Managing disability at work: top tips from the experts

"If you had one piece of concrete advice to give to employers about disability, what would it be?" This was the question put to speakers at the IRS Managing Disability at Work Conference in September 2009. 

In our short video from the conference, disability experts give their answers. Other issues discussed include pre-employment questionnaires and barriers facing disabled people in the workplace. The video also contains delegate feedback from the event. 

This video player requires the Adobe Flash Player plug in. 

Forthcoming IRS conferences

IRS is running further conferences throughout the remainder of 2009 - all with a £50 discount per delegate for HR & Compliance Centre subscribers. To claim your discount, enter PZR27347 on the booking form. 

• 15 October 2009 - IRS essential update on working with trade unions - see the HR & Compliance Centre trade unions resource pack to help you get the most out of the conference
• 21 October 2009 - IRS conference on agency workers and the law
• 4 November 2009 - IRS masterclass on negotiating with trade unions
• 12 November 2009 - IRS conference on managing stress and absence

More resources on disability from HR & Compliance Centre

The Equality Bill and disability discrimination

Existing discrimination legislation is to be distilled into a single Equality Act, with the aim of providing a simpler, more consistent legal framework for preventing discrimination (see the Forthcoming Law section of XpertHR, where we highlight the most important impending changes to employment law). 

The Equality Bill was formally introduced in the House of Commons in April 2009. It makes a number of important changes in relation to disability discrimination, largely as a result of two recent cases that left the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 in disarray: Coleman v Attridge Law and another, in which the European Court of Justice held that the protection afforded against direct discrimination and harassment on grounds of disability under the Equal Treatment Framework Directive is not limited to people who are themselves disabled; and London Borough of Lewisham v Malcolm, in which the House of Lords effectively rendered the comparator test for the purposes of disability-related discrimination meaningless. 

While the Bill sets out to rectify the law in these areas, there are a number of areas where it is unclear or where the explanatory notes are difficult to reconcile with the wording of the Bill itself, as Part One of our series examining the Equality Bill explains. 

How to guidance

HR & Compliance Centre provides practical step-by-step advice on how to manage common situations faced in the workplace:

• How to support an employee who becomes disabled
• How to respond to a statutory discrimination questionnaire
• How to deal with employees on long-term sickness absence

Employment law manual: disability discrimination

The HR & Compliance Centre employment law manual provides accessible and up-to-date guidance on the law on disability discrimination. It also alerts you to forthcoming changes to the law, via the Future developments subsection, a feature of all the employment law manual sections. 

Disability discrimination case law

Keep up with the latest developments in employment case law and check key legal precedents. Recently reported disability discrimination cases include:

• SCA Packaging Limited v Boyle Where it is "likely" that an adverse effect will recur, or "likely" that an employee would experience a substantial adverse effect on his or her day-to-day activities in the absence of remedial measures or treatment, does this mean "more probable than not" or "could well happen"?
• Chief Constable of Dumfries & Galloway Constabulary v Adams Was a police constable whose myalgic encephalomyelitis affected his ability to complete a night shift disabled for the purposes of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995?
• Matuszowicz v Kingston Upon Hull City Council When does the time limit for bringing a disability discrimination claim start to run if the employee is relying on the employer's long-term failure to carry out a reasonable adjustment?

Line managers and disability discrimination

XpertHR's line manager briefing service provides clear, simply written briefings on employment law and good practice, specially designed for line managers. The briefings avoid legal jargon and technical language, making them perfect training tools. 

One of the line manager briefings most frequently forwarded by HR & Compliance Centre subscribers to colleagues is the Line manager briefing on disability discrimination, a sign of how seriously employers take disability discrimination. This is unsurprising, as the scope for discrimination arises at all stages of the employment process, including recruitment. As the briefing points out, any act of disability discrimination perpetrated by a line manager against a disabled employee or applicant in the course of the line manager's employment will render the employer legally liable if a complaint is brought to an employment tribunal. 

Remember, if you come across a line manager briefing or any other article on HR & Compliance Centre that you want to draw to the attention of a colleague, every article has a link to the right of the screen enabling you to "email this item to a colleague". Click on the link, enter the email address of your colleague, and press send. Your colleague will receive the document in full, making this an ideal tool when delegating work. Alternatively, you can email the article to yourself as a reminder. 

XpertHR's FAQs section provides answers to commonly asked questions on a wide range of topics. Questions on disability discrimination include:

• Where an employer redeploys a disabled employee to a lower-grade post under its obligations to make reasonable adjustments, is it obliged to maintain the employee's salary level?
• Is it unlawful to refer to a disabled candidate's disabilities during an interview?
• What steps must an employer take to accommodate a disabled candidate for a job?
• In what circumstances can an employer be accused of discriminating against a disabled employee?
• Can an employee be dismissed on the basis that he or she did not disclose a medical condition on the application form?

We welcome suggestions for new FAQs from our subscribers, so if there's a question that you would like to see answered on the site, use the Suggest tab in the FAQs section to submit your idea. 

However, if you have a particular query and wish to receive an individual response to it within a short timeframe, you should make use of the Legal Advice section of the site (within Employment Law in the left-hand toolbar). You can telephone or email your question to be answered by a specialist employment lawyer. 

Find out through HR & Compliance Centre case studies how other organisations are supporting people with disabilities and promoting equal treatment for them. Recent case studies include:

• how Middlesex University is taking steps to promote the equal treatment of people with disabilities in recruitment, encourage disclosure and fairness, and go beyond mere compliance with its public sector equality duty;
• the changes made by Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council to its recruitment policy, enabling it to recruit individuals with learning disabilities, helping it to benefit from greater workforce diversity as well as easing its recruitment difficulties; and
• the wide-ranging programme of services and support developed by telecommunications company BT to help its employees and their managers to prevent and manage mental health issues. 

Benchmark your organisation against the compliance and good practice steps that other organisations are taking. Did you know, for example, that:

• two-thirds of employers record disability-related absences separately from other absences, and most of these employers discount such absences;
• almost half of employers use government schemes that help employers recruit and retain individuals with disabilities; and
• just 3% of employers have restricted any vacancies to applicants with disabilities. 

Figures are from Managing the recruitment and absence of people with disabilities: the 2009 IRS survey, produced exclusively on HR & Compliance Centre. 

Good practice guide on employing disabled workers

XpertHR's good practice guides deliver accessible guidance that goes above and beyond what employers are required to do by law. Each guide contains practical examples, top tips and recommendations to enable employers to engage their workforce, deliver business objectives and outperform the competition. 

Our good practice guide on employing disabled workers, setting out the practical steps employers could take to attract and retain disabled workers, is due to be published on HR & Compliance Centre later this year. The guide authors are Dr Philip Friend, the UK's foremost consultant on disability matters, and speaker at the IRS conference on Managing Disability at Work (featured in the above video), and Fiona Morden, director of Morden Solutions (UK) Ltd, which specialises in diversity and inclusion. 

Tailored reasonable adjustments agreement for a disabled employee

This model document will provide a means of recording the reasonable adjustments agreed between a disabled employee and his or her line manager, increasing the line manager's understanding of how the disability affects the employee at work. 

See Coming soon to XpertHR for these and other resources that are due to be published on HR & Compliance Centre in the coming weeks, as well as details of those that have recently been published on the site.