BC’s draft accessible employment standards: What they’ll mean for employers
In 2024, the BC Government released the first two draft accessibility standards for the province. The proposed accessible service delivery and employment standards were available for public comment from May 31 to July 31, 2024.
The team at Untapped Accessibility did a deep dive into the draft standards to ask the question what would take it the operationalize the standards as they are drafted?
Here’s what we think you should know about the draft accessible employment standards.
Four major themes identified in the draft standards:
1. Accommodations early and often
Across all draft employment standards, the largest focus is offering accommodations early and often. This goes beyond including an email address for accommodations in your job postings and asking new staff if they have accommodation needs during orientation.
It’s about being proactive and making a conscious effort to invite and normalize the disclosure of needs throughout the applicant/staff member-employer relationship.
The standards encourage employers to create multiple opportunities for disclosing needs, so their applicants and employees can consistently perform at their best.
Tips for implementation
- Cross-departmental collaboration is key for embedding accommodations into the culture of the organization. Build talent acquisition teams, business/technology teams, facilities departments, and any other needed representatives into all aspects of the accommodations process.
- To get the most out of accommodations, they need to be transferable and sustainable – and not specific to one supervisor-employee relationship, work environment, or task. Build accommodations processes around the employee so support remains with them, regardless of where they go and what they do with your organization.
2. Collaborating with employees with disabilities
There is also a heavy focus on collaborating with disabled employees in accessibility planning and barrier removal. This is about ensuring people with disabilities are driving decision-making around the critical things that impact their individual experience and safety (for example, emergency planning, stay at work/return to work policies, and accommodation planning).
This does not mean staff with disabilities are responsible for organization-wide accessibility planning and barrier identification, removal, and prevention. An employer is responsible for making their workplace accessible.
Tips for implementation
- Facilitate larger conversations around accessibility planning and barrier identification, removal, and prevention with your Accessibility Committee and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion teams.
3. Proactive accessibility planning
Proactive accessibility planning means taking action to build accessibility before an accommodation request prompts action. For example, the Communications standard requires employers to ensure all essential communications are available in multiple formats that are compatible with assistive devices. This helps employers save time and effort down the line. It also benefits all employees because everyone has preferred formats that facilitate their engagement and comprehension. When options are available, employees can choose a format that best meets their access needs.
Accessibility capacity-building
When accommodations are requested and fulfilled, many standards recommend making the practice available to everyone. This is a great way for employers to build on what they learn from people with disabilities to continue improving the accessibility of their workplace.
Tips for implementation
- Break down the different demands of your work activities so you can offer options for engaging with these demands (for example, use Untapped’s Accessible Service Delivery Framework to plan employee engagement activities).
- Engage your Accessibility Committee in conversations around anticipating/planning for a diversity of needs.
4. Transparency and storytelling
The standards encourage documenting situations where accommodation requests cannot be fulfilled. This supports transparency, which is another theme throughout. In addition to documenting for accountability, the standards make multiple references to being transparent about your accessibility work. For example, under Job Description and Profiles and Policies and Practices, employers are encouraged to highlight their accessibility practices in job descriptions, profiles, and public job advertisements.
Sharing what accommodations you can offer
The Recruiting Employees standard recommends employers provide a list of accommodations they can offer. This is another way for employers to be transparent around previous accommodations they have offered.
Tips for implementation
- Create templates for Communications and Talent Acquisition teams that include naming what you know about the accessibility of your workplace in posters, social media posts, staff event announcements, job postings, etc.
- Create a system for monitoring and tracking all accessibility information at your organization that everyone can access (for example, barrier removal plans, accommodation examples, accessibility initiatives, etc.). This makes it easy for people from different departments and teams to pull accessibility information into their communications.
What’s next?
We expect to see an update from the BC Government in June 2025. The update will likely include a summary of feedback they received through their consultation process. To stay in the know, join or newsletter list or visit the Accessibility Directorate’s website.