Working with a support worker

Joel Young, Senior Disability Business Partner at BDF, shares his experience of using a support worker and gives advice for employers on facilitating support workers within their organisation.

I’ve used support workers for about 12 years now, having lived experience of vision impairment. I refer to them as ‘access assistants’. ‘Support worker’ to me feels more ‘medical model’, whereas ‘access assistant’ is more what the role is.

My access assistants support me with many different tasks, such as reading inaccessible materials, or formatting presentations and documents. They also support me with getting around, planning routes and guiding me at conferences and meetings. Whatever they do will be relevant to my role at the time.

Different models of support worker employment

There are different models of employing support workers.

I’ve had support workers who have been employed by my employer and managed by me. As a result, I was responsible for their personal development plans and so on.

Some of my past support workers were employed by the company I worked for but were managed by other people in the organisation. I found that quite difficult because I wanted the experience of being a manager.

Earlier in my career, I had support workers provided through a recruitment agency.

I think people should have the choice of model. Now I source my own access assistants. I pay them monthly and claim back the costs from Access to Work.

There are pros and cons to every model. Sourcing my own access assistants means there are extra steps I have to take. For example, whenever I start a new job, I must train my support workers on how to use my employers’ systems, whereas if they were employed by the business, they would already have that information.

However, the pro to my approach is that I have more freedom in organising when I have a support worker with me. If they’re not available on a given day, I can schedule another time or ask my other access assistant if they can support.

Some people might say, “Why don’t you just have the person on hand whenever you’re working?” That might work well for some people, but I wouldn’t want that because I would feel a responsibility for keeping them busy. When I’ve had support workers employed by the business, I’ve had to agree to have them for potentially more hours than I needed them for.

It really comes down to what works best for you as an individual, your role, the business you work for and obviously the support worker.

Advice for employers

The right support worker can make all the difference – the difference between someone’s ability to perform at their best or not achieve their role at all. But I do want employers to understand that there’s no quick solution to put in place.

If you’re a manager, it’s about having conversations with employees who feel they would require or benefit from an access assistant and supporting them where possible to get what they need.

Managers should be empathetic, supportive, take time to learn if needed, and really have that conversation around the barriers as soon as possible, before someone starts if necessary.

They could also offer to support the Access to Work application and claim process. Access to Work will usually require a manager to approve claims, and the quicker this is done the better, particularly if the employee has funded the costs of a support worker themselves. Alternatively, employers could consider paying the cost of an access assistant and being reimbursed by Access to Work directly, saving the employee having to pay for their support initially.

One solution for businesses where there’s a lot of colleagues with disabilities could be to have bank access assistants on hand to support colleagues who don’t have an access assistant yet, or for cases where employment of an access assistant isn’t feasible (for example, when the employee only needs the support worker for a few hours a week).

Don’t assume disabled employees know what they need. Ask questions and have the conversation. Be supportive to enable your team to thrive.

Read our interview with Joel, part of our Managing support workers range of resources, proudly sponsored by HSBC. Available to our Members and Partners only.