Progressing toward a more accessible workplace, shaping inclusive futures for all  

Sixteen percent of the world’s population are people with disabilities; 80% of them are of working age. These numbers indicate a compelling need to ensure workplaces offer equal opportunities for all to pursue successful careers.    

At Capgemini, our colleagues with disabilities and neurodiverse individuals aren’t defined by their limitations but by their capabilities. As a global organization, it’s our priority to ensure all our colleagues are enabled to excel at work, bringing the best of their creativity and innovation to the workplace. This doesn’t apply to people with disabilities alone but to each one of our colleagues, providing everyone with a more comfortable and inclusive work environment that prioritizes well-being.  

Creating an accessible workplace is complex and multidimensional.   

Our commitment to building an accessible workplace – providing tools, support, and flexibility for our colleagues with disabilities – comes from the top. We were an early adopter of the Valuable 500, and our CEO, Aiman Ezzat, recently signed the International Labour Organization (ILO) pledge, furthering our commitment to disability-inclusive sustainability practices.   

Operationally, we are driving change by working collaboratively with key internal stakeholders who are embedding accessibility principles and processes into core functions. Our actions include building accessible apps through our Group IT function, making office spaces fit for purpose through the Corporate Real Estate and Facilities team, and our work to ensure accessibility throughout an employee’s journey from recruitment to daily communications and our L&D programs.     

Our award-winning global employee network group, CapAbility, focuses on providing practical support and a platform for networking and advocacy. CapAbility includes a sub-charter, NeuroAbility, that focuses on our neurodiverse colleagues. They are both pivotal in ensuring the culture change needed for success.  

Three key ways to make our workplaces more accessible for all:  

• Ensuring accessibility of workspaces
• Enhancing digital tools for accessibility
• Accessibility throughout the employee journey

1. Ensuring accessibility of workspaces: With our offices in over 50 countries, our Group Facilities team works on multiple fronts to enable independent access for all, making spaces accessible and customizing them based on local needs.  

We aim to nurture an environment that improves productivity, concentration, and employee well-being across our offices with provisions for quiet zones and well-being spaces, including maternity rooms for nursing mothers. In Sydney and Melbourne, for instance, our offices include multi-faith well-being rooms, while in Belgium, employees have access to a “people room,” a dedicated space that serves as a quiet zone and well-being space for employees, accommodating their different needs.  

Across Capgemini offices worldwide, we have installed a range of facilities and features both in indoor and outdoor spaces to fit the specific needs of our colleagues with disabilities.  

A few examples of how we’re ensuring accessibility in our offices include:  

We’ve recently conducted a pilot in collaboration with CapAbility and an external provider led by experts with lived user experiences, for an assessment of our office spaces, benchmarking ourselves against global standards of accessibility in key sites worldwide, which will then be rolled out globally.   

2. Enhancing digital tools for accessibility: Our IT team ensures that compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the global standard for accessibility, is central to our user experience and service design. This includes creating a corporate design system with libraries of WCAG-compliant components that are reused across all Capgemini websites and applications.  

In addition to aligning with standards like WCAG, we use research to ensure our applications are truly accessible and user-friendly for everyone. 

Currently, the IT team is working on a three-point plan to ensure our internal applications comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This plan includes:  

Work is also underway to improve the accessibility of our external corporate website.   

Our remediation plan addresses blockers for users to complete key activities, enhancing keyboard accessibility, color contrast issues, and screen reader functionality.  

3. Accessibility throughout the employee journey: We believe in enabling all talent to grow their careers right from the time they apply for a role at Capgemini.   

• Recruiting the best talent: We train our talent acquisition team to ensure diversity in profiles and make sure candidates are selected based on their skills and experiences. We also utilize leading technology solutions where needed in our interview process. Currently, we’re working with the talent acquisition team to update our recruitment application processes, enabling candidates to mention their disability and if they require any specific assistance. For instance, in Brazil, candidates with disabilities are provided with sign language assistance whenever needed. In 2023, we renewed a social agreement with our social partners on the representation of people with disabilities in our workforce in France, setting our ambition to reach 6% by 2026.
  
  
• Making training accessible: To make learning effective, engaging, and seamless, we have made mandatory training accessible and built accessible learning by design, for example, by introducing automated subtitles on our learning platforms.    

• Improving accessibility of communications: We provide guidance for effective communication as an essential step to ensuring collaboration and engagement for all colleagues regardless of ability. We encourage the use of features like live captioning and transcripts, which, apart from helping our colleagues with disabilities, are also useful to people who aren’t fluent in English, ensuring they feel a sense of belonging as well.   
    
  Our visual identity guidelines address accessibility issues such as the appropriate use of colors, gradients, and typography. We have a toolkit on accessible communications to ensure legibility and universal accessibility.   

Accessibility and inclusive design principles extend beyond our own operations.   

The way we apply accessibility and inclusive design principles to our workplace is also equally relevant to our clients’ work, and the social impact we create. The ILO pledge, signed by our CEO, Aiman Ezzat, commits us to accessible products for our clients and partners.  While we work with internal client-facing teams to ensure compliance, we’re already seeing some positive changes.   

With the implementation of the European Accessibility Act, frog – part of Capgemini Invent – is working toward the goal of making all the products they deliver align with accessibility guidelines. They recently worked on an e-commerce site that complies with the essential requirements. Cards of Humanity is another example designed by frog as a practical tool for inclusive design that involves gamification of the concept, enabling us to anticipate the needs of the diverse future user and adapt to ensure our product is more inclusive.   

For social impact, our partnership with Youth4Jobs in India includes a dedicated IT training program for youth with disabilities, providing them with tech skills and securing jobs for them.  Capgemini provides both technical and soft skill support to the trainers and candidates. This training includes web development, coding, SQL, and microservices, resulting in full-stack development, and at the end of each training, every successful participant is awarded a certificate of completion by both Capgemini and Youth4Jobs.  

Global benchmarking ensures our continual progression as an accessible and inclusive employer.   

It’s a complex journey ahead, but we’re on our way towards achieving our ambition of building a workplace that is fully accessible. We’re constantly benchmarking ourselves against stringent global standards. Capgemini was recognized as one of the “Best Places to Work for Disability Inclusion™” in 2024, with our teams in Brazil, the US, and India achieving top scores in the Disability Equality Index, a platform that benchmarks corporate disability inclusion policies and programs globally. This year, we also received the Zero Project award for our neuroinclusion program, empowering and integrating neurodivergent talent into the workplace, and the MAPFRE Inclusión Responsable Award 2024, recognizing our efforts to build an inclusive, supportive workplace for people with disabilities.  

Together, let’s continue to improve accessibility in all aspects of our workplace, shaping inclusive futures for all.