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Promoting a disability aware culture
MAC objective 1: A culture that values diversity and actively promotes the employment of people with disability.
What can we do?
Leaders play the key role in setting workplace culture. Senior leaders and line managers are responsible for ensuring that people in their workplaces understand their responsibilities under the APS Values, including the obligation that the Values place on all employees to help ensure that APS workplaces are free from discrimination and recognise and utilise the diversity of the Australian community.
Questacon (the National Science and Technology Centre) is a small agency with a mix of ongoing, non-ongoing and casual employees, and volunteers, and a greater percentage of employees with disability than the APS average. Staff interviewed for this project described the culture at Questacon as highly supportive of diversity in general and people with disability in particular—a place where flexible work practices are not merely talked about, but put into practice. This was attributed in large part to visible support for diversity by the present and former leadership team. These views illustrate the influence that leadership can exert on the tone of an organisation’s culture and on how an agency is perceived by the people who work there.
Leaders are also responsible for ensuring that people they manage understand their obligations under the APS Code of Conduct, including the obligations to behave with honesty, integrity, respect and courtesy towards their colleagues and people in the community.
1. Walk the talk
One way in which leaders and managers can promote a workplace culture based on the Values is to openly demonstrate their own commitment to the principles they represent. This means modelling high standards of ethical behaviour, but managers can also promote messages about the Values more actively.
For example, a manager might look for opportunities to promote discussion about workplace diversity, and to explain why it is important not only to respect diversity when dealing with individuals, but also to draw on a diverse range of views and experience to achieve better outcomes for the agency and the community.
Managers also have a responsibility to intervene to ‘shut down’ discussions and actions inconsistent with the Values. Their own behaviour is relevant to their credibility and authority.
Managers can illustrate their real commitment to supporting a diverse workforce by ensuring that people in their area who have disclosed disability are provided with the tools and the support they need to do their job effectively. With the person’s consent, this may include arranging for awareness raising or training about particular issues for the person’s co-workers.
When vacancies arise in their area, managers can demonstrate their commitment to diversity by ensuring that jobs are advertised inclusively and that selection processes treat applicants with disability fairly.
2. Promote the Values
Managers wishing to promote awareness and knowledge of the APS Values among their employees can draw on a range of products produced by the Commission, accessible on the Commission’s website at www.apsc.gov.au/values.
These include:
- APS Values and Code of Conduct in Practice: A Guide to Official Conduct for APS Employees and Agency Heads (2005)
- Embedding the APS Values (2003)
- Guidelines on Workplace Diversity (2001)
- Respect: Promoting a Culture free from Harassment and Bullying in the APS (2006)
The Commission has also produced a package of training materials that agencies can purchase, called Being Professional in the APS—Values Resources for Facilitators. The package enables APS agencies (or their agents) to build their own programmes that will guide employees in decision-making and workplace discussion of the APS Values and the Code of Conduct.
3. Promote the issues
Many agencies promote and support events such as International Day of People with Disability.64 Senior managers can send strong messages about how important they think the issues highlighted by such events are by endorsing and promoting these events to their senior colleagues and staff, and by making time to attend.
Agencies can also make use of internal communication tools, such as newsletters or the Intranet, to publish articles about disability-related issues and feature positive images of, and stories about, people with disability.
4. Get the message into the mainstream
Agencies should consider integrating issues pertinent to the employment of people with disability into ‘mainstream’ policies and procedures.
Workforce planning processes, for example, cannot ignore trends such as the ageing of the Australian population and the tightening of the labour market. Attracting and retaining employees with disability should be an important component of agencies’ strategies in response to these trends.
Systematic workforce planning processes enable agencies to understand their own workforce demographics, identify the capabilities and organisational structure needed to meet future commitments, and put in place integrated human resource management strategies to meet those commitments. Key factors to take into account in this context include:
- whether the agency has access to good data on the number, demographic characteristics and career aspirations of existing staff with disability and on the reasons why staff with disability choose to leave the agency
- whether the organisational structure aligns with strategies to increase workforce participation of people with disability, e.g. whether there is scope to redesign jobs to better support those strategies, provide opportunities for people with disability, and make better use of existing resources.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, as part of its workplace diversity strategy, promotes and champions workplace diversity to all employees as an integral part of business and workforce planning.
Likewise, it makes good sense to build awareness of issues relevant to employing and managing people with disability into recruitment and selection policies and systems for managing individual performance.
In the Department of Families Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, guidelines for the performance management system refer to reasonable accommodation and provide contact details for the Department’s Disability Access Coordinator, whose role includes influencing the development of corporate policies.
The Defence Workplace Equity and Diversity Plan sets out action plans for various levels of management, including specific actions in relation to disability. The plan includes ‘annual performance questions’ against each action, to assist with reporting requirements. For example, the plan asks Commanders and Managers ‘what have you done to ensure that your workplace is fair, safe and inclusive, where the different skills and contributions that personnel possess as a result of their background, experiences and perspective, are utilised where appropriate?’
The performance of the services and groups is reported in the Workplace Equity and Diversity Annual Report. While the actions in the plan are not directly linked to individual performance agreements, issues identified in the report can be raised in that context.
5. Monitor progress
Agencies need to be able to measure the level of people with disability in their workforce and track how that percentage changes in response to the initiatives they put in place. This issue is discussed in more detail in 'Using a consistent conceptual framework' in this toolkit. Agencies may find it particularly useful to track the following trend information:
- percentage of their workforce that identifies as having a disability
- distribution of employees that identify as having a disability by classification level against a similar profile for their employees generally.
This may be augmented by information that has regard to other factors such as levels of education, length of employment in the APS, and length of time at particular classifications.
