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Creating a supportive work environment
APS agencies should ensure that their workplace policies and practices are sufficiently flexible to enable all employees, including those with disability, to contribute as effectively as they can to their agency, and to achieve an appropriate work–life balance.
What can we do?
1. Make use of flexible work practices
A wide range of flexible work practices are used in the APS, with the workplace diversity plans and collective and individual agreements of many agencies incorporating options for flexible arrangements such as home-based work, job-sharing, part-time work, flexible working hours and purchased leave.
These arrangements can benefit all employees. However, they can be particularly beneficial for employees with disability, including those who have difficulty physically accessing workplaces, those experiencing episodic illness and those whose disability makes extended work hours difficult.
Agencies, in consultation with employees with disability and other key stakeholders, are encouraged to review their collective agreements, AWAs and workplace diversity plans to ensure they encourage and support flexible working practices that allow all employees, including employees with disability, to realise their full potential.
In putting flexible working arrangements into practice for people with disability, managers should talk to employees with disability about any reasonable adjustments needed to address their particular circumstances. Generally, it would be expected that the arrangements covering all employees would provide sufficient flexibility to support the needs of people with disability and be set out in the agency’s collective agreement.
It is, of course, also open to agencies to enter into AWAs with their employees. The use of an individual agreement, tailored to the specific circumstances of the person with disability may provide benefits to both the employer and employee.
Karen’s story
Karen has been a quadriplegic since a diving accident when she was fifteen, and has been working in the APS for almost ten years, including in a team leader role in her agency for the last six years.
Overall, she says that her experiences as a person with a disability in the Public Service have been positive but there have been some difficult times over things that should have been easy.
For example, the back of her wheelchair broke which meant that she had to go into the city to get it repaired. First, however, she came into work to rearrange coaching for her team before taking care of the damage.
Somewhere along the line some wires got crossed. Instead of being granted personal leave—which is what would have happened if she had, for example, broken her leg—to go to Melbourne to get it fixed, Karen was asked to take this on recreation or flex leave. It took a week, including getting advice from Head Office, before personal leave was granted.
Karen felt that she was not being treated in the same way that other staff were, that she wasn’t valued or her situation understood properly despite having worked in the same place for so long. It was a small thing, but it should have been dealt with properly and quickly.
Even so, Karen says that her experiences as an employee with disability in the APS have been positive overall.
….overall my experiences have been positive, and the issues that do arise can be dealt with using a little common sense and awareness of the issues.
In addition to these formal arrangements, agencies need to make sure that managers understand the benefits of flexible work practices to the agency as a whole and are confident they will have the backing of more senior management in supporting the use of flexible work practices by their staff.
The Supported Wage System
While most people with disability who participate in the open workforce do so at full rates of pay, there are some people who are unable to work at full wage rates due to the effect of disability on their workplace productivity. With the Supported Wage System91 eligible people with disability can access a process of productivity-based wage assessment to determine fair pay for fair work. The Supported Wage System pays for wage assessments conducted by independent assessors, so that there is no cost to the employer.
Agencies’ collective workplace agreements generally provide for payment of supported salary rates and set out the criteria for eligibility.
The Jobacess92 website includes a step-by-step guide to applying for the Supported Wage System and Jobaccess advisers93 can provide more information on request.
Where collective agreements are not sufficiently flexible, consideration may need to be given to using an AWA to tailor a flexible work arrangement on an individual basis. In establishing an AWA agencies should ensure employees with disability are provided with appropriate support and the package of conditions offered to employees with disability is not less than that offered to employees without disability. In designing appropriate AWAs, agencies may wish to seek assistance from the Office of the Employment Advocate.94
2. Create advocacy roles
One of the ways in which agencies can encourage a culture supporting employees with disability is to provide avenues for their views to be heard. Although the main responsibility rests with managers, agencies should also consider identifying an advocate, preferably a senior manager, to support employees with disability to ensure they receive ‘a fair go’.
An appointee of this nature would need to be committed to representing people with disability, understand the practical issues that confront them, be approachable, understand the diverse nature of disability and be committed to genuine and constructive communication and negotiation, on a regular basis, with agency employees with disability.
This need not be a full-time appointment, but the importance of the role to the agency would need to be formally recognised, for example incorporated into the advocate’s performance management arrangements.
In the Department of Families Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the Disability Access Coordinator is a dedicated position, whose role includes influencing the development of corporate policies and providing education and support to managers, and advocacy for staff with disability. The department’s commitment to the role is reflected in its Certified Agreement.
3. Provide equitable access to development opportunities
APS employees with disability report experiencing fewer opportunities to participate in specialised leadership development programmes, placement and mobility options inside their agency, and mentoring and personal sponsorship opportunities, than do employees without disability. In addition, employees with disability are more likely to disagree that merit is routinely applied in the temporary assignment of higher duties.
Agencies should encourage managers to hold discussions about learning and development opportunities with employees with disability during the performance management process. Critically, they should not assume that employees with disability are not as interested in development and career advancement as other employees without disability.
If the cost of adaptations required to access learning and development opportunities is seen as a barrier to participation, agencies could consider establishing a central fund for reasonable adjustments for staff with disability.
4. Support the higher education aspirations of employees with disability
Fewer employees with disability have bachelor level degrees and significantly more have vocational qualifications than people without disability. Students with disability face difficulties in accessing higher education which include problems accessing adaptive technologies, the need to provide assessments in different formats and the need for extra time to complete those assessments.
Agencies can improve the competitiveness of employees with disability by supporting and encouraging them to upgrade their qualifications.
One practical step agencies can take to support employees with disability in this context is to review study assistance schemes to ensure they provide sufficient study leave for staff with disability and allow access to adaptive technologies, for example, by providing equipment for their use at home.
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