Introduction
Disabled employees continue to struggle at work due to both individual barriers in their job and wider barriers in their workplace environment and working culture. Conversations about having a disability between employees and managers and with the wider team, and the difficulty in getting adjustments, remain huge barriers. In addition, both employees and managers said that senior leaders were not always calling out poor behaviours, microaggressions, and insensitive comments even when they witnessed these behaviours themselves.
These factors led to an impact in overall work-related stress and a detrimental effect on the level of employees’ mental wellbeing that they said they experience each day.
However, work-related situations and getting adjustments can only go so far when the experience of employees’ disabilities or conditions are difficult every day, inside and outside of work. It is for this reason that a better understanding of managers and wider workplaces about the whole experience of having a disability and being disabled is needed, and it is also why an improved and more mature approach to removing disability-related barriers for disabled employees at work is needed.
Recommendations for employers
You can download our full recommendations for employers at the bottom of this page.
Identify any ‘simple’ or standard ways of working in your organisation which can be signed off without having to go through a formal adjustments procedure or occupational or workplace health assessments.
Examples include access to noise-cancelling headphones or earphones, suitable car parking, having quiet areas to sit if working in the office or onsite, and allowing employees to plan their working day according to when they best perform different types of tasks (such as responding to non-urgent communications in the afternoon and writing in the mornings, for example).
Establish what ‘clear communication’ means across the whole of your organisation.
It should not be an adjustment to know what your job is, have clear explanations, or have decisions communicated clearly. Employees should not have to request adjustments to get important decisions and instructions in writing. Important, business-critical decisions should be communicated in a number of ways, and then managers can organise any specific different versions of materials that are needed in addition to this.
Employers should build better understanding between employees and managers of their different perspectives during the process of making adjustments and refer to workplace and occupational health services only as needed.
How employees feel is not always ‘visible’ to managers unless these specific conversations about the transparency of processes and about personal feelings and emotions happen. In addition, employees are not always aware of the limitations and processes managers must use when making decisions about adjustment and resourcing them. More understanding about what it can be like for employees to share personal information and discuss adjustments at the very time they need supporting can help managers. Equally, employees understanding how managers make decisions about adjustments-related situations can help employees understand the reasons for decisions.
Managers need support and recognition.
They are generally skilled and experienced at doing their jobs, often with increasingly limited resources, yet with increased targets and demands from senior leaders, while receiving a lot of information from different areas of the organisation and different types of instructions and advice about how to support disabled employees. The pandemic was hard for many managers, and many ‘figured out’ for themselves how to support their teams during that time without senior direction, and with little support and recognition from senior teams.
Have one ‘single entry’ point into employer-provided health, adjustments and wellbeing support.
Many of the issues managers reported are created by multiple points of support and inside and outside of the organisation. One ‘single entry point’ into all of the employer-provided health, adjustments and wellbeing support there is available for managers to get support for staff (and themselves) at work for any situation will make decisions and finding support quicker and easier for managers which will then be felt by staff.
This may include bringing together much of what many employers already provide into one internal service, but it needs employers to undertake a review of what is not currently working and provided and then ensure it sits within this single service offer. Within this single offer must come a single, overall workplace health and adjustment budget available to the whole organisation.
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