Dr Calum Carson is a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Health Inequalities Research at Lancaster University, and is working with the Work Foundation on a Nuffield Foundation funded project to design inclusive remote and hybrid working to support disabled workers.

Following the dramatic upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world of work has undergone a series of transformations in recent years that have opened up remote and hybrid ways of working to millions of people across the world. Many organisations are now providing much more flexibility to their workforce in choosing how they wish to work in a post-pandemic landscape.

However, while on paper such changes provide more freedom for individuals to work in the way that they feel is best for them, it is important to consider whether these new models of working are inclusive of all workers’ needs moving forward, particularly when it comes to the complexities of providing an inclusive and supportive framework for disabled workers.

To understand these needs more clearly, a new academic research project has been launched to explore disabled workers’ experiences of remote and hybrid working over the past five years. This project aims to enable employers, policymakers and researchers to understand more fully what best practice looks like when it comes to designing inclusive models of remote and hybrid working. Led by researchers from Lancaster University and the Work Foundation, alongside project partners from Manchester Metropolitan Business School and Universal Inclusion, the Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study is currently seeking to better understand disabled people’s experiences in these areas, and which you can participate in too and ensure your voice is heard in these debates by completing their survey here.

The rationale for this research stems from ongoing discussions among employers, policymakers and researchers (among others) as to what the future shape of work might be for disabled workers. In a post-pandemic world in which new forms of remote and hybrid working are increasingly available to workers, there is an opportunity to design a future employment landscape that is inclusive of disabled workers’ needs. Disabled people have significantly lower employment rates than non-disabled people, and remote working can support disabled workers’ job retention by enabling them to manage work around their health conditions/impairments. Yet this opportunity has often been withheld by employers pre-pandemic.

The flexibility offered by remote working and hybrid working since the onset of the pandemic may help to address the existing disability employment gap. However, implementation must be appropriately managed and inclusive to ensure all staff have equitable access to workplace opportunities. For example, a lack of duplicate specialist equipment in the office and home and inaccessible digital technologies prevent disabled workers’ full participation at work, and enabling easier forms of remote working but making it more difficult to work in the office too is simply no progress at all.

The origins of this research can be found in a previous Work Foundation project funded by the City Bridge Trust. Over the course of 2021 researchers from the Foundation and Lancaster University explored the ambitions and perspectives of disabled people, many of whom have not been a part of conversations about our changing working lives since the start of the pandemic.

This small-scale study of the experiences of 400 disabled workers found that 70% of disabled workers said that if their employer did not allow them to work remotely, it would negatively impact their physical or mental health. Survey respondents and interviewees highlighted clear benefits to working from home, including having more autonomy and control over when and how they work, which in turn allowed them to better manage their health and wellbeing. This brought wider benefits for their organisations too; 85% of disabled workers surveyed felt more productive working from home.

Some disabled workers were facing real challenges as a result of a poorly-managed transition to remote or hybrid work, and this could also limit progress in reducing the disability employment gap. Both survey respondents and interviewees highlighted concerns that they might lose access to opportunities at work if they need to be based at home, and these concerns were greatest among individuals with multiple impairments or conditions. Seven in ten respondents (70.3%) with multiple impairments agreed that opportunities to stretch and grow might go to those in the office, compared with five in ten (52.8%) of respondents with a single impairment.

Perhaps most relevantly for this new project, outdated cultures meant that some disabled workers felt left out or isolated while working at home, particularly when colleagues used different working patterns. It is these particular findings that the Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study is building upon by both better understanding disabled workers’ experiences to date, and what they feel that they need to make such forms of working more inclusive to their needs in the future.

We strongly encourage any and all those with experience in these areas to complete the survey and have your voice heard in these debates, and/or to share it with your own networks too: by participating and helping spread word of the research, you are helping to identify how employers can make remote and hybrid working more inclusive of disabled workers’ needs. This is important to promote disabled workers’ recruitment, job retention and progression, and ensure that they are not left behind as the world of work continues to evolve and employers continue to make decisions now about future ways of working.

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