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Disability

At Unilever we are committed to creating a culture of inclusion for people with disabilities. We’ve set ourselves the global target of having 5% of our workforce represented by people with disabilities and to making all our sites around the world fully accessible by 2025, as well as being the number one employer of choice for disabled people.

In the UK and Ireland we are committed to building an inclusive culture

Here are a few ways we’re working to make Unilever more disability inclusive in the UK and Ireland.

The Disability Confident Scheme

We’ve joined the UK Government’s ‘The Disability Confident Scheme’ which encourages employers, large and small, to think differently about disability and provides guidelines to improve recruitment, retention and progression of disabled colleagues. In 2019 Unilever UK & Ireland achieved 'Disability Confident Employer' status.

We’ve engaged with experts and created meaningful partnerships

Working with the Business Disability Forum, a disability inclusion expertise organisation, we are making sure that we are including the latest thinking and frameworks in our disability inclusion programme.

Working with Adjust, we hold neurodiversity training and workshops for our managers across all sites with the aim of ensuring that all of our employees with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyspraxia or dyscalculia are fully supported and their needs understood and catered for.

We also work with Kings College to offer work experience for their students with disabilities and as a signatory of The Valuable 500, we’ve committed to putting disability inclusion on our agenda at leadership level.

We’re improving our physical and digital accessibility

We’re working to create good accessibility in our systems and our workplaces and now have global guidelines to ensure accessibility in IT, recruitment, communications and workplace design.

We’ve launched Enable to promote change

Enable is a global employee support network for our colleagues with disabilities, and allies. It offers mentoring and advice on how to overcome any physical or emotional barriers preventing people from reaching their full potential at Unilever.

Yvette Edwards

In the UK & Ireland our Enable network is championed by Yvette Edwards, our Communications and Corporate Affairs Director.

Yvette Edwards
"I am passionate about making Unilever the employer of choice for people with disabilities. We need to make our business as accessible as possible for everyone, so we can attract the best talent to come and work with us.We will continue to listen to our disabled employees to understand how we can make their working lives easier and where we can do things better as a business. As the mum of a wheelchair user I know a bit of creative thinking and proper adaptations and adjustments can go a long way, so it’s also about helping everyone feel confident about how to have the right conversations and remove any barriers to work for colleagues with disabilities."
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