Supporting and Enabling Employees with Disabilities
Accessibility Makes Inclusion Possible
Many employers have developed policies to address the needs of employees with disabilities in order to promote an inclusive workplace. This may take the form of targets for the recruitment and retention of staff with disabilities. Initiatives for the support and enablement of employees with disabilities are generally led by public service entities.
The supports are useful for promoting an inclusive workplace, but do not always take into account the personal, private and changing aspects of an individual's experience of disability. Achieving a balance between the privacy of the individual and access to workplace adjustments can challenging.
Reporting of activity against targets is often problematic when the collection of data is via workplace satisfaction surveys. This method of data collection is notoriously unreliable, due to low employee participation rates and a reluctance of many to share personal information. There is a genuine fear that the data could be identifiable and either impede career growth or lead to conscious or unconscious bias, or discrimination.
It is reasonable to suggest that staff, particularly those with non-visible disabilities, are not willing to share their status or seek workplace adjustments that would enable them to complete their tasks to the same quality all other colleagues.
