How To Stop Disability Discrimination In The Workplace

To stop disability discrimination that keeps recurring, look at where the decisions are being made rather than at who made the last one. Repeat problems in this area almost always have a structural source.

Common sources: adjustment requests going to individual managers with no central record, so each one is decided from scratch and inconsistently. No budget line for adjustments, so every request becomes a negotiation about someone’s cost centre. Performance frameworks with no way to record an agreed arrangement. And recruitment processes nobody has tested for accessibility.

Fixing any one of those stops more instances than disciplining a manager will, because the manager was responding to the system they were given.

Where hardship is claimed, the burden of showing it sits with the employer, so a documented decision trail matters. The Commission’s guidance on employee rights under the Disability Discrimination Act is the reference. This is general information rather than legal advice.

See Sentrient’s workplace compliance system and equal employment opportunity course.