Neurodiversity at work: ‘I had to kick doors down to be heard’

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Neurodiversity at work: ‘I had to kick doors down to be heard’

Dan Harris
I think that the business world has woken up to the fact that actually, neurodiversity is a competitive advantage. And all of the social change that’s been happening over the last few years has played into the point that actually neurodiversity is a new paradigm of diversity and inclusion.

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times with me, Isabel Berwick. This week I’ve joined more than 400 delegates from multinationals down to small companies in London’s Docklands for the first international Neurodiversity in Business Conference. Dan Harris, who you just heard, is the founder of the Neurodiversity in Business network for employers and for people diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia and others. We’ll come back to him a little later. In my job at the FT as a workplace expert, I’ve really noticed how much the issue of neurodiversity is being talked about compared to even a few years ago, and maybe that’s not surprising. An estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the population could be neurodivergent, so the chances are that you or a colleague are among them. But I wanted to find out why the issue’s become so prominent in recent years. And first, what kind of issues do neurodivergent employees face in the workplace and how should those be managed?

Janice Rae
So I became really fascinated with neurodiversity after spending a lifetime thinking that I didn’t quite fit in and I thought differently. I approached things very differently and I could see solutions to problems really easily.

Isabel Berwick
Janice Rae is founder and CEO of Tech Talent Academy, which recruits people to the tech industry. And she received an autism diagnosis in her late 30s.

Janice Rae
I didn’t think I was neurodiverse at all because I didn’t seem to fit the, any of the stereotypes. But fast forward started to realise an awful lot. The students come in through our academy. I could see there was neurodiverse traits there and my seven-year-old daughter came back from school one day and having been diagnosed with selective mutism, she said to me, “Mummy, I can’t concentrate in the classroom. The noise is just too loud and the lights are too bright and I really struggle”. And I thought, oh my goodness, you’re autistic. And then I suddenly realised that I have the same struggles. (Laughs) So it was a real lightbulb moment to suddenly realise that we are autistic and that’s why we think differently. That’s why we’ve got challenges.

Isabel Berwick
And Janice, when you work with businesses, how open do you find they are to talking about neurodiversity, to encouraging neurodiverse staff? What’s the state of play out there?

Janice Rae
So it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. I have to say that our employers, who are so inclusive and really keen to learn and understand how they can support neurodiverse talent, they understand a lot of their base people are neurodiverse and they want to be able to do more. And that’s a real joy to find people like that. But sadly, there are other people who want to recruit neurodiverse talent, but when you scratch beneath the surface, they really just don’t understand or think it’s a heavily disabled community and a community which has a lot of deficits. And that’s really not the case at all. So it’s changing the whole dialogue, it’s changing the narrative.

Isabel Berwick
Among those trying to change the narrative is Nancy Doyle. She’s professor of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London and founder of Genius Within. It’s a consultancy that works with businesses to help them create better workplaces for neurodivergent staff.

Nancy Doyle
Ten years ago I had to kick people’s doors down to get them to take neurodiversity seriously, and now they are welcoming me in. So sometimes it’s because they’ve got a problem. They’ve got someone, maybe someone very senior who isn’t performing as they need to be, who’s struggling, who needs support. Or it’s because they’re really keen and they see the potential of neurodiversity and they want to know how they can do it better.

Isabel Berwick
And have you got a sort of simple answer to how companies can do it better that our listeners can act on in the first instance?

Nancy Doyle
Oh, 100 per cent. So where we’ve been for the last 20 years is this very reactive place where we wait for people to put their hands up and say, oh, I’m struggling, can I have some help, please? And then we help them one person at a time. And where we’re going is a bit more strategic and forward-thinking.

So I would say that the best predictor of the future is the past. And what businesses need to be doing is looking back through their HR data, through their experience and going, what kind of accommodations have we had to make? Where have we made adjustments for people that have worked? How frequently does this come up? How much of it is hidden under the surface and how can we just do this as standard rather than waiting for people to express needs?

Fifteen to 20 per cent of the human population is neurodivergent. If you are employing people, you are employing neurodivergent people already. So start with the neurodivergent people you already have. Find out how to make your onboarding more neuro-inclusive. How to manage performance in more concrete and explainable ways and how to do wellbeing in a neurodivergent-friendly style. Think about your environment, the sensory input that people are getting. Is it too overwhelming? That’s where you start the whole business.

Isabel Berwick
So we’re talking in London. This is a global podcast. Is this something that is top of the agenda in, say, Europe and America, or is it a global thing now?

Nancy Doyle
That’s a very interesting question. It is top of the agenda in Europe and the USA and has been for a while. But interestingly, more and more businesses, which are international businesses. So we work with international businesses, we work with Amazon, we work with United Health, we work with large, big companies. And they are starting to realise that actually, yeah, our Indian locations have neurodivergent people too. And so we’re seeing quite a lot of activity from India at the moment around developing neuro-inclusive programmes. And we really do need it to go global. It is a human phenomenon. It doesn’t just happen in white, Anglo-centric western economies. This is happening everywhere. And actually in some of those more developing and emerging economies, the cultures are still quite stigmatised. So by those international companies leading with their programmes and really demonstrating the value of neurodivergent people, they are actually starting to break down serious stigma and shame and concern in some of those countries, which I think is gonna be really liberating.

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Isabel Berwick
So I’m here with Dan Harris, founder and CEO of Neurodiversity in Business. We’re at a big conference you’ve organised in London. It’s probably the first of its kind, I think. Something like this would not have been possible three or four years ago. I’ve been writing about the workplace for a long time. I’ve seen this topic suddenly explode. What’s happened?

Dan Harris
I think that the business world has woken up to the fact that actually, neurodiversity is a competitive advantage and all of the social change that’s been happening over the last few years has played into the point that actually neurodiversity is a new paradigm of diversity and inclusion.

Isabel Berwick
Historically, people didn’t disclose any sort of neurodiversity at work for fear it might compromise their career or block them. Is that still happening?

Dan Harris
It is, unfortunately. Actually, we don’t even have the data, the quantified data to measure disclosure, because unfortunately, neurodiversity is still considered as a drop-down box. So do you have a disability? What type of disability? What type of neurodivergency? Actually what we’re trying to do within Neurodiversity in Business is change that narrative. So rather than focus on that medical deficit model, what we’re trying to do is make sure that me as an employer asks you as an employee, how can I enable you to deliver your best at work? And that’s a beautiful concept because actually it removes the stigma around neurodivergency. And I’m delighted to say actually, that the newer generation of talent who are coming into the workforce, actually, they are far more willing to self-disclose. And I think there’s a moral imperative from some of us who have been in the business world for a while to stand up and say, I’m autistic, I’m ADHD, and I’ve got to where I have got to because of my differences rather than despite them.

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Isabel Berwick
So, many of the companies at that recent Neurodiversity in Business conference were there because they were already involved in recognising and setting up support for their neurodiverse workers. But as we heard there, that’s not always the case. The FT’s Emma Jacobs has recently written about these issues. Emma, to what extent do you think are employers taking steps now because there’s a legal obligation to do so, to make what we might call adjustments or accommodations in many countries?

Emma Jacobs
Well, I think the fear of litigation is obviously (laughs) a huge motivating factor for a lot of employers. It’s hard to gauge whether how many people are making adjustments or thinking about new ways of recruitment or also just management styles because they worry about somebody bringing a case against them or that they feel that they have to go through the motions. But the employees I spoke to and the managers I spoke to who said that they’d really made, that they had made a difference or their employer had made a difference, often it was quite a slow process. And I guess the more that people become aware of their diagnoses but also feel able to speak about it, then there’ll be more understanding between the employer and the employee.

Isabel Berwick
What strikes me is that it’s critical that leaders either declare their own diagnoses or, you know, say my kid’s neurodiverse, or come into it with some sort of very open-minded attitude. Did you see evidence that’s happening?

Emma Jacobs
I think so. But it’s on the fringes. You know, it’s like so many of these things. It’s quite, it takes quite a lot of guts to put yourself forward. I mean, all people want to do is go to their job and do it well. They don’t necessarily want to draw attention to themselves for anything other than their work. And also, after the article was published, a few people did get in touch and say that they’d had terrible experiences and were bullied.

Isabel Berwick
What really strikes me about this is, you know, we can talk about lots of things in the workplace like this, but this topic, you know, how many people have had their careers ruined or had to leave jobs, even though they were good at their jobs, but perhaps they didn’t fit in with the team or their manager didn’t understand them.

Emma Jacobs
Even people that I spoke to that were quite open about it and felt that they’d made good adjustments to their work life and had risen to be senior, still saw that there was going to be a limit on how far they could go, even if it wasn’t kind of outright prejudice. It was because they were different to the norm and they were different to the norm of how people role model success. And so, you know, we often have an idea of a successful business leader. And, you know, traditionally it’s been white male, but it’s also usually extrovert or, you know, all these other things that people see is the kind of vision for success. And some people don’t fit that way. When I was talking to autistic people, they were saying that they could come across as kind of blunt. They sometimes found networking overwhelming. They didn’t want to go to the pub because they found sensory overload. I mean, those are kind of natural limits to the path of success that they could follow.

Isabel Berwick
Did you find any instances of what you might call best practice?

Emma Jacobs
Some of the recommendations on managing neurodiverse workforce are that you should have role modelling from the top so that senior leaders will talk about neurodiversity and that kind of sends a strong signal about the organisation’s values. It’s inclusive and so on, but I mean one can always be sceptical about advocacy and that from the top. And then hiring is looking at recruitment biases. And also one thing that I thought was interesting was consider preparing candidates for the interview and giving them tasks or questions that match the job. And also why not give people some indication of what the interview will hold? I mean, we could all benefit from that. Training — again, there’s a lot of scepticism about training and how inclusive that can be, but anything that helps people understand different behaviours and traits I think is useful.

Isabel Berwick
Emma, thanks so much.

Emma Jacobs
Thank you.

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Isabel Berwick
This has been such an interesting episode’s record on location at the Neurodiversity in Business Conference and here in the studio. This is a huge, huge subject and we’ve talked to people who are really invested in this, who are making change, but there are a lot more people who are not thriving at work or even losing their jobs because they don’t fit whatever that corporate template is. So, I really hope that progress continues to be made at the pace it’s going, but I can see how much further there is to go. I hope we’ve opened your eyes and ears to a few of the things that are going on and a few of the things that can make work better, both for managers who are managing neurodivergent workforces and for people themselves who are trying to make their own way in the workforce. Thanks to Dan Harris, Nancy Doyle, Janice Rae and Emma Jacobs for this episode.

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Isabel Berwick
If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. Email us at workingit@ft.com or I’m Isabel Berwick on LinkedIn. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter, with the best workplace and management stories from across the FT. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. This episode of Working it was produced by Manuela Saragosa and Audrey Tinline with mix from Jake Fielding. Thanks for listening.

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