Balfour Beatty signs up to Disability Confident campaign

Balfour Beatty's UK and Ireland construction business has become the first in its sector to sign up to the Disability Confident campaign.

The Department for Work and Pensions' campaign is aimed at helping employers to remove employment barriers and to give disabled people the opportunities to fulfil their potential.

As part of Balfour Beatty's commitment to the aspirations of Disability Confident, the company is to develop an employee training initiative to help employees understand unconscious bias, the subconscious preferences people can have for certain types of people, and how overcoming or understanding unconscious bias can help build a more inclusive culture. This material will then be shared with the company's supply chain and across the construction sector.

Balfour Beatty Construction Services UK Chief Executive Officer, Nicholas Pollard said: "1.3 million people within the disabled population want to work and we want to access the widest possible skills and talent. To achieve our full potential as a business we need to make sure we have open-minded and inclusive leadership that embraces the opportunities a diverse workforce offers.

Balfour Beatty is rolling out its unconscious bias training in 2014 to its 9,000 plus UK construction employee base.

The company is also driving a number of diversity initiatives across its UK business and supply chain. This month, Balfour Beatty and Parsons Brinckerhoff's UK businesses became members of Stonewall's Diversity Champions Programme [www.stonewall.org.uk], Britain's leading employers' forum on sexual orientation and the largest non-governmental intervention of its kind in the world which helps businesses develop inclusive workplace cultures.