No-one has addressed this aspect yet: disability.
Disabled people have been begging for even one day a week WFH for many years. For all sorts of reasons, from the sheer amount of time saved on travel and preparation for travel, to the sheer mental overhead of being in a space where you are highly visible and isolated at the same time. As someone on the spectrum, someone just coming up and chatting to me isn’t just a disruption, it can undo the progress of a whole day.
For years, disabled people have asked, pleaded, begged for the option of working from home. And for years they’ve been told that it’s too hard, it’s too complicated, there are very good and entirely valid reasons why you think it would work but trust us it really wouldn’t, and you think it would be pleasant but trust us you’ll be begging to come in for the stale coffee and the random managers dropping past your desk and the co-workers chatting about their pets at the tops of their lungs.
Then Covid happened, and it turned out that while it was a disruption, WFH wasn’t actually impossible at all. And disabled people got a taste of the thing they’d been told was impossible all that time, and it was sweet. It was everything they hoped it could be. And they didn’t even have to feel guilty about it, because everyone was in the same boat.
And now. Now, in this “Post-Covid [citation needed] World”, all the extrovert senior managers, who got their positions not because they are better at their jobs, not because they are better at managing people or systems or supply chains, but because they present better at the social events that people like them use for character judgement instead of competence, they are saying that it’s now going to be impossible again.
Only the cat’s out of the bag. And, like kerb cuts and accessible entrances, it turns out that things that make it possible for disabled people to function also make it more pleasant for non-disabled people. Everyone knows it’s possible now, and how it works.
So what’s left is coersion, and orders, and diktat, and gaslighting, and “because there are very good and important things that you can’t do over zoom that I absolutely need you in the office to do no I can’t adequately explain what they are but trust me.”
What this whole push to going back to the office is saying to disabled people is: “We hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse of how things could be. We’re systematically erasing it now, because you and your needs don’t matter.”
