Petrobras adopts home office for disabled employee – 05/21/2023 – Market

This month, Petrobras started a new policy for employees with disabilities who will be able to adhere to full-time remote work for five days a week. From home, this group of people can avoid traveling to the company and use accessibility technologies, in order to strengthen inclusion in the professional routine.

Cecília de Pádua, 55, has worked in the company’s communication area for 19 years. In the pandemic, with the transfer to the remote regime, she discovered home office possibilities that made her day to day easier. Resources such as subtitling and audio transcription during online meetings optimize the work of people who, like Cecília, have hearing impairments.

“I intend to adopt the full remote regime for the acoustic comfort it will offer me during the workday. Remote work will optimize my performance in the same way that it optimized that of most employees during the pandemic”, he says.

Petrobras’ initiative, still in a pilot phase, considered the results of the home office during the isolation period and was based on studies on the demands of employees with disabilities. Led by the human resources and health sectors, the project had the support of other groups, including unions and people with different disabilities

The option for the remote regime is voluntary, and the professional who adheres to the proposal can return to the hybrid or face-to-face model whenever they prefer.

Today, Petrobras has 338 employees with disabilities, the majority working under an administrative regime of 40 hours per week. Of the total, about 58% have already requested the change to work from home every day of the week.

On the platforms, there are 30 workers with some type of physical or sensory demand who, according to the company, will be able to opt for the full-time remote model. In this case, they must negotiate new working conditions with managers to leave the platforms and work in administrative regime activities.

Petrobras says that the tools used in remote work facilitated the inclusion of these workers. In addition to the transcription technology used by Cecília, people with hearing impairments claim that it is easier for them to read lips online, and those with visual impairments use resources such as text reading software.

A human resources professional at the oil company for four years, Tielli Fiorini, 38, also positively evaluates the chance of working from home. For her, who has a hearing impairment, remote work enabled an improvement in communication, which started to be done mainly through messages and emails.

Published in 2022, a survey by the Work Foundation, associated with the University of Lancaster (England), showed that 80% of professionals with disabilities consider the possibility of working from home as an essential factor in the search for a new job.

Most workers with disabilities do not want to return to pre-pandemic patterns of face-to-face work, according to the report. Some 66% prefer to work remotely four to five days a week.

In addition to eliminating difficulties from the journey, the home office allows the disabled employee to have more autonomy. Among the advantages mentioned in the survey are the freedom to adjust the physical space where they work to make it more comfortable and the privacy to take care of their health.

For Carolina Ignarra, director of the diversity consultancy Talento Importar, the measure is important because it was taken with the participation of people with disabilities. On the other hand, she claims that it is necessary to monitor the workers to ensure that they are benefiting from the measure.

“It is necessary to think about care beyond flexibilities, how to train people with disabilities, especially those who are at the beginning of their careers or in operational positions, talk about how to balance opportunities and professional ambition”, he says.

At Petrobras, the human resources sector held lectures on the subject and intends to monitor those who are working remotely.

Ignarra also warns of networking, which helps in professional growth and can be affected in the home office, since interaction with colleagues is usually less.

For employee Cecília de Pádua, working from home does not change her relationship with other professionals, who work in a hybrid regime. “There is no risk of stereotyping employees with disabilities because of the full home office. Proof of this is that, on our internal portal, colleagues without disabilities showered praise on the approval of the measure”, says Cecília.

Petrobras says that full-time telecommuting is one of the measures to increase inclusion. Another proposal was the Accessibility Improvement plan, which implemented actions to boost diversity, such as adapting physical spaces and promoting awareness campaigns.

The company increased, from 5% —legal requirement— to 8%, the reservation of vacancies for people with disabilities in public tenders.