Building an Inclusive Workforce, with Matt Anderson of PRIDE Industries | EDB 252

 

Matt Anderson of PRIDE Industries discusses his work creating employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities.

(VIDEO – 31 mins) October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, so join us as we speak with Matt Anderson of PRIDE Industries.

PRIDE Industries’ mission is to create employment for people with disabilities. In his role as Vice President of Inclusive Talent Solutions (ITS), Matt Anderson shares the mission of PRIDE Industries with large public and private companies nationwide. Under Matt’s leadership, the ITS team sources, trains, and provides ongoing support to people with disabilities employed at partner companies, helping these organizations maximize the benefits of an inclusive workforce. ITS also offers easy-to-use services for training and staffing to help businesses across the country create and manage a diverse workforce, and provides strategic consulting services to companies on issues related to diversity and inclusivity.

For more about PRIDE Industries: prideindustries.com  

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION


HACKIE REITMAN, MD (HR):  

Hi, I’m Dr. Hackie Reitman, and welcome to another episode of Exploring Different Brains. And today, we’re so lucky to have Matt Anderson with us because Matt is going to tell you all about PRIDE Industries and his unique concepts and what he’s doing, Matt, welcome.

MATT ANDERSON (MA):  

Hello. Thanks for having us here today.

HR:  

Hey, Matt, why don’t you give us a proper introduction of yourself because I messed it up?

MA:  

Yeah, well, I usually like to say and share. I’m new to this industry. I’m new to this world. I grew up I grew up in the mattress world. So I while I was in college, I was a biology major plan on going to physical therapy school, and got a job at a company called sleep train delivering mattresses. And I fell in love with the three things about that company. The owner was an unbelievable person had a great culture, we did a ton for foster youth. So that was really why we existed, we gave a lot back to charity. And three, we were in ESOP: employee stock ownership program. And everything about the company, the better the company did, the more the better the employees that because they all had stock in the company. So just a great place to work. And while I was there, I got to run and learning and development, talent acquisition functions of total rewards, and then did a lot with our acquisitions. And it was a great career loved working there, we ultimately sold the Mattress Firm, which was a good thing because all the employees got their retirement benefits all cashed out to them and retirement accounts. So people that never saved a dime and a lot of money put in their account. In our ticket to dream foundation that we were really big with foster youth went from being just on the west coast to being a national chain, because Mattress Firm expanded it. My friend, the owner, he still runs it today helps foster youth all across the country. He partners with Mattress Firm, Famous Footwear, and also Fox Sports. So it’s really turned into a big deal. There’s a lot of good. Well, I will stay with Mattress Firm for about four years. And I got tired of having an office in Houston and New York, and didn’t feel quite as connected to the mission as I did when I was asleep train. And so I left that organization when the opportunity came. And I just knew I wanted to find a company where I felt like it was a good purpose, a good mission, you know, make the world a better place. And it turns out that PRIDE Industries is five minutes from my house, I didn’t know a lot about it. I didn’t know a lot about the industry. So I joined PRIDE at almost four years ago, and I haven’t looked back, I love working here. It’s a great organization. We do a lot of good.

HR:  

That’s great. You know, I tell our interns and everyone not, don’t buy societies big lie, that having a good time. And working hard are mutually exclusive. meant if you can find something you love doing that you’re good at doing, or want to be good at doing. And you can make a good living and help other people. You made it you don’t have to work a day in your life. You’re living the dream.

MA:  

Yeah, I’m one of the luckiest people at PRIDE.

HR:  

It’s great. Tell us about what PRIDE is about.

MA:  

So our mission is to create employment for people with disabilities. The company started in a basement of a church 55 years ago, a couple of parents who had kids with some Developmental Disabilities just wanted them to have like the power of purpose, a paycheck, and a job and they started a nonprofit. About 30 years ago, this great guy called Ziggy – Mike Ziegler, came to the organization. And he had this dream of instead of relying on donations and charity to run, that if he turned it into, you know, good business products, good services, that, you know, someday they can employ 1000 people. And that’s what PRIDE grew into. So today, they we do manufacturing, make medical devices. So electronics manufacturing, you know, there’s 250 employees there and over 100 of them have a disability, doing all kinds of different roles at that manufacturing plant. We do logistics so like supply chain with any HP printer part that shipped anywhere in US, Canada or Mexico comes out of our warehouse. We do a lot of facilities, so anything from custodial to water treatment plants, everything it takes to run a building, you know, electrical, hvac lot of trades jobs. And we do that all across the country with our facility contracts. All in all, we have those three lines of businesses and the new one we’re starting, which is inclusive talent solutions. But I was just amazed when I toured the company and I heard we the grounds I pictured lawn mowers and blowers. And I go out to NASA and there’s a guy mowing the lawns but it’s a 30 foot tractor, you know that that’s more than 30 feet at a time. And you know, I heard facilities and I picture nothing but custodial. And you see some of these trades these good paying roles that we have people into really good living wage, which was impressive to see as I went around the country and so today there’s 6000 employees and 4000 of them have a disability. 

HR:  

Do the employees do they work for PRIDE and are contracted out or how does that work?

MA:  

Yeah, so a lot of times we get contracts, and then we are the employer of record on all of those. And that those are all of our business contracts, we also have a huge employment service department as well. So we’re we’re providing services to help people get employment. And in that case, you know, we have over 300 employment partners in Northern California alone, where we’re helping people to get different types of jobs, and all different levels. So we also help placement in the community. And we have a transportation department as well.

HR:  

And how has COVID affected you? 

MA:  

You know there’s two ways to look at how it affected us. One would be for the services we’re providing, you know, really why we exist our mission. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who we are providing services to and helping to get employment, were mandated to stay home because they were high risk. And that was, that was very unfortunate for us, because we’re about getting them to work, getting them out of the house, making sure they love coming to work, you know, a lot of times that’s their favorite place to be everybody at pride is is competitive, integrated employment, making over minimum wage, so it’s a good environment. And what we found though, is we had to pivot. So with that group, we went to a lot of virtual services, a lot of training provided to people virtually, you saw a lot of growth out of people having to use virtual services, some of the ones that needed the most support, our transportation fleet went from giving people rides to work to maybe going giving them a ride to be the one thing they they got out of their house that week was the baby Just go do a tour of the van by themselves in that van, but get out of the house and go to see some things. So that that part of our organization really had to pivot and shift, which is interesting, and a lot of organizations really struggled. So we just some great people there had had some good ideas. And then a lot of our businesses were essential functions. So that really became about how do we keep everybody safe, and keep them employed and keep those things happening, you know, to keep making medical devices or to keep keep, keep courthouses clean, that we’re staying open, keep military bases running, all of those types of things.

HR:  

Now does someone have to be local for you to take them on?

MA:  

So we will do contracts with pride. And then the thing I haven’t talked much about is is inclusive talent solutions. And that’s where we really helping to place. That’s kind of our new business line. It’s an idea that started we have a program for training, it’s called our next generation leadership program. And it’s like an 18 month track for people with it’s really like a diversity and disability initiative within pride, help people move up into director and executive levels. And a group had the project that they did over 18 months was to help other companies hire more people with disabilities. And that’s where the idea of inclusive talent solutions came from. That if we can run a 60% ratio that any company out there can run 10%. And so we really set it up like a staffing company. So it’s an easy mechanism, a lot of Fortune 500 companies use, you know, they might use direct placement or attempt to hire or retain search. But there’s not many staffing companies that prioritize hiring people with disabilities. And so that that’s how our model works is that they partner with us, we’re going to prioritize hiring people with disabilities, and basically operate like a staffing company. We also have a lot of training and supports available and that trainings through two lenses. So support for the company on how to have a more inclusive environment, whether it’s training for the frontline for HR for managers. And then we also access training for employees to be successful or supports and coaching they need once they’re in those roles. 

HR:  

So if a company hires you to staff, you don’t abandon them, you help them you hold their hand, you take a few other paces, you make sure they know.

MA:  

Yeah, because we want to make sure we’re putting people in an inclusive environment, and that they get a job. And then there’s there’s positive outcomes and career advancement after that

HR:  

Then you work with all different sized companies. 

MA:  

With inclusive talent solutions, we really try to work with large organizations. So right now we’re in. We just started this right so this idea came about 18 months ago, we hired a team of people to put it together some that have hired some amazing people, Dan Robin, who was a, he started the program inside of Amazon, their global disability program. So he’s on our team, we got a consultant that worked at Ronstadt or a high level staffing company to help us out. Some recruiters some really good people in the learning development space, some that understand company side and some that understand more the rehabilitation side and started putting our programs together. So today we’re in Chicago, Charlotte, we’re in Cal cities in California. We’re in Portland and Seattle, and then we’ll be in Florida and Texas and New Jersey in the next few months as well. Well, usually we work with a company who’s thinking of at least like 100 labor orders a year if we’re going to do a model where we’re held To staff and provide support, and make sure somebody is there. We call them an employment success manager that works in that market and is on location to help make sure that it’s going well.

HR:  

Your disabilities are differences, differently abled individuals, they span all different types of individuals. It’s not just one type of difference. Is that a correct statement?

MA:  

Yeah, you know, so PRIDE has always been all disabilities, right? Like neurodiverse. You know, we have a lot of people that might be having hearing impairment and visual impairment, we have, I think we have some, it’s a large number six or seven interpreters at one site out at Fort Bliss that can do sign language. So it’s the full spectrum of disabilities, right. So it could be mental health, it could be some sort of chronic illness. So we don’t specialize in anyone. And a lot of times we’ll partner with somebody who does specialize where needed, they don’t make sure we’re providing the right supports, if we don’t have it ourselves. The inclusive talent solutions model we prioritize. So I’ll give you an example how it works is in a city, like Chicago, we’re going to try and hire 100 people a year, we’ll probably shoot to have a our first priority is to hire some people that might need support employment, those that need help the most. That’s why we exist as an organization. It’s why we were started. And then we would open it up to all disabilities that we’re going to try to source people for, for that. If we can’t fill the jobs with all disabilities, we also work with other barrier groups in that area, we decide we define barrier like we Ella. And then if I can’t fill all the jobs with those groups, at the end, we’ll use traditional methods to also place we want to make sure we always fill the customer’s needs, but we’re going to prioritize increasing the number of people they hire with disabilities as the top priority.

HR:  

We ended up involved trying to figure out how to straighten out what you can’t do this whole SSDI conundrum. Yeah. The whole counter intuitive and counterproductive way. So for instance, one of our interns is out in California says, Look, if I try to get this job, and I fail at it, I can’t reapply for I lose my benefits. Five years, five years. So why am I going to gamble? on getting a job? What’s been your experience with this? And what thoughts do you have on that? 

MA:  

That is… So I’m totally new, like I said to this world, and as I has fresh eyes coming in, there’s lots of things that I see. And I’m like, that just doesn’t make any sense, right? And a lot of it might be the way things have always been done within the industry or why some policies exist today. But my answer there is, you know, there’s the Ticket to Work Program, which we try to see if somebody wants to enroll him, which extends that a little bit further. That’s one option or thing that’s out there. We do some benefit planning. So we have benefit planners that can help to make sure that people are making a good decision on what that really means. You need to go through a lot of training to be one of those benefit planners, it’s not something you could just I couldn’t I couldn’t learn it in just a couple hours. Right? That it’s a very complicated process. So we have some people that specialize in that. And then that’s on the support you could give the other side is well then can I can I get an employer that would split a job between two or three people so that they have a couple part time people instead of one full time person. So there’s two angles to look at how we might approach that.

HR:  

We were having some talks with some of your fellow Californians out there in Orange County, who make some policy differences. And I got a buddy of ours who’s been a great, great proponent for all of us who are disabled, with the AADMD and now he’s at the President’s Council, National Council on Disability, Rick Rader. And now he’s with the White House. He was appointed by Trump and kept by Biden’s who is not a political guy. And he’s, he’s absolutely brilliant. And we’re trying to think outside the box a little bit. But like some of these laws, just they make no sense. You know, exactly why you’re gonna punish somebody for trying to get a job. Yeah. So that’s now. So if one of our interns who are neurodivergent? Yep. Want to contact PRIDE to have you helped them get a job Is that appropriate? Or how does that work?

MA:  

Totally could. Yeah, they could contact us through we have an ima bill hotline, they can email me directly. And then we also could reach out through our website. We’re always looking to find more talent that we can help place in jobs.

HR:  

That’s great. I was once on a panel where I was kind of taken to task Little bit by the global leader for SAP, the world’s largest software company, who has a big program for autistic individuals. At the time this couple of years ago, Jose Velasquez, I think it was. And he said, hackie, let me correct you on that. I said, Please do. He said, this is not a social welfare program, this is good for the bottom line of our company. When we get an autistic individual who can sit there and focus and work on those computers for, you know, 10 hours at a clip, it improves our bottom line that dedicated loyal and so forth. Do you have companies that single out asking you pride for a specific, differently-abled individual?

MA:  

You mean by the actual type of disability or just that they’re asking for a person with a disability for a specific job?

HR:  

No, they’re asking you by the type of disability.

MA:  

Yeah, I think that that’s that that might happen sometimes, right? But we try not to pet let’s say that this person with this disability is good at this job. Right, like, so we really want to say, hey, if what job does this person want to do? And what job can they do? And if there’s a gap, do we need to get them some training to get to that job. And then, you know, like, I think I mentioned, I worked at sleep train, I wasn’t going to college to go, you know, deliver beds, and beds at some point, right? Like, but it was a great culture. And so how do we bring in finding a good culture or a good atmosphere is as part of that conversation to where they’re going. But you know, you touched on something. And I always say that sometimes for an individual, sometimes it’s their, their superpower, or their cool ability is to do a job for a longer period of time. So sometimes we’ll say it might take somebody a little longer to get up, their time to proficiency might take a little longer, but once they’re there, they can maintain it for a longer period of time. That was something that was kind of proved out with Amazon is that we might have had a little bit longer learning curve for an individual. And then once they were there, they had better retention, better attendance, at you know, the same productivity is as everybody else, but even higher quality and safety scores. 

HR:  

The performance, that their keeping statistics on, that I’m aware of anyway, has been very impressive, quite superior to the neurotypicals

MA:  

And we’re just getting started. But we’re really hoping that we’re tracking everything, we invested a lot in business intelligence. And so as we’re building out these customers, how can we continue to make those business cases so that because we don’t want to ever be seen as this is something you’re doing as its, its Business Excellence with social impact, we don’t want it to be seen, like a charity, we want this to be a good business decision is why you’re doing it. Because we think that’s how you do much, much more of it. There’s so many business, I’m sure you’re aware of all the different business benefits. I mean, today, like ESG has become a big thing where companies get get rated on environmental social governance, banks, actually will will give companies a higher valuation, or better loan rates, in some cases, they have higher ESG scores. And it’s just a way to like supersize the S in ESG,

HR:  

I was not aware of that, what does ESG stand for?

MA:  

So it’s its environmental social governance, a lot of big organizations have an environmental social governance policy, they’ll they’ll have a web page, they’ll be part of their webpage, will post what they’re doing there. If you were to go to different financial institutions, they all have different ways of measuring it. So it’s not a standard here in the us today, it is actually a standard over in Europe on how they might rate a company. But today, different institutions do it through different lenses, and have different ways of keeping score. So Charles Schwab might be different than Merrill Lynch on how they rate companies for ESG. But within the social part of that, that is where diversity and inclusion sits. And that’s where it’s something that you know, you start getting the C suites to be paying more attention to it, too, and have that as part of their drive. And that’s one of the one of the benefits.

HR:  

That’s good, that’s really good stuff. What do you see is the challenge for human resource departments to get them on board with this,? Like when you go to a big company, and you got to deal with the human resources… 

MA:  

You know, I’ll just some of the things that we’re having learning lessons as we work with human resources, we’re saying, Hey, here’s training on being more inclusive and hiring neurodiverse individuals understanding, you know, here’s inclusion, one on one for hiring people on the might have a barrier to employment. And sometimes there’ll be a big company, they’ll say, Hey, I already have great training on this, and we do it and then we share what the actual things that we’re going to talk about are, and they’re like, well, they might have a little bit of diversity training and a little bit of inclusion training, but not getting down into you know, the tactical way to be really good at it. So opening up those eyes to training. There’s there’s some biases there around people thinking of what it’s going to take or what it’s going to cost for accommodations. And do they today have a good accommodation process to be able to give somebody what might enable them to be very successful. And a lot of times, they’re very low cost things, a lot of times those things can be covered. And out here in California that they have regional centers, and I think in some places in out here in California, it’s department of rehab, and other states, it’s it’s vocational rehab, there are a lot of times somebody who is receiving supports will have access to some of the accommodations they might need, and they will cover it as well. It’s not always a business.

HR:  

Can you walk us through, like what you might do with an individual when you’re identifying the right job for them? And how you get that job for them, like, kind of an example walk through?

MA:  

Yeah, and it would really depend on on where their, their, what talent pool, they’re coming through, what we kind of start to set up a network of partners in an area. So like in a city, for example, like Charlotte, there’s, there’s 70 different organizations that kind of qualify for disabilities or barriers, and some specialize more in autism, or some of them might specialize in all disabilities. And so as as they’re they’re sending us people, what we’re looking for, is the combination of is can they do the job with some sort of accommodation or support system? And then can we make sure to have that support available? So we’re trying to look at both what the environments like. So if we’re replacing somebody, what what’s this job like? And is that an environment that they’d want to go into? Do they want to talk to the public or not talk to the public? And then there could be several different examples of that. And I’m definitely not the expert on that. Right? So we have like an employment success manager who’s there, and they’re talking to their local experts from all these different agencies and partners that we’re creating, and saying, What’s this person’s individual plan? And then does that plan fit in with the jobs that we have? And can we make sure we provide the supports they need to be successful there? It’s definitely not a, I can’t do a little matrix, right? Like and say, Hey, this is what it goes here. It’s, it’s not here’s what I figured out. It’s not easy. It’s complicated. And if it was easy, somebody would have figured it out by now, we wouldn’t have this huge unemployment rate. And if we’re really going to impact the unemployment rate, you got to take on some really complex and challenging things.

HR:  

It’s not a cookbook. Can you share a success story with us?

MA:  

Yeah, I, you know, I can think of a few different, you know, examples of, you know, we’re placing and maybe placing somebody in an entry logistics role. And then they move in next thing, you know, they’ve got promoted to a supervisor or learning coordinator. You know, pride has an employee who’s been in McDonald’s for 33 years here in Sacramento. We have employees that maybe got started in doing kidding, and then got trained for doing soldering, and then we’re placing chips on circuit boards, on pride contracts. Other places we’ve placed our successes, hey, maybe they were our employee for 90 days, because in that staffing model, and it’s a success every time that they convert, and they become an employee at that site. And then the next goal is can we help them to know let’s maintain that job? But also can we help them to advance? Currently, we have some people who maybe have been custodians for years for pride, right? Like they’ve done the same job for a long time. And so one of the things that the industry is we focus on is health care, because I can get you a job as an environmental technician. And you go from making minimum wage to 20 to $28 an hour. And so can we take some of our custodians that want to continue to advance and grow, and train them on environmental technician classes, and then place them in those jobs and have success with those ones as well. So that that’s something PRIDE has been doing for years, we have a couple contracts at hospitals. And then now we’ve gotten contracts for doing placements through inclusive talent solutions with a hospital here locally as well.

HR:  

Wow. Now, how many employees do you have the run the whole thing?

MA:  

And an inclusive talent solutions are all PRIDE?

HR:  

No, just in another words, for lack of a better term, I’ll say in your administrative end, who get the jobs for people but are part of the well, I guess it’s not the same thing. Really.

MA:  

Yeah. So you know, in the ITS — in all of PRIDE, like so in our Rehab Services Division, there’s over 300 FTEs, whose jobs are either job coaching, job support, case management, helping them to get them jobs, and any inclusive talent solutions. That kind of scales with our customers. So in every market, we’ll have an employment success manager, and then we’ll either layer in job coaches as well or partner with somebody who has job coaches in that market to provide that type of training and support. administratively, we definitely have a decent number of employees as an organization that to keep it all going.

HR:  

And if you add everything together, all the people you place, all the contract all the people who work with pride, what kind of number that?

MA:  

So, historically, like we have 6000 employees 4000 with a disability, we place around another 1000 a year into the community. Our goal is to get to 100,000 a year. And so that’s what ITS or inclusive talent solution’s goal is to get to do 100,000 people a year in the next five years.

HR:  

How does our audience learn more about you? And your work?

MA:  

Yeah. So are our websites is a great place to go to right. Right industries? You know, I’m Matt Anderson. That’s Matt dot Anderson at prideindustries.com.

HR:  

Is there anything we haven’t discussed that you would like to discuss?

MA:  

One, I want to thank you for the work that you do on bringing just some some attention to neuro diversity, to helping to bring more awareness out there to the world, this is a great, great job that you’re doing and running this podcast. There’s not enough knowledge out there, I was ignorant to it before I got the PRIDE. And I think there’s a lot of people out there that don’t look at things through the right lenses and know what’s possible. So I appreciate all the work that you do.

HR:  

Thank you. That’s very kind of you. What is what is one thing that you think that people and the public and the employers don’t get, might not get about PRIDE Industries?

MA:  

That’s a good question. You know, just just like me, when I didn’t, I wasn’t aware, it’s a very complex organization. And so I was talking about all the different things that PRIDE Industries can do, right. So the fact that we can partner with fortune 500 companies to help them be more successful. We could we could work through procurement departments to help be a part of their supply chain in some way. It’s just it’s a very complex organization, that that does a lot of good as a big nonprofit. So it’s, it’s, I always share, I’m like one of the luckiest people that right, like, what I get to do is share what prides been doing for years, right? It’s like the magic of pride with other organizations and other companies. And if you ever watch Transformers…?

HR:  

Long time ago, yeah.

MA:  

Okay. So in Transformers, there’s this little box called an old Spark, right, and you touch this little box to a car and turns a car into a transformer. And they touch that, that to multiple cars, and those cars turn into Transformers, and they go out and they save the world. Right. And so I get to sit here and talk about PRIDE and how great it is. But I want to touch PRIDE to a lot of big organizations to help really go out there and reduce the unemployment rate for people with disabilities. Especially the low ones who need the most support, right? Like that’s, that’s why we exist. And that’s where we start.

HR:  

Oh that’s terrific, terrific stuff.

MA:  

That the amazing thing of PRIDE is as I went around I met people is there is it’s full of great people, that somehow when you do this type of work, you’re surrounded by people that are all there for the mission, doing the right thing. You know, Zig had this saying, you know, no money, no mission. But the mission was, is always first. And that’s one of the greatest things about pride is I go around, there’s people that have been doing this for 10, 20, and 30 years throughout the whole organization and taking their knowledge and figuring out how to package that and share that which it’s in a very complex world with other organizations is just such a great challenge and great opportunity at the same time.

HR:  

Matt, are you in pride doing anything special for National Disability Employment Awareness Month?

MA:  

We have a whole bunch of things going on. for that. We’re gonna we’re gonna offer some trainings up for people, for some employers to go through our passivity, one on one class, we have quite a few different things with this, this I am able hotline that we’ve launched is something that’s new. So we’re going to start communicating and sharing more of that as well. From my personal experience, that I am able, I sometimes will teach some classes at Sac State. And almost every time I go and I teach one of those courses, and it’s like a continued ed class, so that’s just, you know, couple sessions. I’ll have somebody in that class that finds out I work at pride asked me, How do they get support or help for somebody. And they have a, a brother, a sister, a kid, a cousin, somebody in their family, that they didn’t know that some of these supports exist. And it’s just amazing to me, right? That there’s not more knowledge of how do I connect to those supports that every State offers, and how to connect to them and how to get those supports.

HR:  

Matt Anderson, what is one thing you wish that every employer knew about the potential of differently-abled employees?

MA:  

The one thing that I wish everybody knew is that they can have a huge impact and that it’s a good business decision. They’re they’re going to help and have better retention, better attendance, and be just as capable as everybody else.

HR:  

Well, Matt Anderson, PRIDE Industries. Thank you so much for spending time with us and lightening us and say once more the website so people can go to it.

MA:  

Yeah, prideindustries.com.

HR:  

That’s great. Matt I hope you’ll come back again real soon. It’s been a pleasure having you here. Thank you so much.

MA:  

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.