Improvements in disability standards - Update for staff
Commitment to staff
Following feedback in the last Pulse staff survey, Warwick signed up to the Business Disability Forum (BDF) to support our aspiration to address:
- policies;
- practices and;
- cultural issues
that may adversely impact upon people at Warwick who identify as disabled and provide a more inclusive environment for all members of our diverse community.
What’s changed?
In the last year, a number of positive changes have been made:
We have:
- created a new Accessibility Officer role in the Estates Office team to help improve how our campus works for people with disabilities;
- increased the support available to staff to increase their understanding – including web-based guidance for recruiting managers and new job candidates, fact sheets on visible and non-visible disabilities, mental health videos and a Disability Confident Moodle;
- held a Disability and Carers Event to showcase support available on a variety of disabilities and caring responsibilities internally and through external agencies;
- run a Health Needs Assessment Survey to understand staff needs to inform priorities for action; here are some of the highlighted results of the survey;
- updated our Disability Policy to include a more comprehensive section on mental health;
- started the process of reviewing the accessibility of the University website to ensure it works for all users;
- commenced work on a technical standards framework and resources for staff to improve their online spaces in Sitebuilder and Moodle.
- subscribed to an Employee Assistance Programme (Health Assured) – which, as well as offering free wellbeing support, provides staff with access to counselling, legal advice, bereavement support, advice on medical problems/disabilities and a range of information resources and self-help tools.
In addition, we’ve created a Disability Steering Group to ensure coordination of priorities in this area, and identified Senior Disability Champions to help understand and resolve key issues across the University. More from these colleagues will come in due course.
What can I do?
Tell us about any disability or long term illness you experience so we can work with you to ensure that you get the reasonable adjustments and support that you may need to improve your working life at Warwick. When our new HR system launches shortly, you can log on and self-declare easily in confidence. Find out more about using Success Factors.
If you'd like a confidential discussion about your disability/long term illness (both visible and non-visible), please contact your HR adviser, who will work with you to better understand your needs.
If you're a line manager, take a look at the guidance for line managers and other online resources to increase your understanding and awareness.
Next steps
We will make a submission to the BDF Disability Standards Framework later in 2019 to benchmark our progress to date, and agree further priorities for action. We'll share more on this with staff over the coming months.
The Business Disability Forum
The Business Disability Forum supports organisations to become:
fully accessible to people who experience disabilities or long term medical conditions by providing pragmatic support, sharing of expertise, provision of advice and training and facilitating networking opportunities.
More about the BDF
BDF has more than 20 years’ experience of working with public and private sector organisations and were instrumental in lobbying for the creation of the first meaningful disability legislation in the UK in the shape of the Disability Discrimination Act.
BDF also works closely with Government to shape disability policy and through their membership, is able to feedback to government on what works or doesn’t work.
BDF organisations can access a disability standards tool to help us to measure and improve on performance for customers, service users, employees and stakeholders.
