Creating spaces for autistic employees

When the focus falls on neurodiversity within organisations, it’s tempting to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge. Where do I begin? How do I start having the conversations needed to understand how the land currently lies?

The most effective way to start moving the dial is to work through your people managers, as this is how to create the most momentum in a short time. The everyday employee experience for all employees starts and ends with their line manager and the relationship they have with them.

As the term neurodivergence covers many brain types, it’s worth narrowing down the focus to employees who identify as autistic or having ADHD. Neither of these identifications makes things easy for those who have received a diagnosis. The typical corporate workspace can make it very challenging for neurodivergent employees to feel comfortable and able to do their job as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Managers as experience curators

Line managers are the holy grail of employee experience and organisational effectiveness and are pivotal to a business’s success in terms of corralling the troops. I look at them as being the key facet when it comes to working with autistic employees and ensuring the curation of an experience for all their team members.

It's so important to understand the difference that a good manager can make to an employee’s everyday experience – it can be phenomenal, whether you’re neurodivergent or neurotypical. It is problematic if a manager cannot understand their neurodivergent employees, what their preferences and challenges are, or how to accommodate them.

To effectively curate the experience of autistic employees, a good manager must:

1) Take the time to know your employees to achieve high employee engagement. When your people managers know their teams well, it’s a game-changer. Bear in mind that knowing your team well doesn’t always mean that team members will declare their neurodivergence. They may not even know themselves, especially considering long waiting times for diagnoses. Employees are not under any obligation to declare their neurodivergence during the application process or after employment begins. However, if there is a shared understanding that there is some neurodivergence in your team, then you can begin working with that team member to make accommodations for them. You start to create this subculture that’s aside from the wider organisation’s culture.

2) Be aware that change is very difficult and stressful for autistic people. Not just organisational change, but also basic change that may seem innocuous for neurotypical people, such as taking a different route to work, taking a different mode of transport, having to go to a different meeting room, or drinking from a different cup. However, techniques that you can use to support your employees with change, include giving advance warning for when changes might happen. This will give your employees more time to process this new information to figure out how they will navigate the change and how to cope.

3) Monotropism is the focus on one area. Many autistic people tend to focus on one particular topic that is hard for them to move away from. This is why there’s a general understanding that autistic people should be pushed into predictable work – roles that have very specific tasks that are often repetitive, such as data input, data analysis and working with code. This is where monotropism can work in your favour rather than against it. An effective way to help your neurodivergent team members is to build a visual timetable that they can use to predict what will happen and build familiarity in their work pattern.

Creating accessible internal communications

It’s important to create communications that will work for everyone. Therefore, internal communications can make a huge difference when it comes to helping employees to understand the organisation’s strategy, in the short and long term, and their role in achieving those goals and objectives.

Neurotypical people tend to communicate in a specific way that involves a lot of nuances, and they often take these non-verbal cues for granted. Whereas autistic people find it hard to be nuanced and covert in their communication – they say things as they see them, which could be wrongly interpreted as rude, abrupt, or too bold. Therefore, with autistic people, you have to say what you mean and be very literal, open, and honest, as well as diplomatic and tactful, otherwise it’s very likely that misunderstandings and confusion will ensue.

ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) are used across the board by many organisations to support groups of employees from various categories, from protected characteristics like ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, to other areas like being a parent or having a particular hobby. They are created for those employees to have a space where they can discuss and talk about key challenges and brainstorm solutions that will support them in their circumstances, both inside and outside their organisation. ERGs can work very well, although they can sometimes be used as just a tick box exercise to follow a DEI strategy or corporate agenda.

However, looking at it with a positive light, ERGs are created as a support mechanism for both the personal and professional lives of employees. You must create them for the right reasons, be authentic about it, and give the people in the group the autonomy and freedom to be able to run it in a way that feels comfortable and works for them. It will be more effective this way, as they will feel more empowered to have those discussions to direct the group and the organisation in the right way. Also, that shared experience and knowledge, the outputs that are coming from these meetings, will inform the small changes that can be made to improve the employee experience of your neurodivergent employees and the wider employee base.

Cultural fit for neurodivergence

There are many organisations that are not able to start identifying their neurodivergent employees for particular treatment, allowances or recognition. However, there’s a worthwhile exercise in broaching the subject and looking at how this can be achieved. There are ways to transition the culture to be more of a fit for welcoming neurodivergence, not just from basic awareness perspective, but also from an acceptance and involvement perspective, which is what my ‘Collaboration for Neurodivergence’ programme does. This really helps an organisation to start using the many skills and talents from the neurodivergent community to bring innovation and new solutions to solve some old problems. The programme is quite unique in that it starts a process for understanding the organisational structure, the cultural fit as it is today, and what it needs to make it an accessible and suitable environment that is accepting and involving of autistic and ADHD employees.

Summary

All these things culminate to make change. As we know, change is difficult, and transformation takes time. However, you can make a start to with the help of my programme, Collaboration for Neurodivergence.

Remember, everything starts and ends with people managers, line managers, team leaders and supervisors. They are the holy grail of the employee experience, so start with them to make positive change.