features" that such individuals may have.
According to Alessandro, it didn’t take long before “the myth was broken. The universe of vacancies for People with Disabilities that was once limited to our central office was broadly expanded to the nearly 200 client operations with which our firm works.”
Cushman & Wakefield Brazil is proud of the difference the program has made in the lives of the new hires, and plans to build on its success. “Our dedicated HR professional follows the development of each of these professionals and relocates people when they do not properly adjust to their initial role. We always find a solution for them,” said Alessandro.
Added Celina, “This is most definitely a win-win. People who often find it difficult to find work are being hired for good jobs in our firm, and we are getting the benefit of their skills and hard work. There is still a lot for us do, but I believe we’ve made great strides and are on the right track.”
About Cushman & Wakefield
Cushman & Wakefield is a leading global real estate services firm that helps clients transform the way people work, shop, and live. Our 43,000 employees in more than 60 countries help investors optimize the value of their real estate by combining our global perspective and deep local knowledge with an impressive platform of real estate solutions. Cushman & Wakefield is among the largest commercial real estate services firms with revenue of $5 billion across core services of agency leasing, asset services, capital markets, facility services (C&W Services), global occupier services, investment & asset management (DTZ Investors), project & development services, tenant representation, and valuation & advisory. To learn more, visit www.cushmanwakefield.com or follow @CushWake on Twitter.
