Getting started – Knowing where you’re starting from

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 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. Gathering information is a key step at the outset of your journey towards disability inclusion. You need to know:

• What works well, and why?
• What and where are the issues? How urgent are they?
• How many people are affected?
• Are there any barriers such as local legislation?

You do not need to get all this information at once. Picking one of the above is enough to get you started.

Support to assess your organisation’s maturity

Business Disability Forum provides assessment frameworks and support to Member and Partner organisations who wish to assess the maturity of their disability inclusion.

Our Disability Smart Management Tools help organisations understand how well they are performing when it comes to disability inclusion. We offer assessments for both UK-based and multinational organisations which help you understand where you are today, where the gaps are, and what to prioritise next. Members and Partners can complete self-assessments for free.

Getting started – key areas of assessment

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.

Other sources of information

You can use a variety of sources to gather information about your organisation:

• Internal experts – Your internal experts include specific departments that can advise you about how certain aspects of the organisation work, or any trends or tips that may be helpful.
• HR – they can advise on many topics and trends, such as policies, trends in disciplinary hearings or employment tribunals, complaints, reasons people leave the organisation. They may also advise on types and numbers of adjustments requested, staff engagement ratios, and numbers of disabled people.
• Occupational Health (OH) and HR should be able to advise on any trends and concerns about absence management or referrals to OH. For example, is there an upward trend in mental health referrals and absences?
• Managers are at the frontline and are key players. What do they want help with? What trends are they seeing? How many team members do they have that they know are disabled and what are the challenges and barriers they are aware of?
• IT may be able to advise on what licences they have for Assistive software and hardware and the uptake, requests, complaints, costs and any other information they can give you.
• Trade unions can be great sources of information and help on a range of issues. They are usually keen to help promote any communications and training to staff, too.
• Staff networks and Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can give vital information from those living with disabilities and working in the organisation. It is important to get feedback from local and pan-organisation networks.
• Customer services are an often-forgotten source of information. They can tell you about trends for complaints or positive feedback from customers and clients.
• Staff surveys can be useful sources but make sure that they are accessible to all, from a disability point of view and to staff who do not have IT access because of their roles. For example, retail staff.
• Your own observations are just as important as all the other sources. Look at the make-up of the board – how much diversity is there? Walk around different sites – how accessible are they to staff and customers? Get a feel for the organisation or area, what it does and how it works, and the culture in different areas. Most importantly, speak to people in all areas and levels.

Honesty and confidentiality

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.

People may also feel vulnerable and suspicious about being identified and what will happen as a result of any negative feedback being given. It is important for information on this to be made obvious and accessible to everyone at every stage.

Example

You have heard from HR, OH, managers and networks that many people do not know what support is already available or how to access it.

You want to act on this feedback, so you do a quick staff survey that highlights what is available and asks if people know about it. Add a comments section as this is often easier for people to really feedback and nuances that a ‘yes/no’ answer does not. With this survey you are not only collecting information but also letting all staff know what is available.

You can then act on the findings and communicate to all staff any changes/improvements done and planned (with timescales) because of their feedback. People are more likely to provide you with more info if they see a quick feedback and timescales for action, and then results.

Learning from others

There are many ways to learn about all aspects of becoming more disability inclusive. They are also great for networking and building relationships. The following are important ways to learn from other organisations who are further along the inclusion process who are happy to share their learnings:

• Conferences
• Webinars
• Networks – industry sector, location, topic such as neurodiversity
• Benchmarking exercises
• Award ceremonies – to hear about what others are doing and how they got there
• Case studies.

You do not need to restrict yourself to looking at organisations that are of similar size or in the same industry as you. Large organisations can learn from much smaller ones and vice versa. The innovations are just on a different scale, addressing many of the same challenges.