Sightsavers’ workplace: our disability inclusion achievements

Mental health in the workplace

Our senior HR business partners team have launched a wellbeing task force with resources for all staff and developed a team of mental health first aiders to signpost staff to appropriate help when they are experiencing a mental health issue or emotional distress.

Disability Confident Leader

We have achieved our Disability Confident Leader status, as part of a scheme run by the UK government supporting employers to become more disability inclusive. We attained this by undertaking a large range of activities led by our HR team in collaboration with other teams at Sightsavers. These included advertising vacancies with a specialist board that targets candidates with disabilities, piloting alternative accessible recruitment practices and raising awareness internally through our speaker seminars. This means we are among just 300 UK organisations and only two NGOs to have achieved this rating. As a leading advocate for the disability rights around the world we aim to be an employer of choice for people with disabilities.

In addition, we have rolled out global guidelines for line managers to support staff with disabilities.

Training

Our Social Inclusion Working Group has continued to deliver disability awareness training sessions, both at our UK headquarters and in our country offices, with more than 100 staff members completing the session since the beginning of 2019.

Our first course of Level 1 British Sign Language was passed by all eight members of staff who participated in the UK. Going forward, we want to encourage more staff to learn to sign and find a way to roll out sign language lessons in our country offices.

Country office accessibility audits

In 2019 we developed some accessibility tools to identify what gaps exist in our country offices in terms of accessibility. Our security team used these tools as part of their security audits. While this may have limited use initially, it is hoped that this will help influence our practices when new offices are opened or when we move offices going forwards.

Communications accessibility

We have launched our brand guidelines and toolkit which govern how Sightsavers presents itself as an organisation and encourages staff to make sure our content is consistent and as accessible as possible.  You can learn about it by visiting the Brand book.

If you’d like to know any more about our work on digital inclusion and accessibility at Sightsavers, please check out our perspectives pages.

Communications accessibility is important at Sightsavers and so our templates have been designed with accessibility in mind (for example colour blindness and screen reader users).