Last reviewed:22 June 2022
- It is not enough just to hire disabled people – if you want to keep them, you will need to create accessible and inclusive workplaces.
- Create places where everyone’s needs are considered and everyone feels welcomed and appreciated.
- Foster a culture where people can be open and honest about disability without fear of discrimination or unfair treatment.
What is an inclusive workplace?
An inclusive workplace is one where employees are encouraged and empowered to ‘bring their whole selves to work’.
- workplace environments are designed with consideration of everyone’s needs
- policies and practices allow employees to work in the best way for them wherever possible
- the workplace culture is positive and welcoming – senior leaders and managers talk openly and positively about disability, and disabled employees can be honest about what they need to work how they work best.
This means employees shouldn’t feel they need to hide a disability if they have one, or any other aspect of their lives.
The places where your employees work should be designed with their needs in mind, so they can get into work and around the workplace comfortably and easily. They should also feel empowered to ask for an receive adjustments they need to maximise their productivity.
Inclusion isn’t just accessibility – it is about creating cultures and policies and practices that encourage all your employees to thrive. A completely accessible workplace will still be un-inclusive if the workplace culture treats disabled employees as less valued. That said, to create an inclusive workplace, you need to create accessible workplaces. See the section on accessibility below for more information.
Example
Oscar has depression. He applied for his current job because he saw the organisation’s positive statements about disability and inclusion. After starting work he felt able to talk to his manager to explain that every now and then he cannot face people. He is able to work if he can keep his head down and just get on with it.
His manager asks Oscar to let her know when he is feeling this way and he can either work from home on those days or wear noise cancelling headphones in the office. She says she just needs him to let her know where he’s working on those days. Being able to talk to his manager and agree an adjustment has meant that Oscar doesn’t need to take time off sick, and his productivity isn’t affected; he is still able to meet all his targets and he has come up with some good ideas on his “quiet days” as well.
Accessibility
An accessible workplace is crucial to recruiting and retaining disabled talent. If you invite candidates to interview or assessment in your workplace, they may be able to tell then if it is not accessible to them. Equally, they may find current or former employees’ reviews – for example on Glassdoor or LinkedIn posts, or even by messaging current employees – when they are applying that mention a lack of accessibility. Either of these is likely to put off disabled talent from applying or accepting a role at your organisation.
Alternatively, any disabled people you do recruit may decide not to stay very long with your organisation if they discover their places of work to be inaccessible. You may also lose valuable employees who acquire a disability while working for you – which is the majority of disabled people (83 per cent of disabled people acquired their disability while in work, according to House of Commons research).
It is, therefore, crucial to create accessible and inclusive workplaces. This means removing identifiable physical barriers that disabled people may face when trying to arrive at, enter, move around and exit the workplace.
This can mean making changes, such as installing automatic doors, improving lighting and removing obstacles in thoroughfares, which will benefit everyone. It can also mean preparing for alternative ways of doing things, such as having a store of ergonomic keyboards and computer mice and licences for computer programmes such as speech-to-text software.
As a first step, you could check the accessibility of key areas of your premises using our ‘Premises accessibility checklist’. This will help you identify where you are doing well and where you can make improvements.
Inclusive culture
Culture underpins a disabled person’s experience of your workplace, and without an inclusive culture, disabled candidates and new starters will quickly become disillusioned with any efforts you make to hire and retain them.
The way in which hiring managers, people managers and senior leaders choose to behave sets the culture of an organisation and it is the culture of the organisation which determines how managers and employees behave. No disability inclusion initiatives will work if candidates and employees believe that that asking for help demonstrates weakness or will not result in positive change to help them work more productively and happily.
Culture speaks loudly – disabled applicants, candidates and new hires can quickly tell if an organisation does not have an inclusive culture.
There are steps you can take to foster an inclusive culture, such as:
- staff surveys
- networks
- senior champions.
Our resource ‘Creating an inclusive workplace culture’ has more information.
Examples
Example one
Sandra works at a manufacturing firm. She has recently been diagnosed with COPD, a lung condition that causes her to be breathless and prone to lung infections. She knows that the physical nature of her work makes her condition flare up, and she is worried about her health.
Prior to her diagnosis, Sandra has had time off work with chest infections, and has noticed she gets more breathless at work. However, when her manager noticed her struggling at work, he made a derisory comment suggesting that she was “weak” and perhaps she was struggling because she is a woman. Nobody else at work talks openly about their health or disability, and senior leaders emphasise the value of “strength” and “resilience” in their communications with the rest of the organisation.
As a result, Sandra is afraid to tell her manager about her diagnosis or ask to be reassigned to less physically demanding tasks. She doesn’t know whether she can ask for adjustments at work, and given her experience with her manager, she does everything she can to hide the fact that she is struggling at work.
Instead, when she sees a suitable role open at a competitor firm, she applies. When she gets the role, she hands in her notice and looks forward to leaving.
Example two
While Sandra was applying for her new role, she was asked repeatedly about adjustments for the recruitment process. She also saw a case study on their website of a current employee who spoke about his disability and the way in which he worked with adjustments. She hadn’t heard much about these at her old role, so she was surprised that these were possible – she assumed that the nature of the work meant firms in this sector were all inflexible about how the work needed to be done.
She’s initially cautions – however, after she is offered the job she mentions that she has recently been diagnosed with COPD and might need time off to recover if she has a flare-up. Her prospective manager gets in touch to let her know that they are able to give her time off if she does have a flare-up, and asks if there is any way to restructure the way she works in order to minimise the risk of a flare-up.
He offers to explain the organisation’s workplace adjustments policy with her. He also sends her information about the staff disability network and suggests she goes along to a meeting. This hadn’t occurred to Sandra before – she just thought of it as a health condition, and disability as something separate.
In this role, with the adjustments she needs and confident she can ask for time off if her condition worsens, she feels much less stress at work – and consequently, finds she has flare-ups very rarely. Her productivity levels are also higher than before, because she is able to work in the way that suits her.
Read next
- Creating an inclusive workplace culture
- Being a disability confident employer
- Premises accessibility checklist
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