CULTURE CHANGE KEY She
acknowledges
that
incorporating neurodiversity into an organisation can be a challenge. “I don’t think this is going to
come very easily to companies,” she says. “Those companies that are successful are the ones that acknowledge that it is about cultural change.” Organisations that think it is
another thing you have to prepare for and have a form and a process for have not really grasped what is needed, she explains. “Those companies that think
there is a tick list of ADHD adjustments and a tick list of Autism adjustments, they are doing what I would call compliance-based inclusion. They are complying with the Disability and the Equality Act, but they are not doing systemic inclusion. When they embrace systemic inclusion, they realise that what is needed is cultural change.” She argues that the neurodiversity
etiquette policy herself at Genius Within, but rather she co-produced it with staff, reviewing and redrafting it in order to accommodate different needs and views. “I came up with some ideas
and sent them out as a position paper,” she explains. “We had some workshops to discuss the issues. We then did an anonymous exercise to accommodate the people that don’t like to speak up in workshops. We then rewrote it based on feedback. We went with the majority, but we also looked at the people that were really struggling and worked out something individual for them. When you work in neurodiversity, you have to be in this constant reflective process of negotiating boundaries, giving people the benefit of the doubt when there’s a problem.” She describes the process of
managing her team at work as a “creative, cathartic and dialectic process”. It is a model that is based on adult collaboration, rather than a hierarchical parent-child method of management. “It’s not for the faint hearted,
but what you get out of that is an extraordinary amount of authenticity and trust,” she says. “It’s worth it, but most organisations are still at the toolkit stage, yet what we’re really talking about here is cultural change.”
movement currently has a “strange kind of diamond in the rough feel to it”, popularised by the concept of companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM embracing a particular set of people who possess a specific set of skills. She cites how neurodiversity is
seen as a “mystical superpower” possessed by “autistic coders who are magical mystical work fairies that will suddenly make everything wonderful for your software design”. In reality, those who benefit from this perception are in a minority and are predominantly “Silicon Valley, white, male, educated, otherwise abled Stanford graduates who happen to be really good at coding,” she says. Prof Doyle says this idea of the
neurodiverse employee as specialist superhero was never the intention of the neurodiversity movement when sociologist Judy Singer coined the phrase neurodivergent and outlined the concept in her thesis in 1998. “She was talking about
neurodivergent people being a minority whose rights were overlooked and who needed to assert themselves as a political movement for inclusion,” she says. “In 2002, I used to have to kick the door down to get people to listen about dyslexia or autism. There has been progress in the neurodiversity field, but I do think it’s because it’s got this kind of sexy superhero vibe, and it feels
a bit more like exploitation than inclusion.” She takes exception to the current
fashion for “mining a population for the skills that we don’t have”. Instead, she argues, we should be thinking about all the neurodivergent people who come in different shapes, sizes, colours, genders, sexualities and who don’t necessarily fit the gifted coder stereotype. “One of the big things that has
shifted in the last four or five years is that neurodiversity is part of the equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives rather than occupational health,” she says. “That is a shift because if you’re doing it as an EDI intervention, then it is about culture change. If you’re doing it as occupational health, then it is health and safety and it is what you have to do to not get sued. EDI is much more about culture and that is a shift.” Her research has found that the
strongest predictors of whether a neurodiverse employee is planning to leave an organisation is psychological safety and career progression. “People want the help of the
adjustments, but they also want to be heard and they want to be valued,” she says. “You need to create psychologically safe workplaces and you need to train your managers. We need to argue the case and we still haven’t done that.” She also says that assistive
technology, seen as a solution for some conditions, will only succeed if people are trained to use it effectively. “The success of adaptive
technology is moderated by the provision of training,” she says. “If you give people in their 40s a load of new software and don’t teach them how to use it, then they are not going to find it helpful.”
UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR ND AT WORK
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/downloads/ schools/business/universal-design- across-the-employee-life-cycle/
WATCH NOW
59
THINK GLOBAL PEOPLE DIVERSITY, EQUALITY & INCLUSION
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98
