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El Gibbs, CEO of Disability Advocacy Network Australia, has worked remotely on and off for 25 years due to her disability. Powerd Media sat down with the disability advocate to discuss how working from home can be advantageous for people living with disability.
What are your thoughts on the coalition back flipping on their proposal to get rid of work from home policy?
I'm really pleased to hear that there has been a realisation that in the five years since the beginning of the pandemic lots of workplaces have changed and lots of the ways that people work has changed. We are not where we were in 2019, and I think lots of people with disability have changed the way that we work. And I think it's time that everyone catches up with that and we stop having arguments about going back to the office, because it feels like we're having an argument about going back in time.
What are the benefits for employees with disability working from home?
I think that a lot of the conversation about working from home has focused on people with care responsibilities, which is absolutely great, but for people with disability, we've had a huge gap in the number of us that have a job for well over 30 years, and there's been no movement at all.
Up until very recently, the move to work from home has been a significant part of why for the first time in 30 years, there's actually been more people with disability in work than ever before…It’s been a really good outcome.
I'm someone who has to work from home. I've worked from home at different stages of my life for 25 years. I'm that old that I worked from home in the days where people had to courier me things on very big old fat discs for my computer, and I used to have to courier it back to the office.
In our organisation, most of our employees are people with disability or people with significant care responsibilities. Over 50% of us live in regional or rural areas across the country, which is the other part of the conversation that we keep missing out on. We keep having conversations about housing being expensive. More people with disability live in regional areas, and working from home means we can do senior kind of jobs. To make sure that we can be as much part of the community and part of the economy as everyone else.
Do you think had they continued, they would've been made the call to try and get rid of working from home arrangements across the entire employment sector?
Look, I think employment conditions are a bit complicated and they often are particular to the workplace, but we have seen a really big push by some businesses to say that people have to come back to the office.
As I said, people are going back in time. I'm not a fan. I think that we should be leaning into what we learned during the pandemic about inclusion, about how we can make our workplaces successful and that we aren’t dependent on micromanaging people by having to see them do their job that we can be more flexible.
We make sure that we have lots of things in place to make sure that we can deliver on the work that we do, but also that we take care of people in the environments. Some of our staff do work in co-working spaces shared desks with other organisations.
We take flexibility very seriously and, I think we are showing how you can do this. We are now over 20 staff and we have contractors, so we're not a tiny organisation anymore. So I do think the benefits of being able to have really flexible work, and to trust your employees and your staff to make sure that you can get things done in an inclusive way is really important.
I find some of these conversations about everyone coming back to work to be productive quite mystifying from a disabled perspective, because for us it is often the other way around.
So how can we how can we make the wider community really understand how vital working from home arrangements are for people with differing abilities?
I think it's really important that there has been some move to strengthen our industrial relations laws. It used to be that if I asked for working from home before the pandemic it was really unlikely to be granted, so there has been some changes to make that a little bit easier, but we need to go further.
We also need lots of good examples of how to make it work. I often talk to other managers and CEOs about how we do things. One question I'm often asked is about reasonable adjustments, which is a kind of technical term for the changes that people with disability need to get our jobs done.
We do reasonable adjustments for everybody, and we never ask for people to disclose the details of their disability or their care responsibilities. We just say that people will get what they need to do their job, and so everybody doing reasonable adjustments makes it ordinary for that. Everybody needs some flexibility to get their job done.
It's not something special for people with disability.
We can do more about setting the rules so that for those of us who can do work from home, which of course is not everybody, that we are able to do it and it is strongly encouraged.
Have you heard of instances where employers haven't been as flexible, and what can employers with disability do in that situation?
Look, it's certainly been my experience. I've had workplaces where I've had reasonable adjustments refused. I have taken done disability discrimination complaints in the past, but the legislation was not strong enough before this to actually help people with disability be able to get the kinds of adjustments we wanted. We do need changes to the Disability Discrimination Act to make sure that we have legislative powers to actually get the reasonable adjustments that we need.
One of the reasons that I do work in the disability sector is that we are practicing what we preach in terms of flexibility.
I'm really proud of the culture that we've built here at Disability Advocacy Network Australia. We work remotely and we make sure that we do come together in person a couple of times a year, but we work really well and really hard to build our internal culture even though we are all from one end of the continent to another.