How to give your business a competitive advantage

Vol. 9, Issue 4, September 26, 2019

Hamilton's Labour Market Connection

Your weekly news & updates from WPH!

In this week's edition: Help us develop the Hamilton HR Toolkit; How to accommodate people with disabilities in your workplace; Concerns regarding the future of work.

Hamilton HR Toolkit: Your Competitive Advantage

Workforce Planning Hamilton and our partner Mohawk College Enterprise are well on our way to developing an Employer Toolkit for small and medium sized businesses in Hamilton.

The toolkit will include crucial information such as how to recruit and select the best candiates for your positions; how to retain top talent via onboarding and mentoring; health and safety; employment standards, equity hiring and much more!

We want to make sure that we are on track with the toolkit and to do so we'd like your valuable input.

If you are an HR manager or business owner please take five minutes to complete our survey.

This is your chance to tell us about the challenges that your business faces and the areas that you would like help with.

Please complete the survey here.

Employees with disabilities: An untapped pool of labour for your business

A recent report from Statistics Canada presents findings from the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability on requirements and access to workplace accommodations for employees

with disabilities aged 25 to 64 years.

The survey discovered that workplace accommodations such as flexible work schedules or workstation modifications can play an important role in creating an inclusive and accessible work environment.

Explored are the different types and number of accommodations commonly required in the workplace; whether those needs were met; and, the reasons why, in some instances, needs for accommodations went unmet.

Read the report here.

The future of work will still include plenty of jobs

There is widespread anxiety over the future of work.

One important cause for concern is the growing pace of technological change and the notion that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be a real game-changer.

Other causes for concern are the growing international evidence of greater inequality of earnings and incomes and wage stagnation for less educated workers since the 1980s.

There’s no evidence that middle-skill jobs are disappearing in Canada. Rather, a steady decline in low-skill manual and service occupations throughout the period from 1971 to 2016 has been observed.