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Ways of Working - a life story

I was asked to talk about my 'Ways of Working' recently. It turned out to be a brilliant opportunity to connect up so much of my life and my work. 

A sketch effect portrait of Catherine Hale sitting in bed with a headrest, smiling
Working from bed since 1996

 

I first developed My Ways of Working in the 90s as a student living with ME. To get around my very poor mental and physical stamina I studied part time, mostly from home, often in bed, in short bursts of concentration interspersed with rest.

It may have been a strange existence, but it got me a First Class degree from a top University. However, I soon found out that I was utterly unemployable. Pigs would fly before the Ways of Working that made me a high flying student would be accepted by employers in the graduate jobs market in the late 90s. I had no choice but to claim benefits.

Then, in the early 2000s the New Deal for Disabled People came along: a specialist voluntary support scheme for disabled people who want to work. “Yay”, I thought (in those days employment support providers were all friendly and unthreatening). They will know things about jobs market that I don’t. There will be a niche for me somewhere. So I told them I wanted to work, and that I could work from home for a few hours a week as long as the hours were flexible. They fell silent. Then they said “Sorry we can’t help you, there are no jobs out there for you”.

The feeling of exclusion, the lack of purpose and the shadowy sense of identity that came from being unemployable gnawed away at me for years.

What changed is that I had children and forged my Ways of Working as a disabled parent. From that exhilarating and indescribably hard challenge I gained the confidence that I can get stuff done if I’m allowed to do it my way. I learned that being extremely limited in some respects gives me advantages in others: it makes me strategic, driven, organised, efficient and stubbornly determined. I concluded that the crucial difference between paid work and parenting that enabled me to succeed is that our children don’t select us as employees through an ableist competitive recruitment process. My girls and I grew around each other.

So once my girls started school I sought out Ways of Working that enabled me to have an impact in the wider world, not through formal work but through disability activism, research and campaigning. As before, I did it mostly from my bed or sofa. But unlike before I was not alone: the internet and social media connected me with other bed-based badasses; it opened up a world of ideas, networks, campaigns and learning. Then I got lucky with a research grant and the Chronic Illness Inclusion Project was born.

It was through research with the CIIP and then working for Astriid that I realised my Ways of Working weren’t so niche or outlandish after all. There are 4.7 million people disabled by energy limiting conditions in the UK that limit the amount of activity or work we can do. Many need to work part time, if they can work at all, and working from home is often the only way of allocating enough energy to make work viable. Then there’s the fact that almost two-thirds of working age disabled people say their condition is episodic or fluctuating, meaning they may need flexible working times.

This is where the FlexPlus concept was born. I realised that my Way of Working is in fact a combination of flexibilities around time and location of work that is a very commonly clustered set of needs among people with long term health conditions. In a survey for Astriid 75% of jobseekers with long term conditions said the biggest barrier to work they face is the lack of jobs advertised with flexibility over hours and location of work. And on a personal level, I heard from so many people locked out of employment echoing the yearnings of my younger self for meaning and purpose.   

So my current research project is the result of a long established mission. To discover what are the possibilities and barriers for FlexPlus Ways of Working within organisations, in this brave new world of  ‘anywhere working’ of 2024. And how can employers be persuaded to offer more FlexPlus working opportunities to the hidden talent pool who, like I did, have much to offer but can’t show up for work in the conventional ways?

It goes without saying that I’m doing this research within my Way of Working. I remain conventionally unemployable and I didn’t get here through competitive selection but through good people thinking outside the box to create an opportunity for me to work at my pace and place (thank you Ben Baumberg Geiger.)

And thank you to the wonderful Julie Reynolds for handing me the Ways of Working framework to think about my life.

 

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