Don’t dis my creativity

Free spirit: Droga5’s Angus Ingham, left, with colleague Lloyd Fernandes.

Lloyd Fernandes has been working at Sydney advertising agency Droga5 for the past two years. He works three days a week and his tasks include stocking the beer fridge, making tea and coffee, cleaning up the kitchen and shredding confidential documents. Two decades ago, Fernandes may have spent his days in a sheltered workshop or may have been placed in institutional care because he has Down syndrome.

Hiring Fernandes doesn’t just give him a better job. The 24-year-old gives his Droga5 workmates a different perspective, serving as a reminder of the diverse society they market to. At a time when companies fight for good employees at all levels and in an industry where fresh ideas are what gives the competitive edge, diversity is another weapon in the creative arsenal.

“Innovation and creativity is the currency of a company that is progressive, that beats the opposition, that survives and is sustainable,” the managing director of employment agency Break Thru People Solutions, Ross Lewis, says. “Innovation can’t just come from the same people over and over again.”

A homogeneous workforce does not reflect the heterogeneous society it operates in. For a company such as Droga5 – which creates marketing campaigns to target wide audiences, for clients such as VB and Renault – diversity serves as a reminder that not every customer is an inner-city male with a high disposable income.

“The generic market of able-bodied people with average intelligence or greater, or without physical disabilities, is blown out the window,” Lewis says. “Disability is part of human diversity.”

With a skills shortage touching many businesses, minorities, including the disabled, offer value for companies looking to grow.

“We’re reaching the extremities of skills available [in job candidates],” Lewis says. “Unless we open up to other groups, we’re in trouble from a productivity perspective.”

In addition to diversity and productivity, having minorities on the team makes financial sense. One in five people have a disability of some sort and people with disabilities are more likely to do business with companies that recruit people with disabilities, Lewis says.

But employing those with disabilities is still a long way from being a standard part of corporate culture. Indeed, it’s unusual enough that cult blog The Cool Hunter picked up a video that shows Fernandes at work at Droga5. In the video, Droga5 managing director Marianne Bess is seen blinking back a tear while reading a Christmas card from Fernandes’s mother, Theresa Thorley.

“The sincere appreciation that Theresa has for us and that we have for Lloyd and Theresa is a really human kind of thing that maybe you don’t see as much of in the cold, hard, steely environments that most of us work in,” Bess says.

Now, Droga5 has kicked off a campaign to encourage other creative companies to commit to a trial of employment for a person with a disability. The initiative comes at a time creative businesses are lagging others in hiring those with disabilities, says Bess.

“It’s sad [that] employing someone with a disability is so unusual,” she says. “It should really just be the way of doing business and unfortunately it’s not.”

Droga5’s Creative Spirit campaign aims to have 30,000 people with disabilities employed by 2021. The campaign tagline is “What could be more creative than being different?”

Since the campaign began, a number of companies, such as Frost Design and digital publisher Sound Alliance, have signed up.

Companies that indicate their interest in employing a person with disabilities receive consultation and ongoing support from Break Thru.

“We stay with [the employees initially] and help them be trained in doing the job,” Lewis says. “[And we help them] to relate to their workmates, so people aren’t scared of disability.”

Break Thru might devise small changes to the way staffers relate to each other. For instance, Fernandes is very affectionate, so Break Thru and Droga5 got the idea of creating special “high-fives” for him to do with his workmates.

“Lloyd is fantastic,” Bess says. “He genuinely is a great employee. This isn’t a charity thing. It wasn’t a ‘gee aren’t we great’ thing. The reality is Lloyd performs valuable work here and he is very punctual, incredibly conscientious and a very positive person to have around.”

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