Curb cuts in the virtual community: telework and persons with disabilities

Curb cuts are the mmps set into sidewalks to make buildings more accessible to persons in wheelchairs. With fowthought, they are easy to install, they provide access for persons with physical impairmenti, and at the same time they may be used by able-bodiedpersons for pushing strollers, shopping carts, and the like. Just like curb cuts in the physical communily, telework in the virtual community may be used to break down barriers of access for persons with disabilities. This paper addresses how and why telework rnq be used as a work-place accommodation. It takes as a point of illustration a program initiated by the U.S. Department ofDefense to extend telecommuting arrangements to its employees with shortand long-term disabilities. Recommendations are given for how to represent the needs of persons with disabilities in the design of telework enabling technologies. 1 The Virtual Community With the onset and progression of the information revolution, we are seeing the development of a new kind of work community. This is a community that spans time [8, lo] and geography [9], a community that supplements buildings and streets with personal computers and information superhighways [2]. This is the virtual community [22] enabled by technologies designed to move information rather than goods and people [ 171. Life in this community is new, evolving, and relatively unfettered by previous history. Decisions that we make now, as charter members of that community, will leave a lasting impression on the norms, expectations, and mores that will govern its life for decades to come. At the dawn of the virtual work community, there are a number of questions we must ask ourselves. One of the first is: “How do we make this community equally accessible to all of its members’?” In our physical environments we have learned that the way we design our structures may inadvertently have an impact on who will use them. We have learned, for example, that something as simple as a curb, designed to keep water off yards and sidewalks, can pose insurmountable obstacles to those of our community members who have physical disabilities, especially those who rely on wheelchairs to get around. The solution is to design our communities with features that are equally usable by people with a wide range of physical abilities, a principle referred to as “universal design” [ 141. Using the example of a curb, one of the most frequently cited illustrations of universal design is the “curb cut.” Curb cuts are the innocuous ramps set into the pathways outside of public buildings. These ramps not only make the buildings more accessible to people with wheelchairs but they can also be used by anyone pushing a stroller, a shopping cart, or a hand iruck, or anyone who may simply want to avoid the strain of stepping up over curbs. The design solution is the perfect compromise. With forethought, curb cuts are easy to install and yet they are welcomed additions not just for people in wheelchairs but for all community members. The purpose of this paper is to consider similar adaptations -” curb cuts” if you will-in the virtual community. It begins by examining how telework itself may be considered a type of “curb cut” in the conventional organization; that is, how and why telework can be used as an adaptive tool to improve employment options for persons with disabilities. It follows by presenting a case history of how telework was used to improve the working conditions of civilian employees with disabilities working for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). It concludes with recommendations for fi.n?her adapting the practice of telework to meet the needs of persons with disabilities. 2 Telework as a “Curb Cut” In this paper, telework is defined as the overarching practice of substituting communications technology and/or computer technology for actual travel to work or a central office. The term encompasses the notion of telecommuting [18], home-based employment, flexiplace, work from community-based telework centers, remote work, and work conducted while traveling. There has been speculation among organizational researchers that, because of the nature of telework and teleworkenabling technologies, the practice may be used as an adaptation to accommodate the needs of persons with disabilities. The argument begins with an examination of changes in the way people work. 418 1060-3425/95$4.0001995 IEEE Proceedings of the 28th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '95) 1060-3425/95 $10.00 © 1995 IEEE Proceedings of the 28th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1995 2.1 The Changing Demands of Work At the height of the industrial age, when the focus was on creating mass quantities of tangible products through industrial technology, workers by necessity were gathered into machine-intensive, collective environments. The machines that were introduced during the industrial age were designed to replace or augment physical labor. The workers who operated the machines were selected on the basis of their physical ability to meet the grueling demands of factory work or the assembly line. Under these conditions, a person with a disability was o&n seen as a superfhrous drain on the economy: a ma&nctioning cog in the larger machinery of mass production. Changes in the market place, occuring simultaneously with changes in technology, transformed the nature of work. Oversaturated markets, increased competition, and a global economy were all pressures that favored a new organizational envimnment, an e&onrnent based on information rather than capital [26]. The technologies introduced to support this new environment were different as well. They served not to replace physical labor, as was the case in the industrial revolution, but to empower users in processing information [28]. Under these conditions a person with a disability whose intellect was sharp and intact would be in the perfect position to use the new technologies to become an indispensable player in a new workforce. 2.2 Electronically Distributed Organizations As organizations converted to an information age economy, they also decentralized their organizational power and authority. The move was to take out the inefficiency of making decisions high up the organizational hierarchy, away from real time market pressures, and to put decision making power as near the front line of operations as possible. This, coupled with advances in communications technologies, allowed organizations to distribute themselves geographically [ 15, 161, What emerged was a new type of organization that must rely increasingly on telework, in one form or another, to conduct its business [3,4]. This was the electronically distributed work community: the virtual community. 2.3 Telework as an Adaptive Strategy With these concurrent developments-increasing value placed on knowledge workers irrespective of physical ability and an overall move to distributed operations-the time became right to suggest that telework could be offered as an adaptive work strategy for persons with disabilities. In the Netherlands, a rising number of older and disabled employees emerging at the same time as an increase in electronic network technology led one commentator to predict that government support for telework among employees with disabilities would pay for itself dramatically by reducing money spent on disability benefits [27]. In the United States, the designers of a plan to make telecommuting arrangements available to all Federal employees suggested that telework could be used to get “injured employees back to work and to take them off of workers’ compensation roles” [20]. In the context of these justifications, at least two formal programs were introduced in the United States to give persons with disabilities more equitable access to employment opportunities. In 1990-9 1, the Tennessee Valley Authority instituted a program to support workers with spinal damage, paralysis, and other disabling conditions as they worked from home [25]. Around the same time, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., established a systematic program to support home work as part of a comprehensive vocational rehabilitation program. Both programs reported positive improvements in their abilities to meet the vocational rehabilitation needs of their constituencies. Encouraged by the promise of these programs and with effarts at the Federal level to establish flexible work arrangements as a work option for Federal employees, the DOD set out to establish flexiplace as a work option for its employees with disabilities in 1993. That program, and its implications for telework as an adaptive work practice, are described below. 3 The DOD Flexiplace Project On April 19,1993, the manager of the DOD’s Program for People with Disabilities formally introduced flexiplace as work option for the civilian workforce under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The notion of flexiplace came out of etlbrts initiated by the U.S. Government’s Oflice of Personnel Management and General Service Agency to make flexible workplace arrangements available to members of the Federal workforce. Flexiplace is similar to the notion of telecommuting, which allows employees to substitute work at home for work in the office, but the name was coined to imply that employees should be given the flexibility to choose between working away from or working in the office. The DOD program grew out of a larger effort to create new opportunities for persons with disabilities in the DOD civilian worktbme [7]. The goal was to create a diverse workforce in which at least 2% of all civilians employed would be employees with disabilities, Flexiplace was seen as a way of meeting that goal by offering an attractive work alternative to prospective employees. During the uncertain period of base closures, reductions in force, and changes in administration during the early 1990’s the DOD altered its goal from creating new opportunities to enhancing current positions.