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“I think one of the essential things that we should start with is that disabled people have always been [early] users and adapters of technology. I’ll share that I would not be here without technology.”
– Maria Town, President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities
Technology can be a powerful tool for workers with disabilities – and all workers – enabling them to perform their jobs effectively. Companies should invest in accessible technologies and provide training to ensure everyone has the tools to succeed. Technologies, shifts, and resources built with people with disabilities often result in positive externalities for many other groups, as demonstrated by “the Curb-Cut effect.”
Many technologies that are part of everyday lives today, from voice recognition and audio books to closed captions, were originally assistive technology built due to years of advocacy from people with disabilities.
The lessons from the pandemic’s start are another testament to the importance of centering people with disabilities when co-designing workplace policies, products, and company cultures.
“While remote work is extremely beneficial to people with disabilities, we have seen improvements in disability employment that have never happened before, and many attribute that to the greater availability of remote work.”
– Maria Town, President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities
Town highlighted the unprecedented improvements in disability employment due to remote work. Remote work eliminates the need for commuting, a significant challenge for many with physical disabilities. Town also shared the pre-pandemic struggles faced by individuals who requested remote work as an accommodation, often met with structural resistance, reluctance to try something new, or rationalizations for why the accommodation would not be logistically or budgetarily possible.
The mass adoption of individualized virtual conference systems like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet after the start of the pandemic showed what had been possible all along. Personal video conferencing allowed for an expansion of the physical geography of where workers reside. It allowed for immediate auto-captions- a benefit not only for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing but also for people who are not native speakers of the majority language. It allowed caregivers and parents to cut out hours of transit and the labor of logistics to manage all of life’s responsibilities. These positive externalities were all made possible by a solution people with disabilities were denied for years.
It is important to note, however, that remote work should not be the only option available for people with disabilities. Seeing remote work as the primary or only option for disability accommodation may create less of an incentive to invest in updating physical spaces to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. The goal is to create both in-person and online spaces that are inclusive of people with a diversity of disabilities.
Town shares how using remote work as an accommodation exclusively for people with disabilities creates an artificial segregation of people with disabilities and plays into the proximity bias. Research has shown proximity bias, if unrecognized and unmitigated, results in fewer opportunities for facetime with peers and higher-ups: “SHRM reported two-thirds (67%) of supervisors overseeing remote workers admitted to believing remote workers are more replaceable than onsite workers. Forty-two percent said they sometimes forget about remote workers when assigning tasks. This may explain why remote workers get promoted less often than their peers, despite being 15% more productive on average.”
Some companies have also layered performance metrics with in-office time as a codification of proximity bias into their workplace policies, where remote work is allowed but bars employees from promotions. Other companies have opted for other “carrot” style incentives to get workers into the office. Some companies have embraced remote-first work as the future and are seeing overwhelming interest from applicants in their open roles. Some companies have shown year-over-year benefits of work-from-anywhere policies on both their company culture and their bottom lines and productivity having remote work norms in place from even before the pandemic.
In a 2023 interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” AirBnb’s Chief Financial Officer Dave Stephenson reassures that remote work options and productivity go hand in hand when employees are given the opportunity to choose for themselves: “it’s been one year since Airbnb shared our design to Live & Work Anywhere which offers employees the flexibility to work from an Airbnb office, or remotely in over 170 countries. And it’s working great for us. By offering employees flexibility and gathering in-person intentionally, we’re improving employee diversity and retention while increasing our productivity as a company.”
“Demand for remote work continues to outstrip supply heading into 2024,” LinkedIn’s Chief Economist, Karin Kimbrough, reports in the 2024 Global State of Remote and Hybrid Work. “Just 10% of U.S. job postings on LinkedIn in December were for remote jobs — and those postings received 46% of all applications. That translates to remote roles receiving five times the share of applications compared to jobs available.” Attracting top talent is a key performance metric for many Chief Human Resources Officers and crucial to a company’s success.
Lastly, for workers with disabilities getting in the door at a company is essential, but Town flags that visibility is a critical component of belonging. She gives her own experience as a wheelchair user as an example: appearing on a video call often hides her disability in a workspace even though it is a component of her experience in the world.
Continue on for guidance on self-identification, belonging, and more.
Flexible work fosters inclusivity by focusing on individual strengths and contributions rather than physical limitations.
The current moment has the potential to revolutionize disability inclusion and belonging in general in the workplace.
The rise of remote work has sparked a critical conversation about the future of employment, particularly for people with disabilities.
Shreya Singh Hernández (she, her) is a data-driven social impact strategist with a transdisciplinary career in responsible technology and data justice. In her role as the Senior Manager of Empowered Communities and the Responsible Data Practices Lead at Aspen Digital, a policy program of the Aspen Institute, Shreya leads efforts on convening tech experts, collaborating with civil society leaders and academicians, and creating systems of accountability through innovative data programs in the field of tech equity, product inclusion, DEI, and AI Fairness.
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