Case study: Shell introduces global Workplace Accessibility capability

The challenge

In February 2015 Cara Antoine, Continuous Improvement Leader at Shell, recognised the need to create a single, standard process for employees to request and receive access to IT and Real Estate services, tools, and solutions.

Cara had recently gone through her own personal experience of acquiring animpairment, due to the loss of an eye. Through her re-integration into the workplace, she discovered that things weren’t as smooth as they should be for employees with disabilities.

Considering the global nature of Shell’s work and the variety of business functions and teams involved in enabling access to the workplace, Cara brought a diverse range of individuals together from each functional area of Shell to explore and understand the existing processes that catered to disabled employees. What the team uncovered were seven separate and disconnected processes, 12 separate points of entry into each area that would enable people with impairments the access to tools or solutions to help them perform at their best and as many as 110 different ‘steps’in acquiring a solution.

This led to significant delays in the securing of necessary services, tools, and solutions for disabled employees - often resulting in a wait time of between twoand19 months.

To find out more about Cara’s story,see her Shell blog post:

Leading the change

Cara launched a project to create a single Workplace Accessibility capabilityglobally across Shell. Caraachieved this by assembling a working group to lead the change: this initially comprised a Process Manager, Continuous Improvement and Change Specialist, IT Project Manager, and IT Portfolio Manager.

Over the course of 2015, this new working group met with people across Shell to assess the scale of the challenge and engage key stakeholders in the project. The group quickly expanded to include support from individuals across each of Shell’s main business functions, from IT to Real Estate, Health, Human Resources, Finance, and Procurement.

Colleagues across the organisation agreed that “being Disability-smart means being Business-smart” and that the process needed to mean more than just legal compliance. It was about doing the right thing for all employees, no matter the differences they faced.

Cara is a member of BDF’s Technology Taskforce and used its Accessibility Maturity Model (AMM) to assess current practice and performance in Shell’s IT function and indicate what needed to be done to make the workplace fully accessible.

The working group found that several criteria within the Accessibility Maturity Model scaled up to help assess other functional areas of Shell’s Accessibility maturity as well, such as the evaluation of leadership engagement, vendor relationships and procurement. Redesigning Shell’sglobal processes would be key to ensuring that the proper services, tools, and solutions could be accessed for those who needed them.

In Cara’s experience, “BDF’s Technology Taskforce provides a “safe space” for organisations to share ideas and best practices, since all its members come to the table with the same goal in mind: to sustainably improve our workplaces and the communities we live in, in a way that they are equally inclusive and accessible for all people.”

Redesigning Shell’s Workplace Accessibility process

After gathering information on current practice across the organisation and building relationships with various stakeholders, the working group brought colleagues from the key business functions across Shell together for an extended workshop in February 2016 and set out a continuous improvement approach to redesign Shell’s Workplace Accessibility process.

The new capability would be an adapted form of the process developed by BDF as best practice based on the experience of Lloyds Banking Group and other members.

Key elements of BDF’s model include a ‘one stop shop’ for adjustments, the concept of triage to ensure an appropriate route for an individual through the process and establishing a catalogue of pre-approved adjustments, particularly in relation to IT.

This approach would be tailored to fit Shell’s global model and implementation plans, and underpinned by eight key action points:

  • Creating a process that was ‘standard’ across the company, rather than based on ‘exceptional cases’.
  • Ensuring that approach to budgeting was consistent across the organisation with clear financial responsibility.
  • Significantly reducing the number of processes and steps involved in obtaining access to the services, tools, and solutions needed for an employee with an impairment.
  • Ensuring that proper services, tools and solutions were available for employees with impairments.
  • Clearly delineating the role of the Health Department, HR and line management in terms of when they needed to be involved, if at all.
  • Defining a single, self-service entry point in the form of an accessible online portal with a global catalogue of all services, tools and solutions available for an employee with impairment.
  • Communicating and advertising information about the Workplace Accessibility capabilityto all Shell employees.
  • Establishing key criteria and pre-approved services, tools and solutions to avoid subjectivity and ease the flow of providing access.
  • Keeping the process impartial and private by having it processed by Accessibility Care Centre specialists rather than individual line managers.

Additionally, the working group streamlined the approval process for funding services, tools and solutions by giving the Accessibility Care Centre specialists a list of ‘pre-approved’ items that they could sign off independently from the finance team.

Pilot launch

From October 2016 a pilot of theWorkplace Accessibility capability was launched in the Netherlands and Canada. The pilot introduced 142 out of 150 updates through the roll-out of the new capability and is already seen to be delivering dramatic improvements in service and efficiency:

  • Waiting times for adjustments have been reduced from two to19 months to as little as five days.
  • There are now twoprocesses for obtaining a reasonable adjustment, compared to sevenbefore: a single, self-help approach via the online portal and a Workplace Accessibility Care Centre, with a team of Care Specialists to help guide an employee with a disability to the proper services, tools and solutions they require.These advisors were trained by BDF on disability awareness, etiquette and the framework for making recommendations on adjustments.
  • Staff time spent on processing reasonable adjustments has been reduced from 50 hours to 10 hours per case.

Next steps

The Shell Workplace Accessibility team are continuing to learn and measure the effectiveness of the new process and will adjust the offerings based on user feedback and experiences, and expand the capability to more locations around the Shell globe in the coming months.

As they continue to expand their Workplace Accessibility capability, they will increase theircommunications campaign across Shell to raise awareness of the new service.

Lucy Ruck, Technology Taskforce Manager at BDF, said: “The success of Shell’s scheme demonstrates how raising a concern as an individual can have a major impact even across a global company.”

“Through gaining the support of her colleagues and using expertise and tools gained through networking with the Technology Taskforce, Cara was able to bring about a major change to the way Shell handles Workplace Accessibility for impaired employees on a global scale.”

For more information about Shell’s commitment to create an inclusive workplace, please visit