We’re HAND (Home of Accessibility and NeuroDiversity), giffgaff’s Affinity Group for disabled and neurodivergent colleagues and allies. In just 16 months since our launch in March 2025, we’ve achieved what takes many networks years to build. We scaled from zero to 108 active members, engaging over a third of our entire workforce, and successfully shifted accessibility from an afterthought to a core part of giffgaff’s culture and commercial strategy. We’ve given a powerful voice to our people, reshaped product development, and created a true sense of belonging.
To understand our journey, it’s important to look at where we started. Before 2025, out of 310 employees, our recorded disability representation was just 1.5%. We knew this didn’t reflect the true makeup of giffgaff. People were here, but many of them were masking, struggling in silence, or feeling isolated.
When we launched, our goals were to build a safe community and audit the business to see exactly where we stood. Knowing that network volunteers often burn out, we focused on building a smart, sustainable way of working that protects our team while driving massive change. This solid foundation gave us the backing to push back on easy fixes and insist on a seat at the table.
Culturally, we’ve built deep trust and safety. By running events like our Event Debriefs, we created a vital feedback loop to ensure we are actually meeting people’s needs. We teamed up with the Gender Dynamics network for an Autism & Gender session and the Thrive network to talk about Anxiety and Imposter Syndrome. We also introduced Body Doubling co-working sessions, proving there is a real need for neuro-inclusive ways of working. A huge highlight was our Accessibility Culture Day takeover. Through interactive in-office and remote sessions, we challenged old ways of thinking and set a new standard by introducing neuro-inclusive meeting guidelines company-wide.
Our impact on the business has been just as powerful. We refuse to be just a box-ticking exercise. HAND is a key voice for fairness in our tech. We rejected easy fixes like digital accessibility overlays on our website, working directly with tech teams and designers to build our digital spaces inclusively from day one. To move the conversation from opinions to hard facts, we run strict technical accessibility audits, and to guarantee this work stays a top priority, we have a recurring six-weekly meeting with our CTO.
Finally, we connected our internal culture to our external products and the wider tech ecosystem. We ran a Member Closeness Session that allowed our product teams to hear directly from neurodivergent customers, gathering vital insights into how they experience our brand. Beyond giffgaff, we have also begun expanding outwards to support and empower other businesses. Our Lead shared our insights as a speaker at LeadDev’s LDX3 London, and we have created shareable resources in our Inclusion Toolkit (https://www.giffgaff.com/inclusion-toolkit) for other companies to use, saving them time while effectively advocating for inclusion.
We are incredibly proud of our journey and are deeply committed to making accessibility and neuro-inclusion the default standard across our business and the wider industry.
