[Title: Inclusive hybrid work]
[Text: What are you doing to support employees with disability?]
[Audio: Soft background music]
Female voice over: An interview.
[Visual: Fiona enters the scene and sits on a chair.]
Fiona: Things as simple as doing my makeup, it’s much more time consuming when I need to, you know, be presentable to go into the office.
[Text: We spoke to Fiona about her experiences with hybrid work as a person with disability in the Victorian public sector.]
Fiona: I use a long cane to navigate. Being at home for much of the last two years, my cane skills are nowhere near as good as what they were a couple of years ago.
Having to walk from the tram stop to the office and unknowingly coming across construction or something like that, it creates an extra barrier to my day that I don’t need to worry about if I’m working from home.
[Text: Fiona’s husband Paul watched on to learn more about her daily experiences.]
[Visual: Paul enters the scene and sits on a chair.]
Fiona: I think he would think that I’m very driven. He knows that I like a challenge. Quite often he respects the fact that I do things that he would normally not expect someone with a disability to be doing.
Part of my role as a disability advocate is to actually, you know, use my voice to be able to stand up and say: ‘Well, these are the things that aren’t working.’
Perfect example is I had someone send me a document the other day and they said: ‘The blue text is this and the green text is this, and then the other text is this.’ ‘And I’m like, you realise my computer doesn’t tell the difference between blue and green?’
There was a staff event where it was decided, as a reward for getting our star ratings, we were going to go as a team to the movies. And I went and had a chat to my manager and said, ‘Look, I’m happy to stay in the office’ ‘I’d really prefer not to go to the movies.’
It was the worst three hours of my life, really, in some ways where I would have been quite happy sitting in the office. The disability wasn’t taken into account at all. It was just like, no, we’re going to do this as a team and if you don’t participate in this as a team, then you’re not a good team player.
The disability thing, I guess it comes back from one of those things that were built into me when I was very young and it was like, you need to be normal. You need to be like everybody else and fit in as much as you possibly can.
And it’s only been in the last few years where I’ve said: No, hang on, my disability is part of my identity. I need to embrace it and to make it part of who I am and not be embarrassed by it.
[Visual: Paul blinks pensively, then stands and embraces Fiona warmly when she joins him. Sitting side by side, they hold hands.]
Fiona: I think just having flexibility around not even necessarily having to select days of the week. I’m feeling great and I’ve got some really good stuff on tomorrow, so I’m going to go into the office and do that.
Then you get the best out of both in the sense that you can go and incorporate the things that you need to do in the office in, in, you know, that space.
Paul: Walking around the house, you know, with no sight, is hard enough for most people. Imagine trying to walk down the street, jump on the tram, go to work.
Fiona: It’s not the person that’s the problem, it’s the society that’s not taking care of the people and instead of making it an individual fight, making it something that we’re all aware of and something that we can all have an input into making everybody’s lives better.
[Visual: The couple turn to the camera.]
[Text: What are you doing to support inclusive hybrid work? Find out what you can do at vpsc.vic.gov.au/inclusivework]
[Text: Co-sponsored by]
[Visual: Department of Transport and Planning logo and Victorian Public Sector Commission logo]
[End of transcript]