Olga Bezpalko, Director of the Ukrzaliznytsia Social Policy Department, tells about the practice of employing people with disabilities

Our company is very large, it has about 240 thousand employees, and close to 8,500 are people with disabilities.

We do not divide our employees by whether or not they have a disability. All employees are equal, all work in equal conditions and receive their wages accordingly. Our conscious choice is that when a person with a grave form of disability is unable to perform their full range of duties in a certain position, we are prepared to reduce that list of duties. Of course, we add to the staffing schedule a position intended for a person with a disability, with account of their specific condition, and formulate the list of duties that they can perform in that position.

More than 10 thousand of the company employees are now in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, of whom about 600 have already returned to their workplaces and resumed their work. A large proportion of veterans returning to the workplace have a disability, and it brings up the issue of their adaptation in a new workplace, especially if they have been retrained or changed the profile of their activity. Our advocacy centre stays in touch with them, from the moment of their injury and being granted a disability status to the moment when they come to their workplace. We have developed an algorithm to bring back people with disabilities to work, with account of the need to ensure traffic security and harmful working conditions. We prepare the respective workplace, and inform the management and the HR employees about a person with a disability being referred for employment.

If, however, their disability does not make it possible for them to return to their previous job and they need a different kind and type of work, we offer a different vacancy at the same structural unit, and similar to the profession they previously had. In that case the employee can easily retrain or take some advanced training courses and start working at a new position in that same structural unit where they worked earlier. Why is this important? Ukrzaliznytsia is a very large company, it is not one small office in downtown Kyiv, it is more than 800 structural units located all across Ukraine. For many workers who come back from the front, it is important to connect with the place where they used to work and where their families live.

If it is not possible to offer retraining or re-qualification, we suggest going beyond the boundaries of the structural unit and are ready to offer a job within the boundaries of another branch in that region, or in a different regional branch. If this is not acceptable, we propose that the employee relocate to another large city that has a wider range of positions that are suitable for them in our company. This algorithm makes it possible to adapt persons with disabilities to work in the company. 

Ruslana Bogdanova, HR partner of the Kernel Division for production assets, tells about the practice of employing people with disabilities 

Will we hire a person with a disability? Definitely, we will accept them, of course we will employ them. The main condition is that the person does not have any medical contraindications. Every person who comes here to the production facilities has to pass a medical examination. Of course, we decide whether we can hire a person, based on the results of the medical examination and in accordance with the recommendations in the MSEC certificate, and check whether that person can perform certain functions. After all, we are talking about production processes that do carry certain risks, there are certain limitations.

At present, our company employs a little over 600 people with disabilities, which is about 6% of the total number of our staff.

There are no restrictions as to the range of positions that persons with disabilities can occupy. Those include a grain elevator manager, or head of a laboratory, or a machine operator, or a laboratory assistant, or an office employee. I cannot say that for some positions we hire persons with disabilities, and for some others we don’t.

We create additional jobs where those persons can work, for example, if they have a specific condition after coming back from the front that do not let them work in their previous position. Of course, we try to bring those people back and retain them at the company.

The attrition rate among persons with disabilities is two times lower than among other employees. Most likely, people with disabilities value the comfort in the team that they work with. The stability of the team is very important for them, and the attitude is very important for them, too.

Naturally, people with disabilities have certain specifics that we pay attention to. Not all people who come back are ready to open up; not all are prepared to work with a psychologist; not all are ready to come out in the first month in their team.

Valery Kushnirenko, HR partner of PrivatBank, tells about the practice of employing people with disabilities at the bank

PrivatBank employs 664 employees with disabilities, which is almost 4%. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the war, we changed our work forms and schedules. Our employees can work virtually in any conditions: from home, in the office, or while traveling.

We launched the "Equal opportunities for all" programme, aimed at promoting the inclusivity culture among the entire staff of the bank. This year we are launching a programme to support veterans. These programmes overlap in some way because we understand that many people coming back from the frontlines will have disabilities.

In order to employ them at the bank, we changed many recruitment procedures and introduced some technical improvements. We demand from managers that, in the recruitment application, they formally confirm their readiness to hire people with disabilities. If they are not ready, they must explain why. PrivatBank appointed responsible staff members to help people with their adaptation, both newly hired employees and those who change positions.

We launched a “Resilience” programme, where we appointed special inclusivity ambassadors, who we train and help to understand the issue of employing persons with disabilities more deeply and communicate those issues to a wider circle.

All those measures are aimed at generating a flow of people with disabilities that we can employ at PrivatBank according to their capabilities and according to our needs.