Building Disability Confidence Standard Conference Workshops

You will have the chance to attend three of the following six workshops. Your organisation's Diagnostic report should be a good indication of which workshops are right for you. 

A.  Valuing Disabled Customers and Service Users

Listening to the customer is key to understanding your customer, learning how to attract and retain loyal customers and how to tap into the £80 billion spending power of disabled people.

Understanding the changing world and its impact on your customers both now and in the future is fundamental to business success. As UK demographics change, your business will need to move quickly in order to address this.

Importantly, many organisations are demonstrating their commitment to ensuring that their premises are accessible to disabled customers and service users. But more action is required to turn this commitment into reality.

This workshop will help you to ensure that you are an organisation of choice for disabled people.

B.   Spread ownership for Disability

How can you enhance disabled employee satisfaction, ensure they want to continue working for you and enable them to contribute to the success of your business?

In order to become really effective, your disability strategy must be embedded into your organisation's culture.

Establishing structures of ownership and accountability for achieving your vision and goals on disability is part of this process. Every employee must understand the organisation's commitment to disability equality and how they can contribute to achieving this.

This workshop will look at how to:

• Communicate the rationale for disability confidence to the workforce and
• Address the issue of allocating specific responsibility for disability into the performance goals of managers as a means of spreading ownership for disability.

C.   Realising Potential 

It is essential that your organisation take steps to ensure that every employee is valued and is provided with opportunities for continued learning, development and career progression.

Appropriate and effective staff engagement can ensure that disabled staff feel involved. Ensuring disability equality in training and development, promotion, appraisal and pay, will allow your organisation to tap into the potential of all employees.

This workshop will focus on defining what disability confident training and development processes look like and help your organisation make the most of the skills and potential that exists within the organisation but that you might currently not be making the most of.

D.  Procurement and outsourcing 

This workshop will address the need to build disability competence into the procurement and contracting process with specific emphasis on recruitment agencies.

Every organisation wants to ensure it is able to recruit from the best available talent. How an agency manages disability and meets its and your organisation's obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) should be included in contracts and other agreements.

Ensuring procedures are in place to guarantee your procurement and outsourcing processes provide you with accessible services is therefore both a fundamental legal obligation and a core priority for any organisation.

Other outsourced services may include occupational health, training providers, facilities management, security, catering and IT support.

E.  Tracking Progress 

It is essential, if your organisation is to become disability confident, to assess the impact of what you do for disabled employees, customers and other stakeholders. It is also important to assess the impact of your policies and innovations on your organisation in terms of both positive and negative outcomes so as to continue improving the way your organisation operates on all levels.

A best practice organisation will seek to bring about those behavioural and cultural changes that support their disability objectives.

Monitoring and evaluation requires the collection of statistical data to define the significant demographic trends that characterise your existing or potential workforce and your customer or service user base. Monitoring can help organisations to identify a starting point from which they can then measure their progress towards disability confidence.

F.  Accessibility

In 2007 we reported that the majority of action being taken on disability equality was focused on removing barriers to disabled people in the recruitment and selection process and in the built environment. These remain strong areas of focus and progression; however, creating an accessible environment goes far beyond the physical built environment. In today's knowledge and multi-media society, access to a wide range of information is critical.

This workshop aims to address this topic for both employees and customers including targeted initiatives, electronic communication and alternative formats.