A Day in My Life as an Autistic Person in an Open Plan Office

Four years ago, I hated working at home. We had only recently been provided with the technology to do so, and I had no suitable work area in my house. While the open plan office I was based at was not ideal, it was broken into many smaller spaces so the noise was bearable.

The pandemic, of course, changed everything. When it became apparent that we would be working from home for much longer than the few weeks initially predicted, I joined many others in converting a spare bedroom to an office and properly equipping it with what I needed. This was a revelation. For the first time in 30 years at work I was fully in control of my own environment. Working at home was one of the best things that had ever happened to me and many other neurodivergent people, allowing us to tailor our surroundings to what works for us, usually bringing a subsequent improvement in the quality and quantity of the work we produced.

Now, these benefits are being eroded by increasing demands to return to the office in the nebulous names of collaboration, corporate culture, and water cooler moments. I do like meeting my team, and there are definitely benefits of holding face to face discussions. But there are big problems with office working for some of us too. To show you what this means, let me talk you through a typical office day.

I cannot cope with a full working day in the noisy office, and I am a morning person, so my day starts with working at home from around 7am. In the first couple of hours I may well do my best work of the day. But just as I hit my stride, I have to pack up my laptop and head off on the bus to the office.

I am lucky, I only live a few miles away, but it still takes between 45 minutes and an hour to get there. I arrive a little weary from the journey, and anxious about how busy the office will be and where I will be able to sit.

We recently moved to a new building which provides any number of options for people who want to spend the day collaborating with others, but almost no privacy or quiet for those of us that need them. I am hypersensitive to noise, and especially voices. But the only quiet options are a very small number of individual rooms which are in high demand and eliminate any of the benefits of going into the office, leaving me feeling isolated.

I approach the open plan area designated for my team, but not exclusive to us. Anyone can sit anywhere, and reserving desks for others is not permitted. If I am lucky, I will find a desk next to or close to others in my team so we can have impromptu chats about work issues as they arise. If I am unlucky, I will have to sit at a breakout table with only my laptop screen to use, or on the other side of the floor surrounded by people that I do not know.

Wherever I sit, it is likely to be noisy. With teams being spread around the country and people working different days at home and in the office, many of us spend much of the day on teams calls. Some of us cannot help ourselves from speaking more loudly than strictly necessary when wearing headphones, and others have voices which seem to carry very well.

This is a big issue for me. My brain tries to follow what every voice that I can hear is saying. I have no auditory filter in my head, and so I am quickly worn down by this. I have noise cancelling headphones, but with so many conversations going on at once in a block of 30 desks plus nearby meeting tables, even these are fighting a losing battle at times.

I do not blame my colleagues for this in any way – they are just trying to do their jobs. But I really do struggle with an office design that seems to view walls and doors with their sound proofing properties as forbidden. We have large meeting tables right next to blocks of desks. Who does this serve, and what does it achieve?

After an hour or two, I will be starting to struggle from the constant noise. I take a break by going for a short walk which temporarily clears my head. There is an area where we can eat our lunch away from our desks, but again it is right next to the working area with no sound proofing in between. Lunchtime, therefore, can be even noisier than the rest of the day, as people take advantage of the time to catch up with friends.

Again, nobody is doing anything wrong – they are using the building as it was designed, but by doing so it creates barriers for some of us.

I am lucky enough not to have any visual hypersensitivity, but I know that many autistic people struggle with bright lights. They too are very poorly provided for. Desks, meeting tables, walls, and other furniture are almost entirely white, and there is no way to control the very bright lighting.

After lunch I quickly start to flag. I wrap up my calls for the day and head home, having completed around 4-5 hours in the office. As I leave the building I am exhausted, and still have the journey home to contend with. Hopefully other members of my team were also in and I have had some useful conversations with them, but this is not a given. My line manager is based 200 miles away so contact with her is always by call or email.

I get home, fit for very little else that day, and my fatigue will carry over into the next day too. This is very different from days working at home when I will have got more work done and still have energy to perhaps do some gardening or another hobby after finishing for the day. My stress levels also remain much lower on home days, even during high pressure periods of work.

I know that some people need the human contact of attending the office. I am not saying that it is all bad. But if you are going to insist that we all attend for 2 or 3 days a week or more, please provide an office that accommodates people who are not neurotypical extroverts, and who want to get on with their work in a quiet environment. Please recognise that we are all different, and please listen to us when we tell you what works best for us. We are just trying to do the best we can, and right I feel ignored and an inconvenience, rather than a valued member of staff with a legal right to reasonable adjustments. I suspect that I am not the only one.