Disability and the 'working from home' debate
Since Covid-19, the homeworking vs office debate has been extensively covered, but rarely through the lens of employees who also have a disability.
Brand consultant, Justine Gaubert, explores in this guest blog some of the thoughts of our Viewpoint team about working from home (WFH). How is our team experiencing WFH, and what support are they finding most helpful? And is there something about the Viewpoint culture as a social enterprise that other employers could learn from to more effectively support their own staff when working from home or the office?
Dean’s commute to work is a walk to his local train station, where he catches a train to Leeds, and then walks from Leeds Station across town, often at rush hour, to the office where he works as a Telephone Researcher.
Lockdown for many of us meant a temporary reprieve from the energy, time and cost of the daily commute, so it might be surprising to know that after being furloughed for four months, Dean jumped at the chance to be back at the office.
This is perhaps even more surprising, when you learn that Dean is also blind.
Dean and his dog Lola.
Dean works at Viewpoint CIC, a social enterprise which carries out telephone research for clients across the country. South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA) invested in the social enterprise last year as part of SYHA Enterprises.
Viewpoint are amongst the top performers in the UK for telephone surveys, with longstanding clients such as Sheffield City Council and Newark and Sherwood Homes, returning to them time and time again because of their reliability and the empathy that Viewpoint researchers provide.
And you don’t have to spend long chatting to the people who work here, to realise that their performance rates are because of, not in spite of, the people they employ, and the unique culture of the organisation.
Viewpoint’s Leeds hub was initially set up in partnership with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and all their Leeds researchers are blind or partially sighted.
Viewpoint Leeds Researchers
The Doncaster office was set up in partnership with the social housing organisation ‘St Leger Homes’, and employs a small group of their tenants - the office being across the road from where they live, the school just a short walk away, and the working hours genuinely flexible to accommodate childcare and other economic barriers.
Some of the Viewpoint Sheffield Researchers
The researchers in the Sheffield office have also previously experienced often multiple barriers to securing long-term employment such as mental health issues, physical disability or, in the case of Viewpoint’s oldest member of staff, Janet aged 72, just good-old-fashioned ageism.
“But there’s nothing wrong with me except a hysterectomy and two new knees!” Janet, Viewpoint Sheffield
Manal, Researcher at Viewpoint Sheffield
Manal is a researcher from the Sheffield office, who has been working from home since the March lockdown. She ‘Zooms’ with me from her bedroom in Sheffield. Behind her I can see her framed graduation picture, so I ask her about her student experience. It did not sound easy. And not just because of her disability...
Manal has what she describes as ‘moderate’ Cerebral Palsy, which can affect her balance and lead to unexplained falls, slurred speech when tired and sudden shakes (“I didn’t eat in cafes for many years and avoided social events.”)
But she also highlighted some of the cultural challenges she faced as a young Muslim woman living at home (“pulling an all nighter in the library with the boys just wasn’t an option”), and pushing through all the barriers as the first in the family to go to University, such as juggling her degree with multiple ‘secret’ jobs to help her build up work experience.
Despite achieving a 1st in her first year, she was the only one of her friends who struggled to secure a placement - which, as a business and enterprise sandwich course - was the main reason she’d chosen it.
“That’s the whole point of a sandwich course - to get your foot in the door.”
She told me how she’d fly through the first round of written and phone interviews, but after a face-to-face interview, she’d always get ‘pipped at the post’ by another candidate.
“I learnt to put ‘prefer not to say’ for the disability bit of the form, just so I could get onto the next stage. If you put your disability down on the form, you don’t even get a phone interview.”
Sadly, this is an all too familiar story in the world of employment for people with disabilities, and as SYHA’s Niall O Reilly mentions in his blog, despite improving over recent years, the employment gap between people with disabilities and people without is still 28%. For people aged 50 to 64, it’s 34.4%.(DWP ‘Employment of Disabled People’ 24 March 2020)
Niall adds: “To redress these persistent inequalities, we need to do more. The support we offer must be voluntary and should be designed to provide the things people with disabilities and health conditions say they most want.”
So here we go.
Working from home and disability.
I ask Manal how she found working from home during the lockdown.
“Well, there are both positives and negatives,” she explains.
She goes on to describe many of the benefits of homeworking which are now so familiar to us all...the initial liberation of working in your PJs and saving money on work clothes.
But the biggest benefit for Manal from a disability perspective, was the energy saved by avoiding the commute to work.
“The positives are obviously that there’s no travel, and from a disability perspective, you’ve got more energy to give to the work itself. The travelling can take it out of you.”
That being said, both Manal and Dean both miss the mental preparation that the commute and office routines can provide.
“When you go for the bus, you get your mentality ready that you’re going to work,” says Manal.
“Then, in the office, you have a quick drink and a chat with everyone and you get the chance to warm up your mentality for working.”
Dean agrees. “In the office you’re meant to be doing what you’re doing…It wakes you up. You are ready for work.”
Last year I got to interview the whole Viewpoint team to learn more about their culture and what made it so successful. The physical act of leaving the house and coming into the office was a recurring theme brought up by many.
“I put makeup on. It gives me a purpose to get out of bed and go for my walk before I come in.” Janet, Researcher, Viewpoint Sheffield
Indeed, for many Viewpoint staff, the memory of isolation and the impact on mental health from having long periods of being unemployed at home, is all too fresh. Coming into the office has the benefits of routine and purpose in a way that homeworking cannot match.
Dean - “I’ve always been blind, but others have lost their sight over the years, and for some people having a job is about getting out of the house and not being stuck at home… It’s a hard thing to admit - ‘I’d be stuck at home’ - but if you don’t have a job…”
Sophie, researcher, Viewpoint Sheffield (and also a SYHA tenant). “It’s nice to be with people who aren’t on my payroll.”
Last year I also spoke to Sophie, a researcher from the Sheffield office who is also, coincidentally, a South Yorkshire Housing customer.
“I need pretty much full-time care at home. It’s great to come to work for a few hours and be with people who aren’t on my payroll. I do count them all as genuine friends.”
Despite some of the advantages of homeworking, Manal is also looking forward to returning to the office, though she is worried about her colleagues from work who fall into the ‘high risk’ category for Covid.
“Although the office is separate, we share the kitchen and toilets with other companies, so I do worry about that.”
But since its inception over 10 years ago, as a social enterprise, Viewpoint’s core purpose is to secure purposeful work for people who have previously faced multiple employment barriers. This means they are continuously listening and seeking out the best ways of supporting every individual they employ. And, as it turns, out, many of these strategies, may also give them a headstart in the battle against Covid.
Take team size for example. Each Viewpoint office operates in small teams - the natural precursor to ‘bubbling’ - and the small team structure is seen as a core strength by everyone, and critical to the Viewpoint culture.
“It’s such a small team, we have a laugh, we listen to each other if we’ve got a problem. We’re like a family.” Kelly, Viewpoint Doncaster
At any one point, there are rarely more than four or five people in each office and the turnover of staff is incredibly small, unlike their nemesis ‘the call centre’ who may have hundreds of staff in windowless warehouses.
The small teams also lend themselves to team performance targets rather than just traditional ‘individual’ targets. Manal explains:
“For each project we have deadlines and we have a certain target that we need to reach for each client, but it’s spread around us as a team.”
“It means that if you’re having a bad day, you can ask someone else to pick up yours and help you out.”
This, we decide, is something that you’re much less likely to do when you’re working from home on your own. You’re much less likely to pick up the phone and ask another colleague for help.
Additional anxieties of working from home.
Indeed, working from home can bring other additional anxieties.
Manal - “I miss the chat, and the lunch breaks! At home for some reason, I always feel guilty about having a lunch break when there’s no one there!”
And there are practical difficulties related to a job on the telephone too, that can add more stress when working at home on your own.
“Every morning I pray to God that I’m not going to get a difficult call that day. In the office I can hand it off to Ali or Trish, or Ali might step in and tell me to put the phone down. At home, you don’t have that.”
Carrying out their usual work during lockdown understandably brought up some additional challenges too.
“During lockdown, there were times where I got a verbal bashing… ‘is this really the time to be asking about repairs, we’ve got bigger things to worry about’ which you can really understand. You try to explain that we’re just a small business and trying to tick along too…
Plus, you don’t have anyone to destress with after that call. If one of us has a difficult call in the office, there’s always someone to talk it through it with” says Manal.
This ‘being present’ and on-hand to support each other informally, is something that managers are missing too. Alistair Ponton is the MD of Viewpoint:
”As a manager, when you’re in the same room, it makes it so much easier to give gentle feedback ‘in the moment’, which you just can’t do when people are working remotely. Feedback can feel very different and much more ‘formal’ when delivered in a phone call.”
On a personal level, both Manal and Dean said that the communication from Alistair was the thing they found most helpful during lockdown.
Dean - “Ali kept in contact - the occasional phone call, a Facebook group - updates by video. It was nice to be able to hear his voice, not just an email.”
Manal agrees “Communication is the most important thing when it comes to homeworking and knowing the support is there when you need it. Ali is so supportive - he never makes you feel bad for getting in touch. Doesn’t matter how late it is, he always makes time to get back to you.”
And it’s not just informal feedback from managers that people are missing, as Dean points out, it’s the peer-peer sharing too.
“It's the casual help and support from others in the team overhearing your conversation and giving you informal feedback on how they approach specific survey questions. You wouldn’t get that working at home.”
Home working and performance.
Working from home is not without its performance challenges, which is the main reason Dean went back to the office at the first opportunity.
“When you’re doing a phone interview, you need quiet and you need to be able to give your full attention to the person on the other end of the phone. I live with my mum and dad, so you just can’t do that kind of in depth interview at home with people around.”
Dean also tells me he misses the ‘healthy competition’ that comes from being around his colleagues in the office.
“There’s a real togetherness, when you’re doing surveys - sometimes we’ll ask each other how many we’ve done to spur each other on.”
Even Manal, who has experienced the terror of the ‘name and shame’ humiliation practice when working in a call centre one Christmas, said she was missing the good hearted competition with her fellow team members to keep her motivated.
Office working and role modeling.
And there are other benefits of physically being around others in the workplace too.
Leeds researcher Amanda lost the majority of her sight over a terrifyingly short period, (and along with it, her job and confidence), but she was inspired and motivated when she came to work in an office with other impressive blind or partially sighted people.
“Being around an action man like Dean can really give you a kick up the bum,” she told me last year.
I remember meeting Dean for the first time and in the pre-interview warm up talk, asking him how he spent his weekend.
“Oh, I jumped out of a plane.” he said.
I’ve since found out that his many other sporting pursuits include: caving, kickboxing, tandem cycling, and his latest achievement, finally making the blind cricket team after 10 years of perseverance.
Although we all ‘know’ the importance of role modeling and diversity in our organisations, the comfort and ‘leveling effect’ of being in an environment where disability is the norm, not the exception, was again, a recurring theme from our research with the Viewpoint team last year.
I’m reminded of a throwaway comment one of the Leeds team made as he was reaching for the door.
“One of the great things about working here is you can walk into a door and no one bats an eyelid. Or at least, I don’t think they do;-)”
So, is home or office best for employees with a disability?
Pre-Covid, working from home wasn’t really on offer at Viewpoint. And with good reason, as Alistair explains:
“Homeworking was never something that we entertained as a business before, because you could see people flourishing BECAUSE of being in a team in an office environment, and the support and ‘normality’ everyone gives each other.
But since Covid, some of the team have reported some of the benefits of homeworking that you’d expect, and it can work for some people (with the right support), but not all. For our team, it’s definitely not a ‘replacement’ for the office.”
The phrase ‘right support’ here is critical, and from my interviews with other staff last year, providing exactly what each individual needs to do the job, is another key factor in Viewpoint’s success.
But that doesn’t mean treating everyone the same. In fact it’s kind of the opposite.
At Viewpoint, there’s a healthy respect for the adage that ‘equity and equality aren’t the same thing’’, or to quote the writer Terry Eagleton:
“Genuine equality means not treating everybody the same, but attending equally to everyone’s needs.”
Pic Equity and equality aren’t always the same thing. Image by Maryam Abdul-Kareem www.muslimgirl.com To quote Terry Eagleton “Genuine equality means not treating everybody the same, but attending equally to everyone’s needs.”
Is the home/office debate different for employees with disabilities?
On a superficial level at least, from speaking with Manal and Dean, the pros and cons of the home/office debate don’t seem to differ hugely when viewed through the lens of workers with disability.
Looking at an issue through the lens of disability will amplify any historic problems with your culture, but it will also amplify what’s working best.
In my days as a user experience designer, we’d user test websites with people with visual impairments to ensure the website hit the relevant accessibility standards.
But it didn’t take long for us to realise that in 99% of cases, if you improve the user experience for someone with a disability, you improve it for everyone.
The success of homeworking works depends on the hard graft you’ve already put into your culture and is only as good as the trust between managers and staff and each other. At Viewpoint, this open culture of trust was already well established before the Lockdown started:
“You don’t have to lie about how you are feeling and you aren’t made to feel guilty if you need some time.”
I’m reminded of a friend (pre-Covid) telling me the difficulties she had in persuading her employer to let her work from home one day a week so she could work around childcare. Her work was largely content creation, which wasn’t customer facing. They eventually relented, on the proviso that she was at her desk at home at 8.30am, and worked the usual set hours, along with a ‘warning’ that they’d be able to trace her hours of work on her laptop.
A whole new meaning to track and trace.
But for home working to really, well, work, the mutual trust must be there, with a focus on outputs rather than set hours - something that was already a key part of Viewpoint’s culture.
So, Covid aside, is working from home something Viewpoint will go onto to offer all employees?
Maybe one day, as a society, we’ll learn from organisations like Viewpoint that binary oppositions do not serve us well.
“It’s not a case of either or” says Alistair “though it’s unlikely to be something we would offer right away for new employees.”
As we are chatting, I share one of my favourite metaphors which for me, explains the importance of diversity and also the importance of being around others in an office environment.
A single twig, you can snap easily.
But put that single twig into a bundle of other twigs and we are not so easy to break.
Alistair agrees. “Ha ha yes, when it comes to homeworking, especially with people who need that little bit of extra support and confidence building, I think you need to have that bundle of twigs in place first.”
And what about Dean? I ask him to cast his mind back to when he first started.
How would he have felt if he’d gone straight into a home working environment?
His answer is short. Firm. And resolute.
“I wouldn’t even have applied.”
Viewpoint are currently working with several organisations, including Weston Park Cancer Charity, to help them collect feedback from their customers or teams on the impact of Covid-related changes. If you’d like a bit of help or advice researching the impact of working from home on your team, give Alistair a call: 0114 273 9208.
If you are currently juggling working from home and home schooling you may find this article on mindgenius.com both interesting and supportive, as it explores Homeworking & Homeschooling in COVID-19.
About the writer
Justine Gaubert is brand consultant and Founder of the Academy of Dangerous Dreamers. She was previously Communications Manager at South Yorkshire Housing Association and was the first Social Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Sheffield.
Following a recent diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (you can watch her TED x talk here) she is also a passionate advocate for working together with employers on the topic of ‘hidden’ disability.
Justine has been working with Alistair and the team at Viewpoint for several years.