The employer's perspective on Supported employment for people with disabilities: Successful approaches of Supported employment organizations

Supported employment (SE) is one of the most prominent of the various methods designed to combat the exclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace. Research on SE has mainly focused on the supply-side rather than the demand-side; the employer perspective regarding the employment of people with disabilities is not as well researched. The aim of this study is to investigate what employers with experience of employing persons with disabilities see as successful support from an SE organization. Fifteen employers and five managers were interviewed. The interviews were analyzed with the help of qualitative content analysis [21]. The results show that the SE organizations played three important roles - as broker, as guide, and as troubleshooter - and that this influenced employers' willingness to collaborate. The SE organizations were able to respond to the demands and market logic that make up employers' everyday reality. The approaches employers pointed to as most successful were provision of security, responsibility for the labor supplied, and the cultivation of relationships of trust with employers.