• Project number: F2586
• Institution: Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA)
• Status: Ongoing Project
• Planned end: 2029-07-31

Description:

Innovative technologies offer opportunities to design the world of work more inclusively for people with disabilities. The same also applies to participation in teamwork, which may be regarded as the predominant method of working in many organisations. Agile forms of work in particular are on the rise and are changing teamwork. Digital communication technologies are opening up new ways of including people with disabilities as equal team members, but are posing new risks of exclusion as well. While the opportunities and risks digitalisation is creating for people with disabilities and their participation in the labour market are central to inclusion research, they are frequently neglected when new technologies are looked at by ergonomists.

This project will examine the opportunities and challenges created by digital communication technologies in “mixed-ability teams” made up of people with and without visual and hearing disabilities. For this purpose, the project will bring together the different perspectives of inclusion research and ergonomics. Initially, the intention is to work out and describe how teamwork functions in mixed-ability teams that use communication technologies. It is not merely the fit between the individual, the team, the technology, and the task that will be examined. Other factors can also contribute to the positive or negative impacts digital communications technologies have in mixed-ability teams, for example organisational parameters and the climate within the team. Use will be made of established methods of work analysis, such as observation, interviews, and information flow analysis. The findings from the work analysis will be verified under controlled conditions in a laboratory study. Apart from this, people with disabilities will be interviewed about the organisational parameters within which they operate in order to validate the results of the work analysis.

Generally, working in mixed-ability teams is beneficial for the world of work in terms of social sustainability because more people’s insights, skills, and creative ideas are being tapped into. The project’s findings are to be drawn on to make work in mixed-ability teams more equal and human-centred as digitalisation advances. Against the backdrop of the Act to Enhance the Implementation of Accessibility (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, BFSG), this project will continue to generate findings about how technologies can be designed accessibly.