When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, much of the world that could do so pivoted to working remotely. By April, non-essential employers were scrambling to create a situation where their employees could work from home (WFH), thereby giving them an added layer of social distancing when enabling business as usual as much as possible.
In general, up until that point, the infrastructure of work had never been dependent on being virtual to such a degree. Really, prior to the pandemic, WFH couldn’t have been farther from the norm, in which many jobs required employees to work in-person and on scheduled shifts. This status quo excluded many people with disabilities who could not fit into the traditional workplace, whether because of buildings or offices not being physically accessible, or because their employer could or would not offer the regular infrastructure of care to support a disabled employee, the accommodation of a flexible schedule based on the employee’s needs, or the myriad of other challenges that come with being disabled.
For those of us fortunate enough to be employed, and whose organizations had little remote work already in place, we fell into a trial-and-error routine of creating an online environment that was responsive to the needs the pandemic had created or amplified. Parents navigated juggling remote work and at-home child care (as well as remote school for school-age children); home offices were created or repurposed from other spaces; social events moved to digital venues, or else distanced outdoors. It was a challenge to adjust and adapt to a complete system restructure, but it provided an opportunity to access and make accommodations. We saw that not only could remote work protect employees, it gave them the added bonus of increasing flexibility and accessibility.
Increased flexibility benefited many demographic groups, but none more than the disabled community. In this commentary, we will take a look at how adaptations to the pandemic created a paradigm shift, and explore the reasons why our economy would benefit from sticking with the new, instead of reverting to the old.
Filling a Need, Closing the Gap
Where there is a problem, there are also opportunities for solutions, improvements, accommodations and growth—and more often than not, the benefits extend well beyond the original target.
One of the major benefits of the ADA is what is known as the curb cut effect. When we make things better for people who have disabilities, we make things better for everyone.
Long before the pandemic, it was clear that telework could be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, but one of the major benefits of the ADA is what is known as the curb cut effect. When we make things better for people who have disabilities, we make things better for everyone. The expression comes from the fact that while curb cuts are made for mobility device users to get on and off, curb cuts also help people who are pushing strollers, bikes, or grocery carts.
Likewise, work from home can increase workers’ quality of life for a variety of reasons—in other words, increasing access to work for people with disabilities makes the entire workplace better for workers and more productive. Policymaking that supports thoughtful work-from-home practices and policies may be one of the best ways to find opportunity in what was wrought by the crisis that was the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the case of disabled people’s access to employment, it’s useful to look at the pandemic through this lens. While many things did not flourish during the pandemic, one metric that saw a remarkable increase was the employment rate of people with disabilities, due in large part to the increased access to remote work environments—a positive change in a midst of chaos.
This is even more remarkable when you note that the number of people with disabilities simultaneously increased due to COVID-19 itself, and by a colossal amount: one estimate offers 1.2 million people just by the end of 2021. As the pandemic has continued, this number has only grown, especially given the Center for Disease Control’s estimate that “[instances of Long COVID] among non hospitalized adults with COVID-19 range from 7.5% to 41%.” In addition to the debilitating effects of COVID-19 itself, it also had secondary effects on the health care system: for instance, routine cancer screenings were disrupted during the initial stages of the pandemic, leading to a delay or deficit in diagnosis.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2019, the employment rate for people with disabilities was 19.4 percent that year. Furthermore, at that time, persons with disabilities were less likely to be in the labor force overall, with 79.2 percent of disabled people not in the workforce, compared to 31.3 percent of people without a disability; 19.3 percent of disabled workers were employed. With a significant dip in the middle due to the pandemic, four years later, in March of 2023, 22.5 percent of people with a disability were employed—the highest recorded ratio since comparable data were first collected in 2008.
Table 1
While the unemployment rate of people with disabilities was the same percentage in April 2019 as it was in April 2024, the percentage of the workforce has gone up by almost a full two percentage points.
Figure 1
The ratio is the percentage of people with disabilities compared to the same age bracket (16 years and older) of non-disabled peers. The trend of the increase in the ratio indicates that more people with disabilities as a ratio to the overall population are entering the workforce post-2020.
Miles to Go for EEO
While the trends described above are encouraging when viewed strictly by disability, when compared with the percentage of non-disabled Americans who are unemployed, the number is currently trending at about half that population. Simply put, the unemployment rate of people with disabilities is still closer to double. As the chart below shows, the delta (i.e., the overall rates of change) between unemployment rates for people with disabilities and people without disabilities had been closing in the years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic. It should be noted that there have been concerted policy interventions to help reduce this gap, and that they had begun to show success well before the pandemic. However, the disability versus non-disability employment gap widened early in the pandemic, which makes some sense, as people with disabilities are more likely than the general population to be immunocompromised and may have had medical orders to avoid returning to work in person; and expanded unemployment coverage during the pandemic included coverage for those populations. While COVID-era coverage and protections have ended, the health and financial safety needs of the disabled population have not.
However, when examined side-by-side with labor force participation, the numbers are incredibly encouraging during the work from home era. The unemployment rate measures the percent of working age adults who are in the workforce, but not working. Labor force participation includes people surveyed who are either looking for a job or currently employed. As unprecedented numbers of workers with disabilities entered the workforce, the delta between workers with disabilities who were unemployed and workers without disabilities narrowed to incredible lows. This means that even though entering the workforce in person could prove dangerous for people with disabilities, more workers with disabilities were entering and fewer were unemployed.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 2 above shows parallel line graphs, with the orange line representing those out of work without a disability, while the blue line represents those with disabilities that are unemployed. While there is a noticeable increase in both lines during early 2020, the line representing the unemployment rate of people with disabilities did not increase back to its pre-pandemic levels in comparison to the non-disabled employment rate. Thus, the unemployment gap, or the space between the lines, has a marked decrease post-2020.
Comparing that to Figure 3, the marked increase in labor force participation for people with disabilities shows the employment gap is narrowing, in a positive way, from both sides.
The Push for a Return to Work Has Done More Harm Than Good
This statistic may not hold steady, however. Many companies are mandating a “return to work” or “return to office” policy, despite pushback from employees from all backgrounds, known colloquially as “the Great Resistance.” Not only have recent reports suggest that the employment rate for disabled workers may once again be trending downward due to increased mandated return-to-office policies, but a study from MIT showed that return-to-office policies for many employees, regardless of disability, are incentivising candidates to seek new and continuously flexible roles. Put plainly, workplaces are losing some of their best people, including their highest performers, over mandated attendance policies.
Workplaces are losing some of their best people, including their highest performers, over mandated attendance policies.
Speaking from the perspective of the disability community, the fact is that many of us were still working during the pandemic, and thus “return to work” implies we have little to show for our employment during the last four years. In fact, the increase in the employment rate for people with disabilities, as well as disabled people able to enter the workforce, shows that more of us were working, due in large part to the accessibility of remote work.
Accessibility, in this case, doesn’t just translate to disabled people, but seems to implicitly indicate a cultural shift of flexibility and solution-oriented thinking, a philosophical practice of access.
Getting to Work and Living Near Work
One of the forces driving mandatory return-to-office policies is pressure from commercial real estate and businesses in urban centers that have been struggling since the onset of the pandemic. This means that often, the employers who are putting the most pressure on their employees to return to the office are ased in large, expensive metropolitan areas. These may tend to be the oldest sections of cities, built up before the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. Similar trends can also be seen in housing stock. In addition to having to pay a premium for accessible housing, people in metro areas who might need supportive services are either going to have to pay a premium for those services as well, or may have trouble finding those services in the first place. This can be especially challenging for younger workers at the lower end of the income spectrum.
Housing gets more affordable the farther it is from city centers, but at the same time, there are usually more accessible housing options closer to city centers. Another complicating factor for affordability and accessibility is the challenge of a commute, which again is more difficult and time-consuming for people with disabilities. According to the American Public Transportation Association, 45 percent of Americans have no access to public transportation. If you consider that, as of 2020, nearly 25 percent of all transit stations in the United States were not accessible, it’s easy to see that there are increased access barriers for persons with travel-limiting disabilities. That, combined with the headache of navigating the access into, through, and out of the transit stations themselves, such as sidewalks, curb cuts, and elevators, can make regular commuting with a disability a job in and of itself.
Accessibility problems essentially mean that a person with a disability works a longer day because of significant gaps in societal and transportation infrastructure.
In the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2023, about six of the Washington, D.C. Metro’s elevators were out of service at any given time. This means that people who are in wheelchairs or otherwise need an elevator must go to a different stop and then wait for a shuttle, adding significant time to commutes. The problem can create further delays, as well as mistrust, when elevator and escalator outages are not reported in a timely or correct manner, or when shuttles meant to create a bridge between station outages does not have an operational bus lift. Accessibility problems essentially mean that a person with a disability works a longer day because of significant gaps in societal and transportation infrastructure, all while there is an alternative readily available and tested in the work-from-home model, or, occasionally, in models that combine remote and on-site attendance.
The Digital Advantage
When evaluating the benefits of remote work, an important consideration is that the disadvantages of some disabilities can be mitigated by technology that is more easily used from home. For example, people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing might be able to participate in conversations they might not otherwise have been able to in-person. Some people with hearing loss learn to exhibit characteristics of hearing and understanding in-person to avoid making others feel uncomfortable at the loss of their ability to fully participate and understand in-person engagements. However, given the opportunity to engage via technology, they may be able to turn on captioning in online meetings, or turn up the volume to the point where they can hear more clearly. It is still all too rare that interpreters are available at meetings, and when they are, some people with hearing disabilities might not know American Sign Language (ASL). Captioning can be a way for people to participate more fully at work, and to do so without feeling othered.
The advantages of remote work can also translate to people who are not neurotypical and who process the written word more readily than speech. Typical online meeting software also tends to inhibit meeting participants’ ability to interrupt each other, because it makes it easier to “stack” speakers, which can make participating in and understanding conversations much easier for people with experiences varying from neurodiversity to group speaking anxiety, to the ability to hear multiple voices at once.
Furthermore, as noted above, not only have work from home policies supported people with disabilities, but they have also supported people providing care to loved ones, which includes parents with disabilities and disabled people caring for aging parents. It is becoming clear, for example, that the increase in mothers’ labor force participation is likely connected to the increase in work-from-home policies. While not a substitute for publicly supported child care options or long-term supports and services, the ability to work from home creates flexibility for caregivers to forgo commutes, and be present for family members who need them to be physically present.
Solutions to Consider
There may be little will or reason to go back to the office now that much of the United States has experienced the flexibility and option of working from home. Many employers, however, are still creating a workplace culture that prioritizes in-person work. While some employers use return-to-office mandates as a way to cull employees and therefore reduce the overall budget, there are numerous facts that point to the negative effects of firing or letting remote workers go. The results range from attracting younger employees and a more diverse workforce to an increase in company revenue. A study from MIT shows that culling remote workers may expel the most productive and motivated employees, further hindering organizations that must then burn out their other employees to replace the productivity lost, which then increases employee turnover and wastes company resources.
Using a return-to-office mandate as a layoff strategy can also be a way to lay workers off in a way that prevents them from accessing unemployment insurance (UI). Employers have significant incentive to do this, since the amount that employers pay in taxes is directly tied to how many of their former employees get benefits. This is referred to as “experience rating.” Therefore, it might be especially economically expedient for employers to use a return to the office as a way to quietly lay off workers. States vary wildly with regard to access to UI, and a wide range of experts across the political spectrum agree that access varies far too much across states. In some states, refusal to return to in-person work when the company policy changes could constitute a “refusal of suitable work.” In other states, changing the conditions of work, especially when workers were initially hired as remote workers, would be considered a good cause to quit. Some states even specifically allow workers to claim benefits if their work would now require an unreasonable commute.
There are solutions, however, many of which can be implemented through policy and unified leadership. Creating an option for employees to return to office without the mandate gives them the freedom to choose where they work best.
Some people have genuine reasons to want to physically be together to collaborate, but at this point, in relatively few circumstances is in-person attendance actually a requirement for effective collaboration. For example, having people come to the office a couple days per week or several days per month does not guarantee that workers will be coming into an office with any other coworkers present, so RTO policies feel simply punitive. One solution might be designating a particular day or days during the month or calendar quarter for people to get together.
Employees with remote work—that is to say, without a commute—usually give the time back to their organization for other work-related purposes, or use the time to balance their personal needs, allowing them to be more present and focused at work. That usually means less time in the office, allowing businesses to reduce or cut their commercial workspace.
Many could more productively use low occupancy cost for travel budget and better accommodations for remote workers, thus reinforcing the infrastructure and systems of support that employees need to depend on.
By forcing a return to office, leadership burns trust with employees that feel they are being reevaluated for their accountability, with many of those employees then beginning to look for other, more flexible roles. To build more trust and foster accountable relationships based on results rather than on location, management should concentrate on creating a virtual community with genuine connections, with flexibility, in order to attract and maintain the best talent.
Some managers find that they have difficulty keeping tabs on employees when they are not physically sharing space. This is a point in history where some managers might need to shift perspective and (1) assess what it is that they expect staff to accomplish, (2) set expectations around deliverables, (3) assess what works best for the workforce they have whether it is the need for more or less in-person time, and (4) take all disabilities into account.
Building Back Better
As employers are increasing full return-to-office mandates, now is the time to carefully consider the world we want rather than simply a return to “normal.” In the early years of COVID-19, there was a widespread sentiment of wanting to put the fear and isolation of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror. As with all things workforce related, a better lens with which to examine return-to-office policies is having a more inclusive view going forward.
Tags: labor, disability, employment, leadership, Talent
RTO (Return to Office) Is WTF (Way Too Formal)
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, much of the world that could do so pivoted to working remotely. By April, non-essential employers were scrambling to create a situation where their employees could work from home (WFH), thereby giving them an added layer of social distancing when enabling business as usual as much as possible.
In general, up until that point, the infrastructure of work had never been dependent on being virtual to such a degree. Really, prior to the pandemic, WFH couldn’t have been farther from the norm, in which many jobs required employees to work in-person and on scheduled shifts. This status quo excluded many people with disabilities who could not fit into the traditional workplace, whether because of buildings or offices not being physically accessible, or because their employer could or would not offer the regular infrastructure of care to support a disabled employee, the accommodation of a flexible schedule based on the employee’s needs, or the myriad of other challenges that come with being disabled.
For those of us fortunate enough to be employed, and whose organizations had little remote work already in place, we fell into a trial-and-error routine of creating an online environment that was responsive to the needs the pandemic had created or amplified. Parents navigated juggling remote work and at-home child care (as well as remote school for school-age children); home offices were created or repurposed from other spaces; social events moved to digital venues, or else distanced outdoors. It was a challenge to adjust and adapt to a complete system restructure, but it provided an opportunity to access and make accommodations. We saw that not only could remote work protect employees, it gave them the added bonus of increasing flexibility and accessibility.
Increased flexibility benefited many demographic groups, but none more than the disabled community. In this commentary, we will take a look at how adaptations to the pandemic created a paradigm shift, and explore the reasons why our economy would benefit from sticking with the new, instead of reverting to the old.
Filling a Need, Closing the Gap
Where there is a problem, there are also opportunities for solutions, improvements, accommodations and growth—and more often than not, the benefits extend well beyond the original target.
Long before the pandemic, it was clear that telework could be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, but one of the major benefits of the ADA is what is known as the curb cut effect. When we make things better for people who have disabilities, we make things better for everyone. The expression comes from the fact that while curb cuts are made for mobility device users to get on and off, curb cuts also help people who are pushing strollers, bikes, or grocery carts.
Likewise, work from home can increase workers’ quality of life for a variety of reasons—in other words, increasing access to work for people with disabilities makes the entire workplace better for workers and more productive. Policymaking that supports thoughtful work-from-home practices and policies may be one of the best ways to find opportunity in what was wrought by the crisis that was the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the case of disabled people’s access to employment, it’s useful to look at the pandemic through this lens. While many things did not flourish during the pandemic, one metric that saw a remarkable increase was the employment rate of people with disabilities, due in large part to the increased access to remote work environments—a positive change in a midst of chaos.
This is even more remarkable when you note that the number of people with disabilities simultaneously increased due to COVID-19 itself, and by a colossal amount: one estimate offers 1.2 million people just by the end of 2021. As the pandemic has continued, this number has only grown, especially given the Center for Disease Control’s estimate that “[instances of Long COVID] among non hospitalized adults with COVID-19 range from 7.5% to 41%.” In addition to the debilitating effects of COVID-19 itself, it also had secondary effects on the health care system: for instance, routine cancer screenings were disrupted during the initial stages of the pandemic, leading to a delay or deficit in diagnosis.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2019, the employment rate for people with disabilities was 19.4 percent that year. Furthermore, at that time, persons with disabilities were less likely to be in the labor force overall, with 79.2 percent of disabled people not in the workforce, compared to 31.3 percent of people without a disability; 19.3 percent of disabled workers were employed. With a significant dip in the middle due to the pandemic, four years later, in March of 2023, 22.5 percent of people with a disability were employed—the highest recorded ratio since comparable data were first collected in 2008.
Table 1
Prevalence of Disability and Employment over Five Years
While the unemployment rate of people with disabilities was the same percentage in April 2019 as it was in April 2024, the percentage of the workforce has gone up by almost a full two percentage points.
Figure 1
The ratio is the percentage of people with disabilities compared to the same age bracket (16 years and older) of non-disabled peers. The trend of the increase in the ratio indicates that more people with disabilities as a ratio to the overall population are entering the workforce post-2020.
Miles to Go for EEO
While the trends described above are encouraging when viewed strictly by disability, when compared with the percentage of non-disabled Americans who are unemployed, the number is currently trending at about half that population. Simply put, the unemployment rate of people with disabilities is still closer to double. As the chart below shows, the delta (i.e., the overall rates of change) between unemployment rates for people with disabilities and people without disabilities had been closing in the years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic. It should be noted that there have been concerted policy interventions to help reduce this gap, and that they had begun to show success well before the pandemic. However, the disability versus non-disability employment gap widened early in the pandemic, which makes some sense, as people with disabilities are more likely than the general population to be immunocompromised and may have had medical orders to avoid returning to work in person; and expanded unemployment coverage during the pandemic included coverage for those populations. While COVID-era coverage and protections have ended, the health and financial safety needs of the disabled population have not.
However, when examined side-by-side with labor force participation, the numbers are incredibly encouraging during the work from home era. The unemployment rate measures the percent of working age adults who are in the workforce, but not working. Labor force participation includes people surveyed who are either looking for a job or currently employed. As unprecedented numbers of workers with disabilities entered the workforce, the delta between workers with disabilities who were unemployed and workers without disabilities narrowed to incredible lows. This means that even though entering the workforce in person could prove dangerous for people with disabilities, more workers with disabilities were entering and fewer were unemployed.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 2 above shows parallel line graphs, with the orange line representing those out of work without a disability, while the blue line represents those with disabilities that are unemployed. While there is a noticeable increase in both lines during early 2020, the line representing the unemployment rate of people with disabilities did not increase back to its pre-pandemic levels in comparison to the non-disabled employment rate. Thus, the unemployment gap, or the space between the lines, has a marked decrease post-2020.
Comparing that to Figure 3, the marked increase in labor force participation for people with disabilities shows the employment gap is narrowing, in a positive way, from both sides.
The Push for a Return to Work Has Done More Harm Than Good
This statistic may not hold steady, however. Many companies are mandating a “return to work” or “return to office” policy, despite pushback from employees from all backgrounds, known colloquially as “the Great Resistance.” Not only have recent reports suggest that the employment rate for disabled workers may once again be trending downward due to increased mandated return-to-office policies, but a study from MIT showed that return-to-office policies for many employees, regardless of disability, are incentivising candidates to seek new and continuously flexible roles. Put plainly, workplaces are losing some of their best people, including their highest performers, over mandated attendance policies.
Speaking from the perspective of the disability community, the fact is that many of us were still working during the pandemic, and thus “return to work” implies we have little to show for our employment during the last four years. In fact, the increase in the employment rate for people with disabilities, as well as disabled people able to enter the workforce, shows that more of us were working, due in large part to the accessibility of remote work.
Accessibility, in this case, doesn’t just translate to disabled people, but seems to implicitly indicate a cultural shift of flexibility and solution-oriented thinking, a philosophical practice of access.
Getting to Work and Living Near Work
One of the forces driving mandatory return-to-office policies is pressure from commercial real estate and businesses in urban centers that have been struggling since the onset of the pandemic. This means that often, the employers who are putting the most pressure on their employees to return to the office are ased in large, expensive metropolitan areas. These may tend to be the oldest sections of cities, built up before the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. Similar trends can also be seen in housing stock. In addition to having to pay a premium for accessible housing, people in metro areas who might need supportive services are either going to have to pay a premium for those services as well, or may have trouble finding those services in the first place. This can be especially challenging for younger workers at the lower end of the income spectrum.
Housing gets more affordable the farther it is from city centers, but at the same time, there are usually more accessible housing options closer to city centers. Another complicating factor for affordability and accessibility is the challenge of a commute, which again is more difficult and time-consuming for people with disabilities. According to the American Public Transportation Association, 45 percent of Americans have no access to public transportation. If you consider that, as of 2020, nearly 25 percent of all transit stations in the United States were not accessible, it’s easy to see that there are increased access barriers for persons with travel-limiting disabilities. That, combined with the headache of navigating the access into, through, and out of the transit stations themselves, such as sidewalks, curb cuts, and elevators, can make regular commuting with a disability a job in and of itself.
In the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2023, about six of the Washington, D.C. Metro’s elevators were out of service at any given time. This means that people who are in wheelchairs or otherwise need an elevator must go to a different stop and then wait for a shuttle, adding significant time to commutes. The problem can create further delays, as well as mistrust, when elevator and escalator outages are not reported in a timely or correct manner, or when shuttles meant to create a bridge between station outages does not have an operational bus lift. Accessibility problems essentially mean that a person with a disability works a longer day because of significant gaps in societal and transportation infrastructure, all while there is an alternative readily available and tested in the work-from-home model, or, occasionally, in models that combine remote and on-site attendance.
The Digital Advantage
When evaluating the benefits of remote work, an important consideration is that the disadvantages of some disabilities can be mitigated by technology that is more easily used from home. For example, people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing might be able to participate in conversations they might not otherwise have been able to in-person. Some people with hearing loss learn to exhibit characteristics of hearing and understanding in-person to avoid making others feel uncomfortable at the loss of their ability to fully participate and understand in-person engagements. However, given the opportunity to engage via technology, they may be able to turn on captioning in online meetings, or turn up the volume to the point where they can hear more clearly. It is still all too rare that interpreters are available at meetings, and when they are, some people with hearing disabilities might not know American Sign Language (ASL). Captioning can be a way for people to participate more fully at work, and to do so without feeling othered.
The advantages of remote work can also translate to people who are not neurotypical and who process the written word more readily than speech. Typical online meeting software also tends to inhibit meeting participants’ ability to interrupt each other, because it makes it easier to “stack” speakers, which can make participating in and understanding conversations much easier for people with experiences varying from neurodiversity to group speaking anxiety, to the ability to hear multiple voices at once.
Furthermore, as noted above, not only have work from home policies supported people with disabilities, but they have also supported people providing care to loved ones, which includes parents with disabilities and disabled people caring for aging parents. It is becoming clear, for example, that the increase in mothers’ labor force participation is likely connected to the increase in work-from-home policies. While not a substitute for publicly supported child care options or long-term supports and services, the ability to work from home creates flexibility for caregivers to forgo commutes, and be present for family members who need them to be physically present.
Solutions to Consider
There may be little will or reason to go back to the office now that much of the United States has experienced the flexibility and option of working from home. Many employers, however, are still creating a workplace culture that prioritizes in-person work. While some employers use return-to-office mandates as a way to cull employees and therefore reduce the overall budget, there are numerous facts that point to the negative effects of firing or letting remote workers go. The results range from attracting younger employees and a more diverse workforce to an increase in company revenue. A study from MIT shows that culling remote workers may expel the most productive and motivated employees, further hindering organizations that must then burn out their other employees to replace the productivity lost, which then increases employee turnover and wastes company resources.
Using a return-to-office mandate as a layoff strategy can also be a way to lay workers off in a way that prevents them from accessing unemployment insurance (UI). Employers have significant incentive to do this, since the amount that employers pay in taxes is directly tied to how many of their former employees get benefits. This is referred to as “experience rating.” Therefore, it might be especially economically expedient for employers to use a return to the office as a way to quietly lay off workers. States vary wildly with regard to access to UI, and a wide range of experts across the political spectrum agree that access varies far too much across states. In some states, refusal to return to in-person work when the company policy changes could constitute a “refusal of suitable work.” In other states, changing the conditions of work, especially when workers were initially hired as remote workers, would be considered a good cause to quit. Some states even specifically allow workers to claim benefits if their work would now require an unreasonable commute.
There are solutions, however, many of which can be implemented through policy and unified leadership. Creating an option for employees to return to office without the mandate gives them the freedom to choose where they work best.
Some people have genuine reasons to want to physically be together to collaborate, but at this point, in relatively few circumstances is in-person attendance actually a requirement for effective collaboration. For example, having people come to the office a couple days per week or several days per month does not guarantee that workers will be coming into an office with any other coworkers present, so RTO policies feel simply punitive. One solution might be designating a particular day or days during the month or calendar quarter for people to get together.
Employees with remote work—that is to say, without a commute—usually give the time back to their organization for other work-related purposes, or use the time to balance their personal needs, allowing them to be more present and focused at work. That usually means less time in the office, allowing businesses to reduce or cut their commercial workspace.
Many could more productively use low occupancy cost for travel budget and better accommodations for remote workers, thus reinforcing the infrastructure and systems of support that employees need to depend on.
By forcing a return to office, leadership burns trust with employees that feel they are being reevaluated for their accountability, with many of those employees then beginning to look for other, more flexible roles. To build more trust and foster accountable relationships based on results rather than on location, management should concentrate on creating a virtual community with genuine connections, with flexibility, in order to attract and maintain the best talent.
Some managers find that they have difficulty keeping tabs on employees when they are not physically sharing space. This is a point in history where some managers might need to shift perspective and (1) assess what it is that they expect staff to accomplish, (2) set expectations around deliverables, (3) assess what works best for the workforce they have whether it is the need for more or less in-person time, and (4) take all disabilities into account.
Building Back Better
As employers are increasing full return-to-office mandates, now is the time to carefully consider the world we want rather than simply a return to “normal.” In the early years of COVID-19, there was a widespread sentiment of wanting to put the fear and isolation of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror. As with all things workforce related, a better lens with which to examine return-to-office policies is having a more inclusive view going forward.
Tags: labor, disability, employment, leadership, Talent