Making meetings better for people with disabilities

What is it about?

Team meetings are unavoidable for many people in the workforce, whether they happen in-person, over a video call, or a hybrid mixture of some people remote and some in-person. Depending on the mode of the meeting (in-person, virtual, or hybrid) participants face different issues like audio-visual quality problems, social isolation, and mismatched expectations, among others. Our study goes one step further and looks specifically at home people with disabilities experience these team meetings and how the mode of participation changes their experience. Many challenges and opportunities arose in interviews with participants, making it clear that there is no magic technology to fix problems, but that a thoughtful combination of management, technological, and infrastructural changes can make a big differences in supporting disabled workers.

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Why is it important?

At a time when workplaces are debating return-to-office policies, our work goes beyond the traditional debate about office morale and looks specifically at how the mode of even a simple team meeting can have big impacts on workers with disabilities. Already marginalized, the perspective of workers with disabilities is not often considered in return-to-office discussions beyond talk of ADA compliance - but the reality is that many of the flexible and structured supports that help workers with disabilities can provide considerable benefit to all workers, and they are neither difficult nor costly to implement.

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