Recruitment and retention plan for disabled people: 2019

5. Measuring progress and next steps

The work to deliver the Plan will be carried out in collaboration, engagement and involvement with disabled employees, Disabled People’s Organisations, and our recognised trade unions.

We will measure progress through a range of data, some existing and others needing new systems of capture to be built. Key measures have been detailed against each outcome in this Plan. There will be a focus on listening to, and working closely with, colleagues in our disability networks and the Council of Scottish Government Unions.

We will publish, internally and externally, the progress we make as part of our obligations under the Public Sector Equality duty. During the year, the outputs of specific work streams will be reported and scrutinised through our corporate assurance and governance processes. 

The learning from this work will be disseminated as agreed in A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People – Employment Action Plan. As progress and learning emerges we will disseminate this to other Scottish Government bodies and agencies and make it available to the wider public sector for example through our HR network, the Scottish Leaders Forum and in collective leadership forums for the public sector workforce.

We will continue to monitor regularly and analyse workforce information to understand the level of progress being made towards this ambition. We will monitor recruitment and retention of disabled people in the Scottish Government workforce; changes in the number of disabled people in the Scottish Government who are willing to share their personal information; and shifts in the number of people already working for the Scottish Government who become disabled. We will use this analysis to review and, if necessary,  update the target each year. 

If we are successful in delivering this Plan, we would expect to see an increase in disabled employees’ Inclusion and Fair Treatment experience rates, as measured in our annual People Survey, and, in the long term, a reduction in the proportion of disabled employees telling us they have experienced bullying or harassment at work. We would expect to see a reduction in the disability pay gap, as disabled people become proportionately represented at all levels and in all business areas. And, knowing that disabled employees’ decision to share personal information about their disability depends on a climate of respect, trust and confidence, we will work hard to increase our employees’ confidence in sharing this information so we can have a clear understanding of the make-up and needs of our workforce. We will view increases in the levels of people telling us that they are disabled or not disabled as evidence of building a more inclusive workplace culture.