Disability Network

Supporting colleagues with disabilities, connecting with people of a similar interest and background and helping colleagues to reach their full potential.

Disability at Tesco was founded to help inspire and enable all colleagues with disabilities in their lives. We are a proud Disability Confident employer (Level 2). We offer activities to get the right people for our business and have programmes in place to attract, develop and retain disabled talent.

Our Vision

• Every decision we make at Tesco should consider those with a disability - whether a colleague or customer

Our Objectives

• Colleagues: at each stage of the colleague lifecycle there should be clear support for colleagues with a disability
• Customer: continue the changes to meet the needs of customers with a disability

How we support our colleagues and customers with hidden disabilities

As one of the UK’s largest retailers we’re committed to supporting all our customers, including around 12 million people in the UK currently living with a disability – some visible, and some hidden.

To help us make each shopping trip a little easier, the Sunflower Lanyard initiative has been rolled out to all of our UK stores – helping customers with hidden disabilities to signal that they may need some assistance, and providing colleagues with extra confidence in offering help.

We’ve trialed the lanyard in selected stores and have seen how these small gestures really can make a huge difference to the shopping experience.

We’ve signed up to the Valuable 500 commitment, a global movement helping to put disability inclusion onto the business leadership agenda. It is really important that everyone feels welcome at Tesco, whether they are shopping or working with us. It is something that has been on our business agenda for some time now and as part of the Valuable 500, we will be sharing our commitment to continue making Tesco a more accessible place for everyone.

We have been accredited for Visibly Better Employer for RNIB

We’re thrilled to have been awarded the Visibly Better Employer standard from RNIB. We’re committed to ensuring that everyone’s welcome at Tesco and that we are doing the work needed to make Tesco a truly inclusive workplace for all. We recognise that people with sight loss face many barriers to success at work, and with the RNIB’s help are excited to change that for our existing and future colleagues.

Latest News and Events

Recruitment during Covid-19

As part of our COVID-19 response, we introduced a simpler recruitment approach for temporary colleagues which encouraged and supported people with disabilities to apply for a role in Tesco. A temporary colleague explained that she was initially apprehensive about applying for a GHS online vacancy due to her autism and praised GHS Online Manager Carl for getting things right.

“From the first phone call, he enabled me to ask for what I needed in order to do the job to the best of my ability and trusted that I knew myself well enough to know what I could do.” This proves what a tremendous impact good leadership, belief and support can have on colleagues with disabilities.