Leading the way for disabled people
If we want to improve employment outcomes for disabled people (including people with health conditions) in the labour market, we need to lead the way ourselves.
Our Accessibility Charter, which we launched in February 2018, sets expectations for government agencies to make information technology and communications accessible. We developed the Charter in consultation with Deaf Aotearoa, People First, the Association of Blind Citizens and Kapo Māori. We have developed a training package to support the implementation of the Charter.
We developed a new resource to provide practical tips for people managers and incorporated this into our manager training programme. Our recruitment partners are increasing their knowledge by using the Lead Toolkit [46] to support managers around recruiting and employing disabled people.
During recruitment we do not ask candidates to provide information relating to living with a disability – we only ask for this information once the hiring is complete so that we can understand what support the new staff member needs.
Our internal training includes a module about disability, and we also provide an intranet-based Accessibility Toolkit to help managers feel confident about employing and retaining disabled employees.
Footnotes
[46] We developed the Lead Toolkit in 2015 to provide advice to agencies about employing disabled people in the state sector.
