Our success is our people, people like you
Valuing difference, promoting fairness and providing equality of opportunity are key to the success of our work across the UK. Strong corporate values including ‘promoting opportunity & independence for all’ feed workforce diversity and inclusion issues into our overall strategy for our customers and our staff.
We are seeking to achieve a truly diverse workforce, with a variety of backgrounds, aspirations and approaches.
We actively target a diverse audience when recruiting as part of our commitment to progress on age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation and roader equality and human rights issues. Our aim is to employ a workforce that accurately reflects the community that we serve.
We need all of our people to contribute to the achievement of the Departments objectives. To promote this we have a series of staff network groups for age, disability, gender, race, sexual orientation and work-life balance. Each group has a senior manager as its champion.
We provide awareness of diversity issues for our staff through learning and development products such as the Diversity toolkit on an ongoing basis. For example, the Department:
- Works in partnership with other external organisations such as Employers Forum on Disability and Employers Forum on Age
- Is a member of Race for Opportunity and Opportunity Now which are Business in the Community campaigns
- Is a Diversity Champion for Stonewall, the organisation working to achieve legal equality and social justice for lesbians, gay men and bisexual people
Disability Symbol user
As a Disability Symbol user we make 5 commitments:
- We guarantee to interview all applicants with a disability who meet the minimum criteria for a job vacancy and to consider them on their abilities - Guaranteed Interview Scheme
- We will discuss with employees who have disabilities what we and they can do to make sure they can develop and use their abilities
- We will make every effort when employees develop a disability to make sure that they stay in employment
- We will take action to ensure that all employees develop the appropriate level of disability awareness needed to make our commitment work
- We will review the 5 commitments every year to see what has been achieved. We will plan ways to improve and we will let employees know about progress and future plans
DWP is committed to providing services which embrace diversity and promote equality of opportunity in our working practices with all our customers, colleagues and partners.
