“Worst Practices” When Working With Autistic Employees – Part 1

This year’s theme for National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which happens every October, is “Celebrating Value and Talent.” In addition to appreciating the contributions of all people with disabilities, let’s highlight the importance of making workplaces more hospitable and accepting of people with one specific disability: autism. Frequently, these people are discriminated against or fired due to autism-related challenges, and employers don’t take advantage of autistic employees’ strengths — including creativity, reliability, loyalty, and productivity.

How should organizations treat autistic employees? What practices should be avoided?

Autism is a developmental disability whose major traits include atypical communication and repetitive behavior. As autism appears differently among individuals, no two autistic people have identical traits, workplace problems, and needs for help.

What to Avoid

Forcing Autistic Workers to Conform

Often, offices use the medical model of disabilities, which considers a disability a problem to be fixed. Many times, autistic people must conform or be excluded.

But forcing autistic employees to conform to typically non-autistic, or allistic, behavior can have negative consequences. These workers camouflage to fit in, often leading to autistic burnout, the physical, mental or emotional exhaustion that can coincide with losing skills. As a result, autistic workers can become upset, angry, or develop anxiety, depression, suicidal behavior, or heightened autistic behaviors.

Failing to Train on How to Work With Autistic Employees

Office personnel often are untrained on how to work with autistic employees. As up to 85% of autistic people are unemployed, many individuals do not know how to work with autistic colleagues and instead of being accepting, they become annoyed and possibly discriminate. Training staff to work with autistic employees could prevent these problems by providing knowledge and skills regarding handling common challenges. Multiple organizations conduct trainings and/or provide helpful articles, guides, and videos.

Bullying

Autistic people are more likely to be victims of workplace bullying. Organizational psychology expert Ludmila Praslova has said that “Bullying of autistic people in the workplace is a problem that cost many their jobs and is likely contributing to the extremely high rates of unemployment.” Neurodiversity justice leader Bridgette Hamstead wrote that workplace bullying can cause autistic people to develop major mental health problems, including PTSD and anxiety. Workplace bullying of autistic people can take many forms, including verbal bullying, emotional bullying, “systemic exclusion,” “overloading and sabotage,” and cyberbullying. There is no federal law governing workplace bullying. However, bullying a person based on disability may violate disability law.

Mismanaging Reasonable Accommodations

Offices can make mistakes with providing reasonable accommodations (RAs). The RAs process is supposed to be an ongoing interactive process that takes the workers’ preferences into primary consideration. However, employers often mismanage RAs. Some employers ignore requests for RAs entirely, fail to engage in an interactive process, or make unilateral decisions.

Supervisors should avoid the following regarding RAs:

• Disregard workers’ preferences. The Autism Alliance of Canada says, “Any workplace that ignores the preferences of their workers is deliberately putting up barriers.”
• Prevent workers from explaining the rationale for their chosen RAs.
• Not provide a reason when rejecting employees’ requests.
• Unilaterally choose a RA/RAs.
• Inform co-workers about the reason for the RA.
• Refuse to talk with employees about how the RA is going, but blame employees for incorrectly using it.

Publicize Employees’ Autism Status

Employers sometimes do not keep workers’ autism confidential. They should not force their autistic employees to disclose their autism, as disclosure is the workers’ choice. It is also bad practice for employers to “out” the worker for being autistic, even if they do it indirectly. Some autistic people already feel different and/or othered. Singling them out for being autistic could make them more uncomfortable.

Conclusion

Being trained about how to work with autistic individuals and about obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws could help offices accept autistic employees. Managers should use these workers’ unique talents, not sideline them. And some best practices also apply to workers with other disabilities.

Miriam Edelman, MPA, MSSW, is a Washington, D.C.,-based policy professional. Her experience includes policy work for Congress. Miriam’s undergraduate degree is from Barnard College, Columbia University, with majors in political science and urban studies. She has a master’s in public administration from Cornell University, where she was inducted into the national honorary society for public administration. She has a master’s of science in social work (focusing on policy) from Columbia University. She is a commissioner of the DC Commission on Persons with Disabilities. Miriam aims to continue her career in public service. She is especially interested in democracy, civic education, District of Columbia autonomy, diversity, health policy, women’s issues, and disabilities.

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