Disability Tools Helping managers make informed decisions around disability and supporting disabled employees

With the number of disabled people in employment increasing by nearly 250,000 in the last year to an estimated 4.9 million, the challenges for businesses to comply with their legal obligation has never been more important.  

The cost of getting things wrong isn’t just a financial one. Over 185 million working days were lost due to sickness or long-term absence in 2022. 

Our specialist employment lawyers here at Weightmans act for some of the UK’s largest and best-known employers and work with HR professionals across all aspects of employment law. That gives us a perfect insight into the challenges of supporting and managing disabled employees.  

It also means we know that when things don’t go to plan, why that is.  

We know asking the right questions in the right way, at the right time, every time, can be difficult for managers. Ownership and confidence in key decisions is critical.

We have therefore created a helping hand to support and manage your disabled employees. Applying a design thinking methodology we have created an innovative, logic-based tool that augments your decision making to help you reach the right decision, in the right way, at the right time.  

Our solutions: 

Disability Discrimination Tool:

A specifically designed self-service tool to help managers and key stakeholders decide whether an employee is likely to be disabled under the Equality Act. It does so by:

1. Assists with understanding the legal test and principals around disability under the Equality Act.
2. Enables you to overlay the facts and circumstances of a particular case to the law to reach an informed decision as to whether an employee is likely to be disabled or not. 
3. Supports in understanding employees’ underlying medical conditions and reasons for absence whilst empowering managers to proactively manage and engage on such issues. 
4. Assists you to having open discussions with employees regarding medical conditions/disabilities and lay a fully auditable paper trail both to help employee engagement and management but also in the event that a dispute arises.  

Reasonable Adjustments Tool:

Recognising that supporting and managing disabled employees is one of the key challenges for any business, we have designed a tool that augments decision making with a step by step approach to reasonable adjustments. In doing so it:

1. Explores how and why an employee may be put to a substantial disadvantage by a medical condition.
2. Enables you to ask the right questions in the right way around what support may be needed.
3. Crucially, helps businesses understand how feasible that support may be to implement and maintain.
4. Provides a clear and supportive paper trail to not only record how and why adjustments are made but to provide a record to support the employee throughout their employment.

Designed and built by our leading employment experts the tool ensures employees are treated consistently and appropriately so as to mitigate both your litigation risk and spend.  

To find out how we can support you with any disability discrimination related issues, get in touch with our Employment Law expert Jon Gregson who can give you a demo of the tool and answer any of your questions on this topic. 

 Contact our Employment Law solicitors