Top tips for a more inclusive experience

The sudden switch to an online, virtual workplace due to COVID-19 highlighted the importance of digital accessibility at work – whether you’re working in the office or remotely.

As people make their way back into the office, or are getting used to what we refer to at ANZ as a blended model – a mix between home and office, we need to ensure the lessons we learnt about accessibility and inclusion are adapted for this evolution of work.

Organisations such as ANZ have a great opportunity to even the playing field. We create opportunities to have the very best and brightest people doing wonderful things for our customers and accessibility shouldn’t be a blocker to this. Everybody deserves an opportunity.

We’ve been working in a very different way over the past 12 months, and in some ways it’s been quite good having everyone at home.

Virtual meetings are a great way to advance an inclusive culture by modelling some basic practices. We’ve adopted technologies such as Microsoft Teams, which allow people to do a range of things to make meetings more inclusive and we’re naturally building these into the way we work. For example, raising your hand in meetings when you have something to contribute or a question to ask, and enabling captions across the bottom of the screen.

Simple things like this can make a huge difference to people’s experience at work and can give way to new opportunities. And to ensure we continue to create these opportunities, we need to be mindful of how some things could become a barrier in a blended model.

We need to embed principles and practices in our daily work and remain both curious and conscious of people’s needs to avoid this happening.

What you can do:

Be conscious

People working remotely have had accommodations set up at home, so we need to be conscious of thesethings coming back into the office. For example, when you're in a meeting room - someone who might have had access to captioning at home might no longer have captions. How do you ensure they can hear clearly and follow the meeting?

Be an advocate

This is where having open discussions becomes so important. Conversations ensure teams are sensitive to everyone’s needs, people feel comfortable asking questions and making sure there is someone in the room advocating for people who aren't in the room just to say, ‘hey, it looks like someone's put their hand up’ or ‘it looks like someone's not connected, what do we need to do to help them out?’

I've been in meetings which have been like the ‘old’ ones - everyone in the room has not been on a tablet or device and some people are joining virtually. You can't see the people on the screen as the images are small. People in the room are not raising their hand to ask questions and just asking questions among themselves, so others are getting left out of the discussion and opportunities to engage are being missed.

We need to learn from the past year and continue to apply the principles we worked by when we were all remote. Let's be aware of what worked well and continue to use them as we return to the office.

These things are etiquette and protocol for everyone. And just happen to also be important for accessibility.

Embrace digital

We want to ensure the little things that we've been doing for the last 12 months continue in a new way. For example, let's digitise everything so everybody, particularly people who have visual accessibility issues, are able to see information more clearly. Some teams are putting all of their work into software such as JIRA and not only relying on the sticky Post-it notes on the wall.

There are simple things we've done to accommodate working from home, and I'm hoping we can continue to do that and get even better at it.

View more on ANZ’s approach to accessibility and inclusion