The Ten Work-Happiness Secrets of People with Mental Retardation and other Severe Developmental Disabilities

Is your workplace making you crazy? Do your co-workers get on your last nerve? There is no question that work can be a place that tests your patience by lifting you up, tearing you down or sometimes completely ignoring your contributions. It can be a place of passion and drive or a place of frustrated and burnt out clock-watchers. At Chesapeake Service Systems (CSS), hundreds of people with mental retardation and other severe disabilities have a refreshingly honest point of view about work and how attitudes on the job can greatly affect happiness and work satisfaction. We can all learn a lot from how they choose to see the world.

1. Be grateful that you have a job to go to every morning. 20.3 million people with severe developmental disabilities are unemployed in this country. People with severe disabilities who are out of work often suffer mentally, physically, and developmentally digress. Those who have a job, come into work with big smiles on their faces. They want to come to work on the weekends, holidays and even during inclement weather because they know how it dramatically affects their lives for the better. Regardless of whom you are, having a job and a purpose in life is essential to self-esteem, independence, and overall well-being. It might be difficult to drag yourself out of bed on Monday morning, but without a job to go to; your quality of life would suffer immensely.

2. Every job (no matter how small it may appear) is important. Whether you have difficulty communicating, moving, hearing, seeing, or comprehending, every job for a person with a severe disability is important. To someone without a disability, putting a cable into a bag could seem monotonous and boring. It could appear to be just a very small part of a larger contractual obligation with an outside company, but to that one individual performing the task; it is their one chance to be like everyone else. When they are on the job, they are not a person with mental retardation; they are a co-worker and an essential part of a team with a goals and objectives. Status and titles have no meaning here because everyone is an essential part of the companies' success.

3. Greet your co-workers with a kind word or smile when you pass them in the hallway or when they enter your workspace. In a world that is increasingly cut off from people and emotions, simple gestures that

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Ways of working: Your approach and attitude toward work?
We want to hear your view. Write now!