National Inclusion Week: Ensuring your workplace works for everyone

This week marks National Inclusion Week across the UK, with organisations coming together to celebrate inclusion and drive meaningful action to ensure everyone feels valued, supported and able to thrive in the workplace.

With this year’s theme of ‘Build Trust. Navigate Change’ encouraging organisations to work with staff to ensure they feel safe to be heard when it comes to their experiences in the workplace, before working together to implement necessary changes to ensure everyone feels heard, respected and able to do their job to the very best of their ability.

Inclusion is supporting everyone to thrive, irrespective of their gender, race, religion, sexuality, disability, carers status and social mobility – and recognising where barriers to this exist. But what can workplaces do to ensure they are truly inclusive?

Despite being home to the world’s best university for the last decade, Oxfordshire has many communities that suffer from deprivation, major cost of living difficulties and a lack of opportunities – with several wards within the county falling into the 20% most deprived areas in England.

In the very first episode of our podcast, OxTalks, Co-Founder and Director of Makespace Oxford, Andy Edwards, explained how the organisation is helping to reimagine spaces, and locations for the benefit of all, ‘unlocking empty and underused spaces with and for communities, transforming them into welcoming, affordable and accessible places for work, culture and community’.

Series 3, episode 5 covers embracing diversity in the workplace, with Laura Ayoade, former Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lead at Aston Martin discussing the impact and integration of equality, diversity and inclusion into different sectors of business and enterprise – and ways in which businesses can ensure they offer an equitable workplace.

Laura covers the challenges still faced around protected characteristics and the implementation of change within organisations that may not even recognise they are struggling from institutional bias. By going beyond ‘equality’ and focusing on equitable acts to foster true diversity and inclusion within a workplace, organisations can open up those conversations around representing everyone.

Episode 6 also covers flexible working and the ways in which workplaces can ensure all employees are able to deliver, irrespective of their circumstances and responsibilities outside of work.

Helen Wright, Founder of 9-2-3 Jobs, was made redundant from her job as a broadcast journalist while pregnant – and now heads-up an award-winning recruitment agency specialising in flexible working. In the UK, organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of flexible working arrangements. According to official government figures, as of 2026, 74% of organizations in the UK report having hybrid working in place, which is linked to positive impacts on recruitment and retention.

Flexible working is a way of working that suits an employee’s needs, for example having flexible start and finish times, offering job shares or working from home – and is a way of optimising productivity and morale while ensuring the work-life balance of individuals with diverse needs.

Within the most recent series of OxTalks, we heard from Veena Virahsammy, the founder of Oxford Creators, a not-for-profit alternative education provision (AP) born out of her own personal experience supporting her own son. Veena details the need for tailored support hubs that cater to neurodiverse and misunderstood children for whom mainstream education isn’t an option, and so these individuals aren’t ‘written off’ before they even make it into the working world.

The most recent episode of OxTalks, features Olga Zilberberg, Founder of The Missing Link, talking about mental health training, neurodiversity, and what real cultural change looks like inside organisations. Olga shares lived experience of anxiety, panic attacks and depression, and explains why effective training starts with self-awareness, everyday communication, and psychological safety rather than diagnosis or compliance.

The conversation explores what managers and colleagues can notice when someone is struggling, how to create space for honest check-ins, and why supporting neurodivergent people requires inclusive hiring and practical adjustments. Recent UK data underlines the scale of the challenge: the Health and Safety Executive reports 22.1 million working days lost to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25.

The episode goes on to cover the different ways in which different individuals may work best – and how we can all meet each other exactly where we are.

As this week’s National Inclusion Week draws to a close, it is vital all organisations and decision makers continue these conversations to ensure workplaces are truly inclusive, educate themselves – and acknowledge where more needs to be done.