Diversity is incredibly important in every workplace. If all members of staff were carbon copies of one another, a business would never be able to grow and flourish.

Equally, for businesses that work in customer service, a diverse staffing helps them to be better prepared to serve a diverse range of customers. For example, knowing how to respect and assist a deaf person in making an order is a very important skill to have.

For deaf people, going to the shops has suddenly become much more of a challenge. Supermarket staff are trying to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by wearing face masks – but this means that deaf people, or people who have difficulty hearing, can no longer rely on their lip-reading skills to understand what staff are saying.

One Trader Joe’s employee, Matthew Simmons, knows exactly how difficult it is for the deaf right now.

Simmons is deaf himself, and has been working weekend shifts at Trader Joe’s in Vancouver, Washington for the past two years. He does this during summer break, when he’s not working his full-time job as an assistant teacher at the Washington State School for the Deaf.

The new face masks recommendations made it much harder for Simmons to communicate. He would explain to customers wearing the masks that he was deaf, and needed them to lower their masks so that he could read their lips – but some customers just shook their heads and walked off.

He also experienced problems when stationed as a cashier, when customers would try to chat to him. He explained to TODAY Food they the customers were “unaware that I was not ignoring them or being rude, but simply did not know they were speaking to me.”

He added:

“A main component of my job is customer service and assisting them in whatever they may need. How can I assist them if I have no idea what it is they are asking for?”

Simmons explained that wearing a mask cuts off 55% of facial communication, and even ASL – American Sign Language – relies heavily on facial expressions to make sure that communication has been correctly understood. So, for deaf people like Simmons, this was a big problem.

After speaking to his manager, Simmons trialled out a couple of different solutions. At first, he was positioned with another team member who could help him communicate, but Simmons found this to be debilitating.

So he took things into his own hands, and found a shirt online that was perfect for him. On the front, it read, “I’m deaf”, and on the back, it read, “Tap on the shoulder”.

He asked his manager if this message could be printed onto his Trader Joe’s shirts, and his manager agreed.

https://www.facebook.com/Matthew.A.Simmons/posts/10157332430588022

Simmons also started to use a whiteboard, which enabled him to communicate with guests by writing things down.

One customer wrote a particularly kind message when Simmons first opened his register:

This made life for Simmons a whole lot easier – but he wasn’t done there! Now he needed to figure out a way to help his fellow deaf customers. He said:

“After the shirt was done, I wore it and when it was time for me to be on a register, I was given permission to write on the plexiglass saying, ‘Hi My name is Matthew. I am deaf and read lips.'”

Simmons also chose not to wear a face mask, so that other people could read his lips.

This meant that Simmons could now communicate with deaf customers, as well as letting other customers know his situation.

Quarantine and social distancing are certainly presenting a whole host of challenges for all of us, but people who are hard of hearing must be finding their everyday tasks even more difficult than usual. Hats off to Simmons for thinking outside the box and making life easier for himself and his deaf peers.

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Source: TODAY Food, Facebook/ Matthew Alan Simmons