Are Your Insecurities Making You Ableist?

When considering your company structure, who do your policies and practices prioritize? In today’s workplace, policies and practices more often than not prioritize the comfort of those in leadership over the people below them. The return-to-work debate is a key place to observe the tension between a leader’s comfort and an employee's needs. 

Disabled people have been begging for the ability to work from home for decades. But it wasn’t until a global pandemic required most office workers to work from home that many of us realized that it is actually way more conducive to our own ability to get work done. You no longer had to try to concentrate while all your colleagues were having different Zoom calls. You no longer had to budget two hours for commuting. You could take care of the things you need to do, such as doctor appointments or grocery shopping, without having to take time off or lose precious time with your family. 

But suddenly, you see organizations putting forth sweeping mandates that return to office is a requirement, as highlighted in the February Fortune article, Remote work jobs are disappearing before our eyes, “Forget the fact that nearly every expert insists that flexible work arrangements—guided principally by employee desires—are the way of the future. Disregard, too, the fact that many workers insist they’re more productive working from home—and more likely to feel empowered to do their best work under a boss who allows them to work where they want. And pretend you don’t know that return-to-office mandates are near-universally reviled and lead to rapid retention issues, bitter company culture, and swelling resentment—with worsened productivity to boot. With all that out of mind, it may come as no surprise to learn that the staunch pro-office bosses are winning, and remote jobs are actually getting harder and harder to find.”

And even when remote work is available, an increasing number of higher-ups are weaponizing advancement for those who don’t want to be in person. Recently, at the Transform conference, Priceline's Chief People Office Liz Dente said, “I believe that people can do a job from home, but I don’t believe they can have a career from home.”

But the swinging reaction to calling people back to work is problematic not just because it is ableist; it is also problematic because it is more about a leader’s sense of comfort than it is about the work. According to career coach Annie Petsche, who claims to have run a study alongside one of the large consulting firms on behalf of a Fortune 500 company looking at how to build out remote and hybrid work, she found that while the data proves that remote work is better, “Leaders feel incapable of or inadequate at leading distributed teams. Leaders have become used to leading by proximity. When it comes to leadership returning to office, it gets cloaked under the excuse of increased productivity and collaboration, but that is largely a load of bulls&*t.” (Her words). This was confirmed by Atlassian VP Annie Dean on a panel last fall: “The idea that if you bring everyone into this mandatory [office] environment, working shoulder to shoulder, magical outcomes will come—that’s a silly thing. It feels like magical thinking.”

So companies have opted to engage in magical thinking, not for the good of the employees but for the comfort of leadership who do not feel prepared or able to lead a distributed team. However, instead of optimizing for employees' needs and ensuring that leaders have the right training and support to prioritize their staff's access needs, companies rush to ensure their higher-ups' right to comfort. 

A leader’s right to comfort, according to scholar Tema Okun, is a form of white supremacy. Some examples of this include:

• the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort (another aspect of valuing “logic” over emotion)
• scapegoating those who cause discomfort

To lead inclusive, high-functioning teams, it is more important than ever that the right to comfort shift from the person with the most power and that they learn to recognize the needs and discomfort of the people they oversee. 

The ways we learn to support our disabled and marginalized colleagues are the practices that will make the whole team more high-functioning. 

This shift to leading through the lens of empowering the people you manage is the focus of the book that I have spent the last eight months working on. (Speaking of which, I’ve decided to self-publish it because I want 100% of the people who work on this book to be disabled, and I want to compensate them for their work. From editors to cover design, if this is something you’d be interested in, send me a note). 

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