Scottish Government - Reasonable Adjustments

Supporting government staff to do their jobs comfortably

The Challenge

Under UK Law, employers must make reasonable adjustments to make sure employees with disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions, aren’t substantially disadvantaged when doing their jobs.

The Scottish Government commissioned Storm ID to undertake a service design project to review and propose a revised approach for delivering a reasonable adjustments service to disabled staff. 

The Objectives

  • Develop user journeys

    Develop clear understanding of current user journeys, barriers to optimum performance and satisfaction levels. 

  • Comprehensive service proposal

    A service proposal that addresses identified opportunities, works for users and has the potential to deliver value, without being limited by current organisational realities. 

  • Responsibilities

    Identification of organisational responsibilities throughout the employment journey. 

The Insight

Storm ID aligned the approach closely to the Scottish Approach to Service Design, which states that the people of Scotland should be empowered to actively participate in the definition, design and delivery of their public services and that inclusive and accessible research and design methods should be used so that all citizens can participate fully and meaningfully.

Core principles of collaboration and inclusion were followed throughout the project. For example, we actively involved employees and line managers in the identification of any issues and barriers around the reasonable adjustments process.

We also ensured employees and line managers helped make sense of the research findings through sense-making and co-design workshops.

Overall, we engaged with over 70 participants during the project (including both employees and line managers). This included representation across a spectrum of Scottish Government locations, directorates as well as a wide range of disabilities (including physical, cognitive, neurological and mental).

The Outputs

Outputs of the project included:

  • journey maps of ‘As is’ organisational processes for pre-employment and employment highlighting prioritised key pain points
  • prioritised user needs
  • to-be vision and journey maps, highlighting key opportunities for service improvement
  • development of a reasonable adjustments maturity framework with UK wide benchmarking report to assess progress of the Scottish Government against the framework

Outputs were produced in accessible formats for users who use assistive technologies.

The findings were taken forward by the project steering group and encapsulated with a wider Diversity and Inclusion strategy review.  

Related projects

Scottish Government - Saltire Intranet

Seafish

Transport Scotland

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