Championing inclusion in 2025: five ways to make a real difference

Everyone wants a workplace where people feel valued and respected. With positive intentions, true inclusion can be incredibly rewarding and impactful.

People’s identities and experiences are complex and inclusion goes beyond race, gender, religious beliefs or sexual orientation. It’s about seeing each employee as an individual. Think about:

• A colleague who’s neurodivergent;
• Someone going through menopause or pregnancy loss;
• A team member starting fertility treatment;
• An employee balancing work and caring responsibilities.

The key is creating space for honest conversations. When managers know how to listen and respond, people naturally feel safer sharing their experiences and asking for support.

For National Inclusion Week 2025, we’re highlighting five steps organisations can take right now to improve workplace inclusion.

This year’s theme, #NowIsTheTime, emphasises the importance of inclusion, urgency, and resilience, encouraging actions that make inclusion sustainable and embedded across organisations.

1. Empower your managers to lead on inclusion

Managers shape how people experience work. A great policy means little if the day-to-day relationship isn’t supportive. Yet many managers feel underprepared to have sensitive conversations or make necessary reasonable adjustments.

Here’s how to equip them:

• Practical training: Not just theory but real-world scenarios, checklists and conversation guides.
• Clear guidance on adjustments: Spell out what managers can authorise themselves and when to escalate.
• Safe spaces for managers: Peer forums or “manager surgeries” where they can share challenges, swap ideas and learn from HR or specialists.

When managers feel confident:

• Inclusion stops being “just HR’s job” and becomes a normal part of people management;
• Employees feel genuinely supported and valued;
• Risk goes down, retention goes up and performance improves.

This improves employee engagement and experiences.

2. Offer learning that brings ED&I to life

Training is where good intentions turn into real-world behaviours. It gives people the knowledge, language and confidence to handle difference well, and that pays off in engagement, creativity and productivity.

To make it stick:

• Blend short eLearning modules with live workshops, team discussions and quick “nudges” that keep ideas fresh.
• Cover the basics and the specifics. Unconscious bias, inclusive leadership and effective communication are essential. But add topics like neuro-inclusive best practices, menopause awareness, domestic abuse guidance or religious inclusion at work.
• Tailor to your audience. Senior leaders, line managers and frontline staff all need different examples and scenarios.

Recent research from City & Guilds provides some eye-opening stats:

• 37% of managers still have no neurodiversity training
• Only 51% of employers adapt recruitment processes for neurodivergent candidates.

That’s a huge, missed opportunity to unlock strengths and improve performance as research has also found that neurodiverse teams can be up to 30% more productive than their neurotypical peers, and inclusive teams make better decisions faster.

Watch our on-demand webinar on manager empowerment and neuro-inclusion.

3. Check your policies through an inclusion lens

Policies need to be more than tick boxes. They should be fully embedded in the organisational culture from top to bottom, demonstrating to your people the organisation has consciously and considerately thought about their real-life experiences. Ask yourself:

• Does your onboarding feel welcoming from day one?
• Can every employee access information easily?
• Do managers know how to spot when someone’s struggling?

Policies that clearly cover topics such as menopause, gender transition or domestic abuse make a real difference as they tell employees you’re serious about supporting them and are going above and beyond the standard.

Outsourcing inclusion policy reviews

It can help to bring in an expert to:

• Review policies for inclusive language;
• Point out gaps or outdated processes;
• Suggest new content based on best practice.

And don’t stop at the wording. Look at the whole employee experience, recruitment, day-to-day employee relations, absence support and career transitions, to create a strategy that’s practical and future focused.

Making sure the policies are lived experiences for everyone in the company, from leadership to managers to those on the ‘ground floor’ will go a long way to creating an inclusive workplace.

4. Use your employee relations data to spot gaps

Your employee relations (ER) data is one of the richest resources you have. Collected and analysed by dedicated technology, it can be so much more than a simple record of cases or grievances in a spreadsheet; it can be a window into your culture.

Real-world impact of inclusion

Patterns in this data can reveal where inclusion may be breaking down, long before issues escalate into turnover, formal complaints, or legal risk. For example, Wickes identified a need for extra manager training to support neurodivergent colleagues. They partnered with the National Autistic Society to provide specialist training and raise awareness, an early intervention informed directly by their ER insights.

Organisations similarly can uncover:

• Which departments or sites have higher volumes of certain case types;
• If absence, performance or grievance issues cluster around particular teams or managers;
• If some employee groups raise similar concerns repeatedly and how long it takes to resolve concerns.

Spotting these trends early enables HR and managers to respond quickly with training, policy changes or targeted support, instead of reacting after the damage has been done.

Turning inclusion data into action

empower® makes this analysis straightforward by pulling together your organisation’s ER data into intuitive dashboards so HR can track and improve:

• Trends and pressure points across your organisation;
• Behaviours that shape employee experience;
• Progress over time with clear dashboards.

Using data-driven insights, organisations can take tangible steps to improve inclusion.

This combination of technology and human insight gives HR an early-warning system and a way to direct resources where they’ll have the most impact on inclusion.

5. Keep checking and adapting your ED&I plans

Inclusion isn’t a “set and forget” exercise. Regular reviews help you keep pace with new laws and shifting expectations:

• Track progress against clear action plans;
• Update policies as needed;
• Benchmark your data against peers.

By staying ahead, you protect your organisation from risk and strengthen your culture, making it easier to attract and retain diverse talent.

Why disability and neuro-inclusion matter for business

Inclusive workplaces don’t just feel better; they perform better:

• Companies investing in disability inclusion see 28% higher revenue and over 30% higher profit margins (Accenture).
• Employers making workplace adjustments report a 53% boost in productivity (Job Accommodation Network).
• 71% say hiring or retaining employees with disabilities improves staff morale (DWP).
• Neurodiverse teams can be up to 30% more productive than neurotypical peers (University of Nottingham).

With 24% of the UK population reporting a disability (House of Commons Library) and 14% identifying as neurodivergent, there’s a huge untapped talent pool key to solving skills shortages.

Our commitment to inclusion

At AdviserPlus we’re committed to living the values we promote:

• Our InclusivityPlus team meets every month to explore new ways to champion inclusion across the group businesses and to embed inclusive best practice into everyday work.
• We also run an annual anonymous survey, “Your Voice”, to understand how well we’re supporting disability and mental health at work and where we can improve.
• To make our content more accessible we already include subtitles in all on-demand webinars, and we’re now adding British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation too. BSL is an essential component of any organisation’s inclusion commitments and we’re proud to make it a central part of ours.

For people whose first language is BSL, written English may not convey information as effectively as sign language. Subtitles alone aren’t always enough. Adding BSL closes this gap and makes our videos and webinars more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing community.

“I’m proud of continually learning in a HR role – to constantly be seeking new information and to be at the forefront of inclusion and creating safer spaces for people to work in. To be able to champion causes such as LGBTQIA+ rights, Mental Health and Disability Awareness alongside worker’s rights and helping to support some big name clients means I have a very fulfilling role day-in and day-out that I can be proud of.” – Emily Bennett, Technical HR Consultant, AdviserPlus

Driving workplace inclusion through small but powerful actions

Small changes, like clearer policy wording and manager training, can make a real difference to inclusion in the workplace.

By empowering managers, embedding inclusive behaviours and acting on data-driven insights, organisations can make real progress. Most importantly, by recognising that inclusion isn’t a “one-and-done” exercise, but a continuous journey of improvement, “inclusion” transforms from a buzzword in a static document into a pillar of organisational identity.

From ambition to action

Find out how we can help your organisation put ED&I at the heart of your people practices with policy assessments, learning and development solutions and ER technology.  Speak to an inclusion expert today about how we can support your organisation’s efforts.