Funded by Employment and Social Development Canada, the Covid-19 Accessibility Resources for Employers (CARE) Program primarily aimed to assist Canadian employers with supporting employees with disabilities and/or mental health challenges in their working environments during the global pandemic.
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Canadian organizations have been challenged to shift priorities and adapt to new business models while managing unprecedented processes and policies, including remote work accommodations and flexible working arrangements. Reactive in nature, individual and organizational responses served as temporary stop-gap solutions, initially in place to ‘wait out’ the pandemic. These responses have both highlighted and created new human resources challenges that are surfacing alongside increased mental health challenges and work/life balance strain among employees.
Through the CARE project, WWi was able to build on our capacity to create, implement and evaluate educational resources for Canadian employers, which will allow them to build processes and policies to accommodate employees with disabilities and/or mental health challenges during, and beyond, the global pandemic. A secondary objective was to research the process of rapid project design, implementation and evaluation.