Disability Confident News

Laura McKeown, Business Support Manager discusses

Did you know, there are 7.6 million people of working age in the UK who have a disability or health condition?

In May 2023, we signed up to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer. We’ve always been committed to being inclusive, but this helps us demonstrate to prospective employees, suppliers and customers that we’re serious about it, and want people to ask us what we’re doing to be Disability Confident.

We’re currently working towards Level 2 – Disability Confident Employer – and hope to have achieved this by the end of 2024. There are several changes that we’ve put into place to ensure we are meeting the required standards and making our culture more inclusive.

We have made big changes in our recruitment process over the last few years, including using blind CVs during the initial stages. More recent changes we have made include advertising all our roles in the disability press, reflecting our commitment to employing people with disabilities in job adverts and descriptions, and being mindful of the language we use in adverts and descriptions to ensure they are easy to understand and don’t use any jargon. We have also committed to interview any applicants with a declared disability who meet the minimum criteria of the role.

Within the business, everyone is completing an e-learning course called ‘Disability Means Business’ which goes through what disability is, what the legal requirements are, language use around disability and working in an inclusive way. Some of our managers have also completed a course around managing people with disabilities and how to make any necessary adjustments.

This is far from a tick-box exercise. We are committed to remaining an inclusive and accessible place to work and are keen to learn from those with disabilities how we can make our service more inclusive.

We also encourage anyone to become Disability Confident Committed and start making changes to improve accessibility to your business for everyone.

If you would like to discuss the process of becoming Disability Confident accredited, have any comments or suggestions on how we can make our service more inclusive and accessible, please feel free to contact Laura McKeown at lmckeown@climalife.dehon.com.