Pain and Interventions on the Body

Watch the video

For each session in the series, we collaborated with a performance company to develop a video resource that can be used to illustrate the content of the research themes. These creative responses to each topic are aimed toward sparking discussion, debate, and the development of inclusive workplace practices. You may wish to show these videos, and use the additional resources we have collated, in your work workplace as an way of starting discussions around the issues depicted.

These are the 10 key learned lessons from this event that we would like to share with organizations.

1. The sharing of people's life stories and experiences are extremely important in challenging inequality and shedding light on challenges – this is both in the context of academic autoethnographic narratives but also for organizations.
2. It is important to question and critique limiting frameworks that impose normative limits on people, especially binary conceptualizations regarding gender (e.g. male/female), health (e.g. healthy/sick), disability (e.g. able/disable) and other categories of difference.
3. Organizations must take a holistic and intersectional approach to inclusion, understanding that the individual experience across multiple protected categories is not simply additive, but it involves complex dynamics and challenges.
4. Chronic pain and disability can be both visible and invisible.
5. Workplaces must make reasonable adjustments (based on criteria around effectiveness, practicability, cost, disruption and the effects on others) to ensure enabling environments for all employees.
6. People who experience pain and suffer from chronic illness or disability at work are often required to spend more resources than others to carry out their duties – this includes time, requirements dictated by bureaucracy, money, and emotional labour.
7. Helping people overcome adversity can improve their confidence, enhance trust with the organization, and lead to empowerment. Lack of support can, on the other hand, result in resistance, under-performance, high turnover of staff and health related issues (both mental health and physical health).
8. Creating a culture of inclusion means also creating flexible systems that allow people to flourish – for example around self-disclosure and self-reporting; leave requests and flexible work hours; working from how or other work locations.
9. Some illnesses have ‘flare ups’ at unpredictable times and rarely need medical intervention; others involve continuous pain that can be managed individually. The same illness can be experienced in different ways by individuals, so it is important that line managers target individual needs.
10. There is still a lot of stigma around illness and disability in the workplace. Organizations should create or develop a culture whereby adjustments to foster equity are a basic expectation, rather than being considered a form of  ‘special treatment’ that employees need to feel guilty, or grateful, for. 

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