Information for Employers

Supporting Employees

Supporting disabled employees helps you to recruit the best staff, retain experienced staff and makes sound business sense. In addition, principles to support disabled staff will help you support all of your employees.

Some key principles are:

Promoting and communicating openness and trust with the employee or applicant.
Seeing and valuing the disabled person as an individual with skills and strengths. This is no different from supporting all your staff to maximise their individual strengths and get the best out of them, whether disabled or not.
Reasonable adjustments - employers have an obligation to make reasonable adjustments when a policy, practise or procedure puts a disabled employee or applicant at a substantial disadvantage. Simply assuming a disabled person is unable or unsuitable for a job is discriminatory. For more information see the section on The Law.
Access to Work funding is available for many adjustments. Other Jobcentre Plus schemes may also be able to help.
Ask the disabled person what adjustments, help or support they might need.
Request specialist help: Disability Employment Advisors at the Jobcentre Plus should be your first port of call and will help you to support disabled employees and applicants, advise you of other support schemes and funding available.
Value diversity - research has shown that a diverse workforce supports creativity and helps companies respond to a diverse customer base or market.

You can find out much more information about the different ways people may be disabled and how to support them in the links section.

For more information on the business case for employing disabled people: see the Employers Forum on Disability: Business case for employing disabled people.

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