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.
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.