Tuesday, January 8, 2013

A “different” way of building brand equity

More and more companies now realise that recruiting the differently-abled can be more than a CSR initiative, and can help build the brand and give an image boost to the employer.

Twenty-year-old Tamkin Khan greets you warmly with a friendly smile when you visit the Costa Coffee store, located in the tony Green Park area of New Delhi. Using expansive hand gestures, he can be seen ushering guests to their tables while politely gesturing others to wait if the tables are all taken. Guests are struck by Khan’s enthusiasm for his work and their admiration grows even deeper upon realising that he is both speech and hearing impaired. Khan has been working at the Costa Coffee outlet for the past three years and his employers vouch for the fact that in all these years he has never been late to work even once.

Like Khan, there are some more in the store. And that is what makes this Costa Coffee store stand apart. Five out of the eight personnel working at this outlet are differently-abled. In fact, the café chain is going all out to ensure that as many differently-abled people get to operate a majority of its stores across the country. It plans to open eight to nine new stores, which will be run entirely by differently-abled persons in the next one year. By the end of 2012, the company plans to run 20% of its stores across the country by differently-abled people. Not to be left out, Bangalore-based Café Coffee Day, from the stable of Amalgamated Bean Company Ltd, has tied up with an NGO called Enable India to hire about 100 such employees per year.

Like Costa Coffee, more and more companies in the country are now aggressively recruiting differently-abled people as they look to take their CSR initiatives farther beyond their usual goody two-shoes routine. Until about a few years ago, differently-abled people were only given low-end jobs like managing transport and admin tasks because it was believed that this was the limit of their abilities. But now companies have come to realise that recruiting the differently-abled can be more than a CSR initiative. It is actually about tapping into a vast pool of talented resources, which was earlier overlooked. As a result of this change in thinking, companies in increasing numbers are coming out to hire differently-abled people and integrating them into the mainstream. And once hired, they are not relegated to mere filing tasks – they are assigned roles depending on their qualifications and abilities, and have as much a


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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