Disability

An inclusive culture that supports and celebrates disabled employees will lead to happier and more productive employees, who will thrive within a proactively inclusive environment. It will lead to effective teamwork, wider perspectives, and better investment decisions. 

Whilst there is a larger dialogue around the suitability and inclusivity of the term “disability”, we have decided to use it for this workstream in order to align ourselves with key stakeholders’ decision to continue using the term when referring to people living with a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on one’s ability to work. This workstream of the Diversity Project strives to ensure that best practice to create a fully inclusive working environment is widely shared. The purpose of the Disability Work stream is to accelerate progress towards an inclusive culture within the Industry around disability. 

Our objectives are to: 

1. Get a further 10 Companies to be Disability Confident by end of 2022. There are levels from entry level to being a leader and some of our 2021 companies will still be working towards their first accreditation, or we will be helping them go further up the levels (there are three). There are very few Financial Services companies who hold this Disability Confident kitemark. It is our goal through workshops and the BDF (Business Disability Forum) to ensure that all Diversity Project companies have achieved the Disability Confident accreditation (5-year goal). 
2. To continue raising awareness and having conversations about disability and inclusive practices: We want to partner with SCOPE to deliver a series of workshops to help companies better prepare for disabled candidates applying for jobs and disabled employees. These cover: 

• Access to Work 
• Interviews 
• Policies & Procedures 
• Reasonable Adjustments 
• Recruitment Toolkits

We also want to improve Awareness by having more Social Media posts sharing stories and tips from our members and also awareness of workshops. 

1. Introduce Disability Role Models who hold this Disability Confident kitemark: Our mission (in-flight) is to encourage and empower employees with disabilities and supportive allies to become visible across the Investment and Savings Industry by raising awareness to facilitate the attraction, development and retention of talent with disabilities into and with the Industry. 

We would like to establish a baseline for firm/member engagement over the short term and improve diversity metrics to better inform equitable and inclusive employment practices and policies over the long term.