John Dziewa was just 17 years old when a diving accident left him mostly paralyzed from the neck down.
Having spent most of his teen years working as a mechanic for his father’s business, Dziewa didn’t really have a plan for what would happen when he graduated from high school in 1988.
That’s when he applied for a computer programmer training program that was being sponsored through a partnership between Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin & Metro Chicago and local companies, including Brookfield-based Fiserv.
Although he disliked computer programming in high school, Dziewa decided to give the program a try.
“I adapted really well to it. It was really focused on program system analytics as well as making sure that with a disability you could handle an eight-hour workday. We were required to wear suits and ties and everything,” he said, recalling the experience.
Thirty-five years later, Dziewa still works for the financial technology company, currently overseeing conversions, the process by which financial institutions upgrade from an older system to one of Fiserv’s.
Helping workers thrive
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John Dziewa[/caption]
What has impressed Dziewa most throughout his career is Fiserv’s continued effort to accommodate and support workers with disabilities – not because federal law requires it, but because it’s part of the company’s culture. When he enrolled in the training program that Fiserv participated in, for instance, it was still two years before the passage in 1990 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and mandates reasonable accommodations in the workplace.
“Right away, they recognized an untapped workforce in people with disabilities, and from the very beginning they made accommodations,” Dziewa said.
Those accommodations have taken on many forms – from ensuring workplaces and workstations are accessible to the creation of Thrive, an employee resource group for people with disabilities, caregivers and allies.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, only 27.6% of the 166,360 disabled persons over the age of 16 in the Milwaukee-Waukesha metro area were employed in 2021. That’s about 6% of the 783,166 total workers in the region at that time.
Today, Fiserv partners with Disability:IN, the leading nonprofit resource for business disability inclusion worldwide, and the offices of disabled veterans at several universities as part of its recruitment efforts, noted Mark Jelfs, the company’s senior manager of communications.
Earlier this month, Fiserv was named a Best Place to Work for People with Disabilities by the Disability Equality Index for the fifth year in a row. An effort to advance the inclusion of people with disabilities, the index is a joint initiative of Disability:IN and the American Association of People with Disabilities, the nation’s largest disability rights organization.
While Dziewa is the most severely disabled person in his Thrive group at the Brookfield campus, and the only person who uses a wheelchair, all of the members of the employee resource group have backgrounds that make them keenly aware of the needs of disabled individuals in the workplace.
“When you talk about six degrees of separation, you only have to go to two or three degrees to find a close connection to someone with a disability,” Dziewa said. “Whether they have a child, or another family member (with a disability), or just have had a past experience, the passion is there.”
Building design
The Thrive group at Fiserv’s headquarters has also been instrumental in ensuring that the company’s buildings are as accessible as possible. As a result of input from Dziewa, Fiserv rebuilt the ramp at its Brookfield campus three times to get it right.
“They finally ended up with a built-in, heated ramp and platform that worked not only for me, but any able-bodied (person) who had to walk on it in the wintertime,” he said.
Dziewa and his Thrive group have also played a key role in making sure the company’s future headquarters at the HUB640 building in downtown Milwaukee is as accessible as it can be in a structure that is more than 100 years old.
He set up a tour of the building with the design architects working on the renovations, Fiserv’s facility management staff and experts with Milwaukee-based nonprofit Independence First, which provides resources for people with disabilities and has one of the most accessible buildings in Wisconsin.
“The (Independence First experts) talked about everything from wheelchair users to the blind, the deaf and people with epilepsy, and what they did to design (their building) with those users in mind,” Dziewa said. “Fiserv is taking those design components and is incorporating them into the new building.”
Marci Boucher, president and chief executive officer of Independence First, said the nonprofit welcomed the opportunity from Fiserv “to weigh in on ways to make spaces accessible and inclusive for everyone.”
The support and encouragement Dziewa has received from Fiserv has had a mobilizing impact on his career, he said, eventually leading him to earn a degree in organizational leadership from Marquette University.
“When I first started, I had a lot of fears about how I would be accepted and wondering if I could do the job, and those concerns quickly went away just by me opening up and Fiserv being proactive and saying it wanted to know what those fears and concerns were,” he said. “Once that fear was over and I started doing the job, the disability wasn’t an issue anymore. Talk about a confidence and morale booster.”
