Disability inclusion resources for Desk-Free Workers 

What to measure when getting started?

Before getting started on improving your organisation’s disability inclusion, you need to know where you are starting from. Once you know your starting position, in terms of disability inclusion, you can decide what you want to achieve and what steps you need to take to get there.

Disability inclusion touches every area of your organisation, and therefore there are many ways to measure how you are performing.

Workforce

It can be useful to know how many disabled employees your organisation has. Knowing this can be useful to discover if your organisation is inadvertently turning away disabled applicants and disabled employees feel unable to continue working there.

You could carry out a data monitoring exercise. As well as telling you how many people in your organisation identify as disabled (or at least, how many people in your organisation are willing to tell you that they identify as disabled) you could also get feedback from your disabled employees about how they feel your organisation performs in terms of inclusion.

For example, you could try to find out how people with adjustments found the experience of having the adjustments implemented. You could also ask if people have ever experienced negative treatment from colleagues because of disability.

Data monitoring exercises can be sensitive, and will only produce usable information if carried out properly. See our resource ‘Data monitoring – Asking about disability’ for more information.

Customers

You could also try to find out more about your disabled customers’ experiences.

One way of this could be to look carefully at any recent complaints you’ve had from customers, and identifying ones that are a result of barriers faced by disabled customers.

You could also try to survey customers to gather their insights. As with data monitoring and your workforce, these surveys need to be carried out carefully to make sure they produce usable information.

Premises

When we talk about premises here, we include any part of your organisation’s physical environment. That includes workplaces, shop floors, outside spaces, entrances and exits, and any other areas that your organisation operates within – whether rented, owned, or used on any other basis.

To know where you’re starting from in terms of premises, you could carry out an accessibility audit of your premises. This involves looking at every aspect of your organisation’s premises to find all the barriers to disabled people’s ability to use your premises.

For more information about accessibility audits, contact your Business Partner or BDF’s Advice Service. You can also read a blog on BDF’s website about Sainsbury’s’ experience of having an accessibility audit.

Be honest

When trying to discover how your organisation currently performs in terms of disability inclusion, it can sometimes be hard to get an accurate picture. This can be because it is hard to admit when things could be done better.

There’s no simple way to overcome this, but do what you can to reassure colleagues and staff that this is being carried out in good faith to improve your organisation’s inclusivity.