One key task I’ve been working on recently is our sector’s accessibility audit. I’m a member of the disability inclusion steering committee for our organisation. Together with a colleague, we are leading on workplace adjustments.

The audit is externally assessed. It covers everything from policies, to recruitment and professional development, IT systems and innovation, procurement, and communication and marketing. We’re evaluated on our internal practices with staff, as well as our services to customers, and our partnerships.

Each member of our committee is responsible for a different section of the audit.

I’m liaison on our workplace adjustments. For example, what do our policies say, how has this been implemented, are resources adequately communicated to staff, and do disabled staff think these processes are effective.

We created a plan and reached out to the areas of our organisation that have all the information that we need. My role is to coordinate the data from the experts and submit our section for external review. It’s an interesting and valuable process.

On other work today, our project team revised the draft message frame from our partners, which will be used as part of the control conditions for our randomised control trial. As I’ve previously described, we’re testing whether we can use behavioural principles to change behaviours on diversity and inclusion. The mechanism we’re testing is through improved communications that draw on behavioural and social sciences evidence. If it seems that all we do is draft and re-draft—that’s completely right! Refining a behavioural science intervention is incredibly time consuming. Each message is around 200 words, but the language needs to be tested and re-tested and weighed against the evidence.