Training employees to be inclusive of disabled people is essential for creating workplaces where everyone feels valued, supported, and able to thrive. Using the principle of inclusive design, disability inclusion training can shape cultures by prioritising equity and fostering belonging. Understanding the distinction between accessibility and inclusion is critical to this effort, as highlighted by Celebrating Disability: accessibility ensures physical or logistical access, but inclusion makes individuals feel welcome and valued. Celebrating Disability’s Accessibility versus Inclusion video demonstrates this theory.
Beyond Accessibility: Creating a Culture of Inclusion
Accessibility is a foundation. It provides the tools, resources, and structures disabled employees need to participate. Examples include ramps, hearing loops, or screen readers. However, inclusion is about attitudes, behaviours, and culture. Inclusion ensures that employees don’t just participate but feel valued.
For example, consider a workplace that provides a quiet room for employees who need sensory breaks. That’s accessible. However, if colleagues stigmatise or question the use of that space, the environment is not inclusive. True inclusion requires creating a workplace culture where adjustments and those like these are normalised and understood as essential.
Why It Matters
Exclusion, whether intentional or not, has significant consequences. A disabled person might navigate physical barriers in the workplace, but without inclusive behaviours, they are unlikely to feel they belong. For example, if a team meeting allows attendees to move around to aid focus but doesn’t pause discussions to include everyone, someone with ADHD may feel marginalised.
How Celebrating Disability Can Help
Creating inclusive workplaces is a journey, and you don’t need to have all the answers at once. What matters most is your intent and willingness to learn. Celebrating Disability offers training beyond compliance to explore real-world strategies for embedding inclusive attitudes and behaviours in your workplace.
Beginning with a conversation to understand your goals for disability inclusion in your organisation, Celebrating Disability provide tailored resources to ensure solutions offered are tangible and realistic to your working environment.
Training Employees to be Inclusive of Disabled People with Celebrating Disability
Like your disabled employees, your organisation is unique. Therefore, all our training sessions are delivered to be unique to your specific challenges and structure. We want to understand your goals for disability inclusion and the current barriers to creating an inclusive culture. This way, we can ensure that when we develop content, it answers your burning questions.
Whilst training employees to be inclusive of disabled people, it’s important to understand that disability is an evocative subject for some. Our approach must be mindful and respectful. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels confident and psychologically safe to not only challenge their own thinking but also to question the ideas presented. This openness allows for the implementation of ideas both immediately and over the long term.
While we use PowerPoint slides to cement our content, trainers do not rely on PowerPoint slides to carry the sessions. Instead, all trainers ensure that sessions are engaging and interactive. Keeping our sessions to a maximum of 20 delegates helps us achieve this.
We also understand that not everybody in the room will disclose any support needs they may have. Therefore, we ensure content is delivered with inclusion and accessibility as a priority. For example, all slides are read out loud. Delegates have options of how they participate and engage in our sessions. To read more about how we ensure inclusion and accessibility during events, please click here.
As a user-led organisation, when training to be inclusive of disabled people, we always deliver with lived experience of disability. Our trainers have a diverse range of impairments. Personalised experience of disability is utilised in training sessions to support concepts and solutions that are tangible and relevant to people in the room. On top of this, all trainers have an active background in the workplace and, therefore, can bring lived experience coupled with professional experience to ensure any solutions and concepts offered are realistic.
Tracking Growth
Along with many organisations we work with, Celebrating Disability finds it important to track the learning growth of people who have attended our training sessions. We do this for many reasons. Primarily, we want to provide clients and delegates in the room with a tool to tangibly articulate and understand the journey of learning they have achieved. Clients will also have a resource to see what they have achieved and where they still need to go on their journey.
We also want to ensure that our content is relevant and helpful. This enables us to make improvements easily and constantly.
Therefore, we provide benchmarking data. At the beginning of the training session, we provide delegates with a short survey to complete. The anonymous survey understands knowledge and confidence levels before any information is delivered. We encourage delegates to take the same survey at the end of the training session. This way, we can track their growth whilst engaging with us. On average, people’s learning level has developed at about 31%. We don’t expect anyone to enter our training sessions without knowledge of the subject. And, although we are very good at what we do, we cannot expect people to leave the room knowing everything after a three-hour period. Therefore, this rate is quite good!
Did you know that only an average of 9% of UK businesses prioritise disability inclusion? There are probably many reasons for this. One of the reasons is that disability inclusion is multilayered. Many find it overwhelming and do not know where to start. An integral part of our service is to support our clients to consider what they want to achieve and why they want to achieve it. This, as a result, informs the strategy. To read more about how we support you to consider your goals and reach your outcomes, click the link below to download our white paper.
Disability inclusion is not just about meeting legal obligations—it’s about creating a workplace culture where everyone feels they can succeed. Get in touch with Celebrating Disability today to discuss tailored training that will enable you to make disability inclusion a reality.
Esi (rhymes with messy) set up Celebrating Disability in 2017; offering training, consulting and auditing to support businesses attract, engage and retain disabled people. Having the opportunity to support businesses to see the wealth of benefits that disabled people can bring to business, either as customers or employees is a privilege. She is passionate about disability equality and inclusion and loves nothing more than that “Ah ha” moment with a client when they see what disability equality and inclusion can do for them.
