In this article, Ian Streets, consultant at NRAC explains to PBC Today how improved accessibility in workplaces can help to address staff shortages in businesses and improve workplace culture
The NHS generally gets the headlines when people talk about staff shortages, and we wouldn’t argue against that, but a little research will reveal that the concerns are much more widespread. The care sector is right up there on the government’s shortage occupations list, along with all sorts of scientists, engineers, IT workers, and much more.
Then there’s the understaffing you notice as you go about your daily routine – public transport, hospitality, cleaning – with even recruitment professionals telling you they can’t get the staff.
This isn’t the place to go into the part played by Brexit, Covid, or anything else in creating so many vacancies, but what we’re interested in is the ideas for getting people back into jobs that are considered essential – which basically is most of them.
Businesses need to make workplaces more accessible
A tactic advocated by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) when we attended a lunch recently with their Director General is for the government to help businesses reduce the costs of training and development.
That’s fine, but what we’d like to see more of is businesses seizing the initiative and making work more accessible. If the government does come up with more cash for targeted training, will it be offered to disabled people? And how about also making funding available to improve accessibility in the workplace?
Adaptability is essential in business, and for employers, that means extending how they accommodate and support their staff. Do you have people in your workforce who have an impairment? How often do you receive job applications from disabled people? If you decide to hire a disabled person, can your working environment accommodate them?
If it can’t, then not only do you risk breaching the Equality Act 2010 but you may end up losing someone who could become a real asset to your business. And further, if an existing member of staff acquires an impairment – which can be as sudden as a car accident or as gradual and long-term as a medical condition – then you stand to lose all their experience and expertise unless you can make reasonable adjustments to enable them to continue working.
Good employers should maintain a good awareness of their staff’s capabilities and needs
As an employer, you should maintain a good awareness of staff, their capabilities and needs, and the fact that all of those can change. Your approach should be to focus not on the tasks which the disabled person cannot undertake, but to concentrate on the work that they can do and to assist them with that.
Our work is all about advising businesses and other organisations on how to make their premises, products, and services accessible. If you do that then you’re in a position to welcome more customers, and you can also recruit from a wider talent pool.
Most people will quickly come up with the most obvious features which can make a workplace more accessible – parking spaces, ramps as well as steps, automatic doors, WCs, all of which need to have the right specifications.
But to make a real difference it helps to think more strategically, understand the concept of hidden impairments and envisage a disabled person’s journey through their working day. The sort of features that can create obstacles to access for people who are neuro-diverse or visually impaired extends from the style and location of furniture and fittings to the nature of the décor.
Figures released by the government earlier this year showed that the disability employment rate was rising until the pandemic but then declined. It is now improving again but the charity Scope reports that the disability employment gap – the difference between the employment rate of disabled people compared to non-disabled people – is 29 percent, so it’s dropped over the last 10 years but only by four points.
There are all sorts of illuminating data in the report “The employment of disabled people 2021” and we found a few points particularly interesting.
The data shows that disabled people are as likely as non-disabled people to be in “quality work” as defined by the Office of National Statistics based on levels of pay, hours worked, and desired contract type. So clearly there is no question of the significance of their contribution.
Disabled workers are twice as likely to stay in a full-time role
Also, disabled workers are twice as likely to stay in a job if it’s full-time. So it would be wrong to assume disabled people can’t do a full working week, however, a good employer would discuss any requirements for flexible working, just as they would with their non-disabled staff.
But overall what the various reports and anecdotal evidence tell us is that the UK has big gaps in the workforce and almost half the disabled working age population of nearly 9m is out of work. Improving accessibility can help to address that.
