Social Lives
Author: Joan O’Donnell, Doctoral researcher with the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, funded by ADVANCE CRT and the SFI. She lectures in the MSc programme in Systems Thinking In Practice with the Open University and is the author of the Employers for Change report referred to in this blog.
Continuous advances in technology and Assistive Technology (AT) enhance the range of work that people can do outside the office environment, making working-from-home (WFH), hybrid or remote working a realistic option for many workers with disabilities. It may suit those seeking greater flexibility in their working day, allow for better management of disabling conditions at home or sidestep the need to negotiate public transport.
Disability and work poses a complex issue that persists despite broad recognition of the interrelationship between disability, poverty, education, housing in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) Article 27, which commits to safeguarding and promoting the right for disabled people to work on par with others. While the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests there is a greater need to engage employers to build a better world of work for persons with disabilities, the ESRI finds that there is also a need to understand the experience of disabled people in work.
Participating in the emerging workplace relies on having the right digital skills, access to Information and communications technology (ICTs), the means to pay for them, and that the technology must be accessible.
But this cannot be taken for granted in a workplace where disabled people are hugely underrepresented and experience economic hardship, including digital poverty as a result, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The employment rate of disabled people across Europe prior to the pandemic stood at 48% and the OCED suggested that employment policies have underperformed. The situation in Ireland is especially concerning: we have the lowest rate of labour market participation of disabled people across Europe at 26%, and Eurofound considers the Irish Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities both unambitious and ineffective.
Employers for Change, an Irish organisation explored the experience of disabled workers and their employers working remotely during the pandemic. They identified three areas requiring concerted action, including the need to meet the need for better connection, reasonable accommodations and continuous learning across all levels of the system, each of which is now considered in turn.
Staying connected and visible
Disabled employees needed to feel confident about raising issues with employers and the message from the pandemic is clear: the level of connection required for open and honest communication cannot be produced via training sessions. Nor should the responsibility be outsourced. Creating positive connections preceeds psychological safety – a work climate which allows employees to speak up and take risks without negative consequences. Employees sought more open space conversations that foster sustainable connections that are qualitatively different from the Zoom Fatigue, or wellbeing sessions which were poorly attended by all employees.
Visibility of disabled staff affects promotion prospects as well as recruitment levels something that needs to be addressed if working from home is to prove viable. Even prior to the pandemic, it was difficult to sustain disabled voices in Employee Resource Groups, with the result that disability concerns struggle for parity with other diversity issues such as gender and race.
Reasonable Accommodations
Reasonable accommodation refers to measures employers must take to ensure that the workplace is accessible for disabled staff. Improving digital accessibity does not sidestep the need for accessible buildings, but expands the site of accessibility to include all work environments. This is a major concern for disabled employees who are concerned with addressing core accommodation issues such as access to assistive and accessible technology. There was a sense in which employers did not understand the technology needs of disabled remote workers, either assuming that they would have all the AT they needed at home, or that their internal IT systems were more accessible than they were. The upside was that now people felt more included in meetings than before, voice recognition software and the accessiblity of Microsoft Word and Zoom increased as time went on. People adopted a stronger ethic of not talking over eachother in meetings and using the chat function for side conversations, which supported disabled workers to feel new levels of inclusion as this research participant suggests:
“I have a hearing loss and I knew I was missing a lot of what was being said at meetings and I did bring it to the management’s attention, and nothing was ever done about it. But since working from home, they’ve provided captioning for me for meetings… it’s the first time since I’m working there that I feel like I know everything that’s going on.”
Continous Learning
Employers did not feel disability confident: they expressed a need for learning for individual disabled employees, mangers, and IT personnel, as well as support developing internal policies. The opportunity to learn across organisations was also key to becoming disability-confident and developing the expertise to support disabled staff to become a vital part of the remote workforce. In the words of one employer:
“We need to create a space for them to succeed without having to say ‘this is an employee with a disability’, but rather saying ‘this is an employee that we need to put supports around’. We need to be really clear, really understanding what are the barriers to success. And as an employer we are responsible to remove those barriers”
The rapidly evolving work environment poses continuous fresh challenges for disability inclusion. This includes digital advances affect how work is structured, as much as concern about the effects that the climate emergency will be most strongly felt by those with disabling conditions living in poverty. Enhancing the digital skills of disabled people and improving access to AT will undoubtedly improve this situation, but learning and human connection also form a key component of the way forward.