Employ and support people with disabilities

Being a fair and equal opportunities employer not only ensures you meet your legal requirements to prevent discrimination, but you will also tap into a diverse talent pool that can bring many benefits to your business. Employing people with a disability can save you money and boost the profitability of your business.

Benefits of employing people with a disability

Recruit from a wider talent pool

By opening opportunities to people with disabilities you can widen your recruitment pool helping you to attract staff with the skills and talent that can enable your business to grow and thrive.

Promoting an inclusive workplace culture

Hiring people with a disability enhances diversity in your workforce. It can help increase staff morale, motivation, and commitment by demonstrating a workplace culture that values all staff.

Access specialist knowledge and skills

Staff with a disability may bring in specialist knowledge and skills such as understanding the needs of disabled customers, creative problem solving, and having particular attention to detail. Workers with disabilities possess skills and experiences that can offer employers a competitive edge.

Minimise staff turnover

People with disabilities tend to seek stable and reliable work when looking for a job and so tend to stay in their posts longer, helping to reduce staff turnover. This minimises recruitment and training costs incurred to take on new staff. You will also retain staff with years of experience and know-how.

Attract new customers

Having a diverse workforce, including employing people with disabilities, can help you attract disabled customers and potentially a large revenue stream. Employees with a disability can help you look at things from a fresh perspective, develop empathy for customers’ needs, and gain a better understanding of what they value in a business or brand. When your business and its products and services are accessible, you are able to appeal to a much larger and much more diverse audience and customer base.

Procurement opportunities

By employing people with a disability, you will be able to meet any social responsibility recruitment clauses that may apply to access particular tender opportunities and public procurement exercises. See understanding social value in public procurement.

Enhance your corporate image

Being an equal employer makes you look good. Consumers prefer to give their business to organisations that show a strong sense of corporate responsibility including employing a diverse workforce.

Low-cost reasonable adjustments

There can be a stigma to employing someone with a disability. Some employers may unfairly think that reasonable adjustments will be costly and take a lot of time to implement. However, most reasonable adjustments in the workplace can be simple, free, or low cost and there can be government help towards any costs that are incurred.

Encouraging accessibility best practice

Employing people with a disability will help you see things from their perspective. It can encourage the adoption of best practices to create accessible environments using adaptive technologies that are useful to people with and without disabilities.