Recruitment and retention plan for disabled people: 2019

Improvement focus

• Deliver on the target for external recruitment that, over the next 7 years until 2025, on average 25% of successful candidates will be disabled people.
• Deliver on target on the flow of disabled people into Senior Civil Service to reach 13% by 2025.
• Increase the retention of disabled people.

What we learned from our engagement work

• Identification with the experience of disabled people from the consultation on of A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People: Employment Action Plan.
• Interest in setting a recruitment and retention target for the Scottish Government workforce.
• Interest in testing the impact of setting improvement goals for specific organisational processes like recruitment, promotion, etc.
• Acknowledgment that achieving our target will require us to set and achieve consistently high standards for the operation of processes around recruitment and on-boarding.
• Anxieties expressed that disability risks being viewed as a barrier to promotion.

What we will do to achieve this

We will work with the Civil Service Commission to devise compliant strategies to meet our targets to bring more disabled people into the Scottish Government workforce, including: 

• Engaging with Disabled People’s Organisations to develop and implement better outreach methods to attract more disabled people and establish a more prominent place in the employment market as a diverse employer. For example, we will ensure a strong emphasis on disabled people in our next graduate diversity leadership conference in 2020 and in external recruitment campaigns in 2019-20.
• More joined up approach between our employability programme, Fair Start Scotland, and our own recruitment processes.
• Ensuring accessibility of online presence, and making use of multiple formats for advertising and applying for jobs. 
• Working to ensure all recruitment reflects the good practice learned from centralised campaigns that have successfully attracted more disabled people by developing resources for major recruiters in the Scottish Government and sharing learning with all our managers.
• Taking a whole systems approach to improving the representation of disabled people in our talent pipeline.
• Building on learning from successful interview and selection methods that support disability equality. For example improving the diversity of selection panels for interviews, trained in disability equality awareness, and removing academic qualifications as a requirement criteria for non-specialist posts.
• Developing a more joined-up service to understand better and meet candidates’ needs during recruitment, and enable a smooth transition for successful candidates into the organisation. 
• Continuing to involve our disability and mental health staff networks in developing our recruitment and talent approaches.
• Providing constructive feedback to unsuccessful disabled candidates who are interviewed for jobs in the Scottish Government.
• Expanding our paid work experience opportunities for disabled people at all levels of experience.
• Undertaking a review of our Senior Civil Service resourcing and selection methods to ensure an inclusive approach.
• Continuing to implement and develop new positive action initiatives to address underrepresentation of disabled people.
• Offering our disabled colleagues in middle management roles one-to-one career development advice through “talent conversations”.

How we will measure progress

• Annual assessment of changes in patterns of disability in the workforce:
  • External recruitment.
  • Senior Civil Service recruitment.
  • Retention rates.
  • Progression rates.
  • Pay gap.

Improvement focus

• Improve Disability Equality awareness and organisational culture.
• Strengthen supportive relationships.

What we learned from our engagement work

• Further development is needed to improve awareness and understanding of mental and physical disability.
• Disability Equality training is needed. 
• There are a range of barriers experienced by disabled people that prevent full sharing of personal information about their conditions and impairments. 
• Line managers do not always know how to manage and support disabled colleagues and would welcome more development on this. 
• Only a very small number of Senior Civil Servants have told us they are disabled.

What we will do to achieve this

We will work to continue to improve our organisational culture with action for individuals, teams and for the whole organisation by:

• Providing disability equality awareness training to employees, prioritising line managers and specialist staff such as HR practitioners. 
• Revising the content of our New Line Manager Development Programme to include specific emphasis on disability.
• Ensuring managers are well-informed and supported to implement workplace adjustments and to apply policies affecting disabled people consistently and fairly.
• Building the capability of managers and staff in managing their own emotional health and wellbeing by:
  • continuing to provide a dedicated series of accessible resources 
  • providing a range of training solutions on mental health and wellbeing.
• Ensuring that all our Learning and Development information, materials and training suites are accessible to everyone and available in alternative formats.
• Supporting teams to value diversity and hearing different voices as part of becoming a more successful organisation by. For example, we will produce a film project showing the value and richness of diversity and equality including disability. 
• Embedding inclusive leadership in the leadership development framework and curriculum, with a clear expectation of disability equality.
• Continuing to build accountability of leaders through performance management, for example by delivering our senior leaders’ Diversity and Inclusion Objective challenge and ensuring that this Disability Action Plan is recognised in the personal objectives of our Permanent Secretary and Executive Team. 
• Making inclusive leadership part of the selection criteria for Senior Civil Service posts.
• Undertake analysis of disability within the Senior Civil Service to understand the reasons for low reporting. 
• Implementing a “mutual mentoring programme” for disabled colleagues to support career development and build inclusive leadership.
• Integrating disability equality into the provision of Organisational Development consultancy services. This will include offering informed challenge and positive modelling of inclusive leadership practices to senior leaders through coaching and team coaching.
• Supporting our disability and mental health networks to develop and be successful with clear engagement pathways to corporate support teams.
• Embedding disability equality in early HR intervention practice to support positive working relationships.
• Explicitly valuing the health and wellbeing of all our people through the delivery of the Scottish Government Wellbeing Strategy.
• Delivering a programme of communications initiatives to: 
  • tackle stigma, shift perceptions, promote understanding, promote workplace adjustments
  • build employees’ confidence to share their personal information relating to disability status. 
  • ensure everyone is aware of what this Plan means for them.

How we will measure progress

• Increase in the Inclusion and Fair Treatment rate for disabled employees as measured by our annual People Survey.
• Over the long term, reductions in the proportions of disabled people who tell us they have experienced bullying and harassment, as measured by our annual People Survey.
• Increases in the proportions of people who share personal information about their disability status on our e-HR system.

Improvement focus

Focus on improving the collective impacts of internal policies.

What we learned from our engagement work

• The experience of disabled people in the Scottish Government is affected by a range of corporate policies that are not well understood in terms of their overall, collective impact on individuals and their managers, for example, attendance management, job design, flexible working, smarter working. This affects our policies on attendance management. job design, flexible working and Smarter Working.

What we will do to achieve this

• Improve our disability impact assessment approach when developing new or revised policies and ensure that impact on “wellbeing” is understood as part of that approach. 
• Commission research on the collective impacts of relevant policies. Then use this to understand how to get the policies to work well together, for disabled people to be successful at work.
• Work through our policies and guidance to ensure they are accessible (easily located, formatted for accessibility, use inclusive language and plain English). 
• Develop a culture of involving disabled people in policy development and decision-making and to inform continual improvement. 
• Engage with disability and mental health networks to understand disabled employees’ experience of bullying, harassment and discrimination and develop accessible reporting channels which meet their needs.
• Take action to understand the causes of identified differences in appraisal-marking outcomes for disabled employees and take action as required.
• Ensure our suppliers of recruitment and occupational health services deliver the ambitions of this Plan.
• Improve systems capability to enable the effective monitoring of our policies’ impact on disabled people.
• Build capability to effectively use data to understand and inform our policies and culture.

How we will measure progress

• User feedback from disabled colleagues about the quality of internal policies, processes and services. 
• User research about the experiences of disabled colleagues and how well internal policies, processes and services are working.
• Diversity monitoring to understand if policies are advancing equality of opportunity.

Improvement focus

Physical environment and workplace adjustments.

What we learned from our engagement work

• Concerns expressed around consistent processes and practice.
• Time taken for workplace adjustments to be made is too long.
• Interest in a one-stop shop approach to enable packages of adjustments.
• People often need to repeat their needs multiple times.
• Barriers experienced by some neurodiverse people range from environmental (e.g. noise and colours) to cultural (e.g. constant change).
• Management of Smarter Workplaces Programme should be informed and improved by learning from the experience of disabled people.

What we will do to achieve this

• Further embed disability equality in the design of Smarter Workplaces.
• Consider and take forward the findings of the Discovery Service Design project to review and propose a revised approach for delivering a workplace adjustments service to disabled staff.
• Continue an active engagement with disability and mental health networks and discussion forums to understand current issues in the workplace and seek to reflect them in designing workplace change. We will invite representation from disability networks for projects, e.g. Victoria Quay Ground Floor Project to embed disability equality into the design to support the positive action in the rest of the action plan.
• Continue to work closely with Disabled People’s Organisations to ensure appropriate support for individuals and their managers.
• Provide opportunities to test out new furniture and spaces ensuring workspaces have a range of options to choose from.
• Implement the outstanding actions from building access audits.
• Appoint a designated lead on adjustments for candidates going through our interview and selection processes and for transition into the organisation if successful.
• Pilot an approach to disability passports for the intake of candidates on our Graduate Development Programme 2019. 
• Improve e-HR systems capability to capture and review workplace adjustments.

How we will measure progress

• Feedback from individuals involved in requesting or implementing workplace adjustments. 
• Feedback from disability and mental health networks, discussion forums and Council of Scottish Government Unions, including from those who participated in workspace design/delivery projects on their experience.
• External assessment by leading disability interest groups.
• Evaluation of workplace adjustments and changes in the workplace environment.