My neurodivergent experience of the workplace.
For a long time in my professional lifespan, I grappled with the sense of profound unease. If there is one place where I felt like a totemic pole of three kids in a raincoat pretending to be an adult, that was it! When asked what it was that I did for a living I would reply, “Honestly, I don’t actually know, but I keep being paid so maybe I am doing it right?” Cue canned laughter. Only… only I wasn’t really joking. For a neurodivergent individual it is very easy to feel deskilled and unseen for what they can realistically offer. While I winged it by mostly relying on my unconventional smarts, capitalisation of my anxiety and catastrophic thinking, and compassion by most of my managers, I still found the office life tricky and was chronically haunted by the ravenous spectres of depression and burnout. Now, a qualified therapeutic counsellor, I can see how this came about and what can be done to help ND folk and the organisations employing neurodiverse workforce have a better time together.
Problem: The silent drowning of neurodivergent burnout
Remember how drowning is shown in the movies? Wild arm waving. Shouts of “Help! Help! Heeeeelp!” That’s a far cry from the reality of drowning, which happens to be a very silent affair. This is largely because, when drowning, our brains prioritise breathing over talking. It doesn’t matter how smart or eloquent the drowning person usually is. Nervous system says, ‘no chitchat’ and no amount of intellect can realistically counter this.
In much the same way happens the neurodivergent drowning. If you are a manager heed this, by the time you have a neurodivergent person tearfully complain about drowning, it is most likely too late to avert it. Neurodivergent people frequently mask to conceal their struggles. I want to stress that this is in response to previously sustained psychological injury. We expect to be eviscerated for non-performance.
Second reason is difficulty accessing our feelings or appraising them in a way that can alert us to minor changes to emotional wellbeing. This can vary from alexithymia (inability to name an emotion as experienced) or barriers to interoception (identify sensations within the body). Then to top it all off, the kicker is that with burnout, our ability to carry our cognitively demanding tasks plummets. For the managers in the audience, when a neurodivergent employee is telling you they are burned out, the Rubicon has been crossed, Bolivar’s horse Palomo is gone, and your employee is well past the point of compiling a list of all of their tasks, or coming up with and articulating the solutions.
What can be done.
Prevention (while not a panacea) is key. Creating a neurodiverse workspace should be as much of a priority as installing a wheelchair accessible ramp. These are not extravagant concessions and as we now know ramps benefit a wide range of people who are not wheelchair users. Much in the same way rendering our offices less overstimulating and allowing people to work from home, can benefit a wide range of people. I am not going to go into the weeds of how to make such a space come about, because others have already made the effort of such planning (see link to https://www.atkinsrealis.com/~/media/Files/A/atkinsrealis/documents/beyond-engineering/neuroinclusive-office-design.pdf). What I am hoping to convey however is the urgent need for such planning to be undertaken long before you start working with the late-diagnosed, undiagnosed, and self-realised neurodiverse staff. And the odds are you already are. And it is never too late to provide a workplace that is not hostile to its workers.
Educate HR, the Management, and all staff on neurodiversity and inclusivity. The more the leadership knows about neurodiversity and disabilities, the better they are equipped to accept, validate and build trust. Trust and acceptance are far more valuable to neurodivergent folk than any time-management course will ever be. Trust is the key component of a relationship where small struggles can be shared before they become insurmountable. I must stress that the trust must be grounded in genuine mutual respect and radical acceptance rather than serving as a tool to obtain a desirable performance. If you want us to unmask lead by your own example.
Accept that you might not get an all-rounder performance from a neurodivergent person. Some tasks just feel like death (and I am not exaggerating) to us. In part this is down to a tremendously strong drive for autonomy (known under a less generous name of PDA) and something called a monotropic mind, which determines our motivation. Many incentives that work to motivate neurotypical workers fall tragically short for neurodivergent employees. Many neurodivergent people possess an interest-based nervous system. Give us an interesting or a challenging task and we fly, give us something that lies outside of that range and it is like flogging a dead donkey. There will also be some days where our spoon budget is low and the tasks, we could accomplish with ease previously are now unassailable to us. If a neurodivergent person cries every time they have to reconcile their expenses, then dismissing them with “everyone else does theirs” is every bit as cruel as saying “everyone else manages the stairs” to a person relying on a walking aid.
Have policies and support in place to see us through our darker moments. Did you know that neurodivergent folk are more likely to experience abuse and coercion in romantic relationships? What can your organisation do to support them through this even if they choose to stay? We also need to look at ways to support people who go through menopause. ADHDers in particular are affected by the ebbing of oestrogen and can experience sharp changes in emotional wellbeing and executive function.
Lastly, intersectionality. Intersectionality is a nifty term to help explain how people who fall into the intersection of the Venn diagram in the game of diversity bingo, can experience a brand-new blend of oppression. For instance, your organisation may promote autistic men and neurotypical women, but not autistic women. While the company gets to say that they champion gender equality and neurodiversity, they neglect the intersection of the two and fail autistic women in a blend of problematic discrimination they don’t see themselves as having.
Involve neurodivergent people in decision-making and ensure that they get time and resources to contribute their input to a more accessible place but remember that the responsibility of providing a neurodivergent-accessible work environment is a responsibility that lies with the organisation. Would your organisation install a wheelchair ramp as a default or wait for a disabled hire to ask for one?
Lastly, when the burnout has occurred, remember to look after the person first. Have provisions in place to pick up the pieces, like making sure that important projects have understudy personnel that can pick up things in a pinch. If your policies permit, have the emails directed to you or a department mailbox. The same can apply to holiday taking. Part of the reason why I was often reluctant to take time off was that it felt like a time loan that had to be repaid with interest upon re-entry. Nothing like relaxing for the purpose of frantically overworking to catch up once back in the office, sorting out thousands of overdue emails.
Accept that there are different communication styles and cultures and that there is a plethora of ways to be understood or misunderstood. There is a common misconception that neurodivergent people are lacking in communication skills and their neurotypical counterparts don’t have these issues. But if that were truly the case, West End Farce and the many sitcoms that drew inspiration from it would not have any appeal. Errors in messaging happen all the time in part because most people wrongly assume that they are very good at communicating. Anecdotally many of my ND friends find seeing this type of entertainment profoundly embarrassing. I can only hazard a guess here, but it could well be that we were seldom afforded the clemency to be able to laugh it off and move on. “Antisocial”, “weird”, “inept”, “lacking”, “careless” are just a few sticky labels that follow neurodivergent folk around.
There could be thousands more suggestions, too many for a blog format. I do hope however, that what I wrote may give you an idea or ignite a curiosity about other people’s minds, no matter how different they are from yours or from what we grew up favouring. These minds are valuable, we are valuable. Each and every one of these suggestions can support ALL of your workers. Much like the drop curb that makes pavement accessible to wheelchair users but ends benefitting a much larger group of people, neurodiversity-friendly places will help more of us flourish and usher in a more vibrant and fertile way of working together.
