Under the Equality Act, 2010 employers are obligated to provide “reasonable adjustments” for any staff with a disability, illness or other health issues to enable them to work at the same level as people who do not have any of these. Reasonable adjustments are practical changes to the workplace or work practices that will prevent disabled employees being disadvantaged when doing their jobs. These need to be made throughout the process of recruitment and into employment and promotion opportunities and can vary from large adaptations, such as the installation of a lift, to small inexpensive adjustments like enabling someone to not hot desk to allow them control over their sensory environment.

However, we have realised over the last year or so that, more and more, the responsibility for providing support for disabled employees has moved from Occupational Health or Human Resources teams to team managers who are unaware of the support available or their responsibilities. Therefore, many disabled employees are finding that they are being left to struggle without any reasonable adjustments, often facing disciplinary action as a result of failings caused by lack of provision for their disability.

At Enabling Technology, we understand the difficult position that managers find themselves in, they often have little or no knowledge about the disability their team member has, how it affects them in the workplace or the reasonable adjustments that are available to them. They are also often extremely busy with their usual responsibilities of managing a team. Therefore, we are offering a free webinar to inform managers about what reasonable adjustments are, why they’re important and how to ensure that their colleagues have access to them. We will also talk about the role of access to work in supporting organisations in providing adaptations and support that go above the reasonable adjustments. This afternoon, Monday, 10 May we will be running the first of these webinars and welcome anyone who is unsure about how to support their colleagues to contact us if you would like to attend a future webinar.