Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2016

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OUR PEOPLE

we wanted to turn that record around. Today we are pleased to say that we are true inclusion facilitators, fully complying with the hiring quota.” With most of Brazil’s 1,500 employees working out of client sites, Alessandro, who spearheaded the project, said “a huge adjustment needed to be made to our structure in order to provide proper support and achieve buy-in from clients.” Celina Atunes, CEO of Cushman & Wakefield South America, agreed that doing the right thing wouldn’t be an easy task. “We understood that we would have to go beyond to actually fulfill our social responsibility role,” she commented. “The Brazilian team began acting as inclusion facilitators—looking beyond the physical or mental issues,” explained Alessandro. “We started interviewing people with disabilities for vacancies just like we would any other candidate and began to understand that the greatest limitation to hiring such individuals was our own ignorance.” To help guide the process, HR introduced the following three pillars: 1. An understanding that it is achievable to integrate people with disabilities into the organization 2. That HR is dedicated to this challenge, and will integrate their staff and prepare the company for the change 3. That the program would be implemented and maintained with a new view towards people with disabilities based on the abundance of skills that these employees bring According to Alessandro, it didn’t take long before “the myth was broken. The universe of vacancies for people with disabilities that was once limited to our central office was broadly expanded to the nearly 200 client operations with which our firm works.” DIVERSITY SPOTLIGHT: AUSTRALIA’S JOB SUPPORT PROGRAM & KOOMARRI PARTNERSHIP

The Jobsupport program is a job placement service managed by Disability Employment Services, an Australian government initiative. In 2016, three Cushman & Wakefield

employees were retained through the program. In

October 2016, we received an award from Jobsupport for employing their 700th client—a

Melbourne office team receives the 700th client award