Episode 96: Addressing the Needs of Neurodiverse Individuals in the Workplace (Interview with Dr. Nancy Doyle)
This week’s podcast guest is Dr. Nancy Doyle, Chief Research Officer at Genius Within and Co-Director at the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work.
In our conversation, Nancy and I discuss:
That 15 to 20% of the population are neurodiverse, so we are all managing neurodivergent people in our organisations, whether we realise it or not
How to build organisations that are inclusive to the needs of neurodivergent people, including the most important touch points in the employee journey that should be addressed
The business benefits of hiring neurodiverse individuals, including examples from organisations such as Microsoft
The research that Nancy, is currently heading up at the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work, including the intersection of exclusion of autistic people across the globe and autistic people's experience of bringing their authentic selves to work
How practitioners can stay up to date with research in the academic sphere
Support for this podcast comes from iPsychtec. You can learn more by visiting https://ipsychtec.com/
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Nancy Doyle, Co-Director of the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work at Birkbeck and Chief Research Officer at Genius Within, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.
Nancy, it is great to have you on the show. Welcome to the show. This is a really fascinating topic that I know our listeners will be interested to hear about. Can you provide our listeners with a brief introduction to you and your work?
Nancy Doyle: Sure. So, I am Dr. Nancy Doyle, occupational psychologist. I have specialised in disability inclusion and in fact, social inclusion, for the majority of my career. I have worked with the DWP on programs for people who are long-term un-employed, in prisons and on the access to work scheme, which is where the DWP advise on reasonable adjustments for disabled people, going back kind of 25 years.
More recently, over the last sort of 10 years, I have specialised in neurodiversity, which I will provide a definition of in just one moment. And the idea really, with my work, is looking at all ways in which organisations can be diversity inclusive or neuro inclusive and providing support for neurodivergent individuals throughout their careers, from being unemployed and transitioning into adulthood, right through to senior leaders, senior managers, and entrepreneurs who are also neurodivergent, in great numbers.
David Green: Great. Well you have set up the first question absolutely perfectly, Nancy. I know, as I said, it is a topic that our listeners are increasingly interested in, which is good. It is good to see the way we are going on that.
Can you share a definition of neurodiversity that you think will particularly resonate with organisations?
Nancy Doyle: There are lots of different ways to define it, as I am sure you can imagine. We could spend 45 minutes talking about this to be perfectly honest with you.
Usually when we talk about neurodiversity, we are referring to cognitive invisible differences or disabilities. Dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism, tourettes syndrome, dyscalculia and dysgraphia are also known, but neurodiversity isn't really an umbrella title for those things. The idea of neurodiversity is that there is neurological diversity in the human species, in the same way that there is diversity in our height, in our agility, in our athleticism, in our personalities. There is a kind of, a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, feature to humanity which is where we are both, a balance of specialists and generalists across a number of different kinds of intersecting forms and neurodiversity is just one of those.
Some of us are jacks of all trades and we are equally good at verbal skills, visual reasoning, abstract reasoning, memory and processing speed. Around two thirds of the human population is average in all measures of neurocognitive ability, whereas some of us are specialists. Some of us are absolutely excellent at abstract visual reasoning and really, really rubbish at processing speed, so we end up with these spiky profiles.
So, neurodiversity means everyone. And those conditions confer neurodivergence, or diversity within the profile rather than between.
So with the conditions that I have named, you have got this specialist, rather than generalist, approach. Around 15 to 20% of humans have some form of specialism or neurodivergence and we can widen those barriers to include all kinds of applied, acquired, or transient, ways in which you can have a neuro-divergent profile.
But in the main those conditions, we are starting to use the umbrella term, neurominorities, for those conditions. Neurodivergent for individuals who have a neurominority condition and neurodiversity to refer to the whole species. And that appears to be where the narrative is taking us, but it is a very emergent narrative. It is not led by psychology, that narrative, it is led by communities of lived experience.
I am actually sitting on a working group at the moment, for the British Psychological Society, desperately trying to get everyone to catch up to where people's language has moved us. Like all forms of diversity and inclusion, the language evolution is part of the development of the inclusion process and so I think people find it confusing and that is because it is confusing. It is not because you have missed a memo. You haven't failed to read the very important text that tells you all the answers to your questions. It feels opaque and transient because it is and I think we just have to get used to that, just as we have to get used to updating the language that we use to discuss race and LGBTQIA2S+ for example.
These things update as our knowledge increases and as our narratives develop, so it is just like that really. It is no different to any other forms of D&I and it is our job to really educate ourselves in the same way, to listen, to hear how people like to be described and labeled, and to respond appropriately when people have a preference.
Long answer, short question, sorry.
David Green: No, I think it was really good to get that content right up front for our discussion. And I guess, one of the features last year of the racial inequality crisis, which was obviously really brought to everyone's attention by the black lives matter movement, was that people like me and others, we educated ourselves on that a lot more because of that. Is one of the things that we can do as HR professionals, as it is mainly HR professionals that listen to this podcast, again, educate themselves around the topic of neurodiversity? I guess one of the complexities is that, as you said, it is invisible whereas other forms of diversity are visible and maybe slightly more obvious to the eye.
Nancy Doyle: Yeah, certainly there are other forms of D&I that aren't visible, like being lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and a lot of trans people is also not visible. Sometimes it is noticeable, sometimes it isn't. Again, it is about educating ourselves. It is about being aware and making sure that our policies and our paperwork and our language is updated appropriately. That can feel like painting the forth bridge, it is like the LGBTQIA2S, 2S is a new one on me. I learned that this week, and just as you think you have got to the end you are like, oh, we are going to go back again and start again.
But I think that is part of what D&I is in HR. Part of it is actually just staying up to date and being part of those narratives, that is part of our job and I actually find it quite interesting and challenging.
I think the other thing to notice that because there is no definitive answer, that the American psychiatric association says this and therefore we now will use that language. That is not going to wash, people don't like that. So, because there is no definitive answer a useful thing for HR professionals to do is to have caveats, have glossaries of terms. Say, we are using this language because we have been listening and we understand that this suits most people. However we understand that some people don't like to be called neurodivergent, they prefer to be called neurodiverse, or neurodifferent, or they prefer to use the label attached to their specific conditions, such as autistic or dyslexic. So really happy to change our language and address people how they want to be addressed. And that is no different to a woman deciding if she wants to be known as a gay woman, a lesbian, or a queer woman. It is no different.
David Green: And I guess HR has a huge role to play in organisations about getting that language right.
Nancy Doyle: Yes and just demystifying it for people. Because I think, in lots of these sorts of things where managers are walking on eggshells, it actually becomes something unspeakable. And it is like no, no, no, just get it out there and get it wrong. It is better to get it wrong with the right attitude, be corrected and then move on, than to not talk about things because you are so busy worrying about getting things wrong. That is where HR can provide those core style and language guides, and just keep up to date and make sure people are aware of what is current.
David Green: And I think you made a great point there, with all forms of diversity and inclusion, you have got to keep up to date. Just like you have to keep up to date with technology, with labour regulations, and D&I is another thing you have to keep up with.
Nancy Doyle: That is right, absolutely. So adding the 2S to LGBTQIA2S, it stands for two-spirit, which is the way indigenous people in the USA refer to homosexuality. They refer to people as having two spirits, a male spirit and a female spirit, which is a lovely, but it just shows you that we have ignored until this point, the intersection of indigenous experience of sexuality. And it is not, oh no, we didn't realise that before, we have got something wrong, we must be terrible people. It is more like, oh, we have learnt something new, how interesting. Let's add that to the list and let's just be delighted to hear that. And now we know more about that intersection and how wonderful that is, and tick that, and keep going and move forward.
David Green: Moving again, into organisations, when we think about building more inclusive organisations for neurodivergent individuals, this is much more than just about hiring.
Nancy Doyle: Oh, it is. And you know what, David, this is one of my biggest bugbears. I have actually started to get a bit of a reputation in the neurodiversity field now, for being militant, which I find slightly genderised and insulting. But the reason is because I keep critiquing autism hiring programs. Because I think, it is a lot more than just hiring. We are talking about 15% to 20% of the human population having at least one neurominority. And so it is not about the people that you haven't got in, it is also about the people that you have already got.
There will be a lot of people who are struggling without the right and appropriate adjustments, who haven't disclosed because they are still fearful of stigma and prejudice, and you can bring as many people in as you like, but if you haven't sorted those things out then they are not going to thrive and they are not going to progress. The autism hiring thing is starting to feel a bit token-istic to me. It was great when it started, because it really changed the paradigm. So it was a massively important thing, where we actually stopped doing neurodiversity hiring, because we felt sorry for people, which is where a lot of disability initiatives start. We feel sorry for people, we must be giving people a chance. It is quite hand-wringing and quite patronising actually.
The autism hiring thing really started as a, well look at the talents that autistic people can bring to a workplace. And we are looking for people who can do coding. We are looking for people who can process fine detailed information at speed and actually, autistic people, that is the peak on their spiky profile. That is their specialism. A lot of the time, not always in the context of computing, it can be in the context of music or art or language, but that fine detail processing is very typical autistic behaviour and skill. So that was a big paradigm shift and it really changed the way we thought about neurodiversity inclusion.
But the problem is we have got stuck there and what we should have done next is gone, okay, so if we stop thinking about jobs as being for people that are jacks of all trades and we start looking at job design as something where you can allow people to specialise in the thing that they are particularly good at, then we can make all jobs potentially neuroinclusive. We can be more inclusive and we can just provide more employment opportunities like that, and we can look wider than autism and we can look at wider disabilities.
So the problem is that we got stuck in an industry which is typically very male and white and privileged. So we are not doing autism hiring programs in as many in media, we are not doing it in law, we are not doing it in catering, we are not doing it in construction, we are doing it in tech predominantly, which means that we have got some intersectional biases. So people that come into autism hiring programs tend to be white and male and so therefore we are potentially undermining some other forms of D&I, by focusing on this one label.
And then, my real critique for it is, imagine if we were doing race inclusion like this. So imagine if we said, right we need to increase racial diversity in this business. We have heard Chinese people are really good at math, so we are going to go find some for finance. You would go, whoa, you can't do that. And yet we think we can for disability. And so we have got to tread a really fine line between positive discrimination and positive action, on this particular line.
So my argument really is, now that we have proved that autistic people can come into businesses and do a really good job, what was wrong with our hiring processes that meant they weren't coming in, in the first place?
So not, let's have more autistic people come in.
But, why were our hiring processes not allowing those people in, in the first place and what do we need to change to those hiring processes so that we don't make that mistake again? And where else could we look for where that mistake is being replicated?
So it is about human resources still being broadly dependent on the triad of references, CV, and interview, for jobs where actually those particular forms of selection have very low predictive validity and aren't likely to tell us whether or not someone is going to perform well in a role, and then are actually creating adverse impact for certain people, like autistic people for example. So it is about taking a more systemic view rather than a tokenistic view.
David Green: Yes. It is like where a number of organisations have changed their approach to only hiring from a certain number of schools. That obviously, disadvantaged most of the population, frankly. And it is the same with this, isn't it? It is saying, what is wrong with your hiring process that means you are not hiring neurodivergent people in the first place.
Nancy Doyle: Absolutely. So when we circumvent the hiring processes and we let them in, by some positive action processes. Oh, look, it turns out they are really good at their job. Fabulous. Well done. Okay. So next step is, let's make those the hiring processes for everybody, because if they are actually proving that you can get good people by doing a different hiring process, then that tells us our hiring process was wrong, not that we need to keep making exceptions. We are having black swan events with our hiring processes, aren't we, it is like, oh, we have discovered that interviews are really bad. Let's do work sample testing for this thing. I use this myself, in my own company. If I am hiring someone for finance, I don't ask them to give me a presentation. I give them a spreadsheet full of holes and ask them to find the holes and tell me what they think that means. Or can they interpret the direction of travel in a set of management accounts, and I don't care if they write that to me or speak it to me because that is not the job, the job is, can you manipulate financial data? Can you look for inconsistencies in the reporting of financial data? And can you interpret what that data means and make recommendations to management?
That is the lesson of the autism at work movement, the lesson is, we have got to get better at using selection methods that predict performance. For example, we do want to keep using interviews for some jobs. So when I hire coaches and trainers, I do use interviews. I use group-based interviews because that is the job. So it is not necessarily, don't use them. I saw Richard Branson in the news a couple of years ago, he had made some grand sweeping statement to say that because of dyslexia exclusion, he was going to say to Virgin that no one was allowed to hire based on CVs anymore at Virgin, because dyslexic people are adversely impacted by education achievement. And so CVs were no longer going to be part of the hiring process at Virgin and it was all going to be interviews.
I was just like, urgh, now we have designed it for dyslexics, we are going to keep all the autistics out and vice versa. And actually I think that your team hiring lawyers, finance people, and potentially also people that are driving the airplanes, might want to check their CVs. It is all about matching and appropriateness, I think.
David Green: And let's broaden it beyond hiring, let's look at the whole employee experience. As you said, there is no point hiring neurodivergent people if you then can't keep them because quite frankly, you have got the wrong culture for them. What are the most important touch points in the employee journey that should be addressed, to better meet neurodivergent individual needs?
Nancy Doyle: So in the same way that when we are looking for appropriate measures in selection, we need to be looking at appropriate measures for performance management, appraisals and talent progression in an organisation.
So again, you still find a lot of appraisals where you can't get moved up to the next level or qualify for a bonus, if you haven't done well on team influencing ability, for example. And actually you have got someone whose job is a data analyst and so, how is that relevant to the job? So again, it is looking for all of those processes where you have implicitly embedded generalist skills, as opposed to specialists and going, how does the specialist move through this organisation? Can they be promoted?
I have always found it very odd and counter-intuitive that the way we select for senior leadership is from middle management, because middle managers require a completely different skill to senior leaders. Middle management is about compliance and collaboration and building consensus. Whereas senior leadership is much more about disrupting and innovating and looking for odd exceptions to the rule. So there is a kind of counter-intuitiveness there and your neurodivergent thinkers very often, get stuck in those management layers because management is very much about processing HR. It is about keeping everybody up to date, making sure people have done their expenses and done their one to ones, and chased them for this and that. That is a huge cognitive load on things like working memory and processing speed, which lots of neurodivergent thinkers don't have, ADHDers and the dyslexics will struggle with that, but they might be brilliant at their jobs and they might be brilliant in a senior leadership role. So how can we look at the structure of how we manage talent in a business? And how can we look at the whole of the employee life cycle, as opposed to just the hiring point.
But there is something really important that needs to be said here actually, which is about the legal aspects because the neurodiversity movement has been critiqued before for being a bit Polly-annaish. For looking at the glass half full rather than the glass half empty. While it is really important to create a narrative in which the peaks of a specialist profile are recognised and understood, there are also the troughs in that profile and those do confer disability protection, according to the law in most developed economies. We have a legal obligation to these employees. It is not just about, ooh la la la , we have got a new, magical, mystical work fairy who is going to come up with fabulous ideas and then transform our senior leadership. It is also about, this person needs assistive technology, they need coaching to help them work out their prioritisation. They need their manager to communicate with them in a certain way and manager's are going to need to know what that way is. The managers might need to have some coaching about that because it is quite different and much more direct than they might be used to, for example.
So we need to put those things in place, around those employees, and those are legal obligations. They are not carrots, they are sticks and there is actually quite a wealth of case law where employers have broadly made those mistakes and lost in court. People are losing disability discrimination tribunals by not putting in place reasonable adjustments for autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or dyspraxic employees and that includes employees who didn't have a formal diagnosis when they raised their concern.
Yes. Yes. I am enjoying the look on your face. Podcast listeners, you cannot see this but, David, displayed a look that I could only interpret as surprise. But yes, if an employee suspects that they may have a neurominority condition and they raise this as an issue regarding a performance conversation, then the employer is required to take that pretty seriously at that point, because if you end up in court and then the individual goes out and gets that diagnosis confirmed between them leaving the employment and going to court, then they still win their case. So a note of caution.
David Green: And that highlights again, the importance of having good managers in any organisation.
Nancy Doyle: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You don't want it to get to the point where someone is putting their hand up and citing a neurominority condition because they are already at the end of their rope, really. You want to be into it much earlier than that. Something that we have in my company, Genius Within, is we have a performance management checklist for managers, which if you have got performance as an issue, check, has this person had enough training? Is the role resourced adequately? Are they disabled or potentially neurodivergent, in which case have you provided reasonable adjustments? And if not, why bloody not? So it is basically before you even start a performance management conversation, going through the checks. And I think lots of managers or HR people, are very concerned about starting those conversations if people haven't disclosed and that is where a lot of the sense of unfairness comes in, I think. For lots of HR people, they feel this isn't really fair because if I don't know, then how was I supposed to deal with it? And I think that is a really a valid question, but my advice is to make an assumption of positive regard.
So assume that's a possibility and check it out, well, before you proceed to performance. So put the input that you give that person an innocent until proven guilty rating. That it is an innocent performance issue related to a cognitive difficulty, until it is proved otherwise. And only if it is proved otherwise, can you consider them in some way character deficient, in terms of their motivation or their attitudes. We have something on our website that we have as a little free questionnaire, at Genius Within, which is where we have put the most common barriers for neurodivergent thinkers. So there is 50 questions, which are the most common things that neurodivergent thinkers of all neuro types will come up with and then a solution for each of these. But critically what the questionnaire doesn't do, is it doesn't try to diagnose you. It doesn't start telling you that you may or may not be autistic, because that is actually quite a risky thing to do for anybody, psychologically. You don't want to have those conversations, HR managers are correct in that respect, it is potentially risky. But it just looks at the behaviour and it looks at the functional skill. So if for each question that you say yes to, it has got an idea and then when you have been through it all, it will give you a report.
And something that I recommend to people is just sit with the person you are worried about, go through that questionnaire, just go through it, kick out the report. The report in itself will tell you what that person can do differently, which is your list of reasonable adjustments, and then you are doing your legal duty because you are making adjustments for that individual and you are talking about how you can do further adjustments. And it may just be the way to start the conversation. They might after that, come and say, actually I have always struggled with literacy and typo checking my own work, even when I was doing my A levels at university, I used to have to go over things seven times more than my peers. You can follow that with, oh, okay. Have you ever had a dyslexia assessment? Maybe I should have a dyslexia assessment. Yeah. Maybe you should, and if you do, with this technology that just does all that for you. Then you can stop working 12 hour days and you can start managing your work and everything will be lovely.
David Green: And then as you said, 15 to 20% of the population, that is a big number. We all managing neurodivergent people in the organisations, whether we know about it or not.
Nancy Doyle: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The most common thing that people come to us with are, difficulties with memory/concentration. So your ability to pay attention and concentrate. And that is 92% of our clients, 92. That is neuro type blind, it doesn't matter what condition they have got, what neurominority they belong to, it's 92% memory, concentration, attention. I grouped those together because psychologically they are the same thing, I am talking about short-term memory, not long-term memory. Then the second most common thing at 82%, is organisational skills. The third most common thing is time management ability at 78%. And then 67% will be communication and also, 67% will be stress management.
So those are the common complaints. If you have got somebody coming with those common complaints, you can pretty much assume that they have got something going on cognitively and even if it is not a developmental lifelong condition, those are the performance issues that you will also see if someone is peri-menopausal, if somebody is recovering from cancer treatment, if somebody has multiple sclerosis, you can have those things. So there are lots of health conditions that can create exactly the same cognitive difficulties, which is why I advise people in HR positions to just assume that there is a medical or biological reason for that, rather than making the assumption that this person is negligent and lazy.
If you start with the assumption that there could be something going on here, you are more likely to turn that around. If the provision of assistive technology and support with using prioritisation software, if that stuff doesn't work, then you can go back to plan B, which is, this person is not right for this role anymore and they need to be managed out. If you start with, this person is not right for this role and they need to be managed out and then what you have got is an undisclosed neurodivergent or health condition, those are the people that end up in court.
Nancy Doyle: Yeah, I know. I know we want to talk about the benefits of hiring neurodiverse people as well.
David Green: What are the benefits to hiring, developing, and retaining, I am not going to make it all about hiring, neurodiverse individuals?
Nancy Doyle: You know, there are so many places we could go here.
One of the business benefits is unleashing that performance. If you have got all of this undisclosed neurodivergence hidden and struggling in day-to-day performance, then your organisation is not working at the best it can be. You haven't got people working at the level of their potential. If you get people working at the level of their potential, particularly people that come from backgrounds where they are more likely to have been excluded or ostracised in education or previous work, then generally speaking, what we find is increased levels of loyalty. So therefore reduced turnover, reduced absenteeism and so that is a real strength and value of just dealing with neurodiversity sensitively, well, systemically embracing the idea of adjustments, flexibilities, job crafting, specialist roles. If you do that, you are going to attract neurodivergent people and when you attract neurodivergent people, you are going to get neurodivergent thinking.
Now there is an odd schism which is, neurodivergent thinkers are overrepresented in entrepreneurs and leadership compared to corporate management. A study by Julie Logan, about 10 years ago, at the Cass Business School at City University found that only 1% of corporate managers were dyslexic, compared to 20% of entrepreneurs in the UK and 35% of entrepreneurs in the USA. We are always talking about the war for creative talent and innovative talent, this is where it is. Your neurodivergent thinkers, they bring that innovation and that creativity usually. And the thing that we can do, as employers, is not have them get death by bureaucracy at levels in the organisation that don't suit them and find ways to unleash that thinking and that kind of an innovative idea.
David Green: And there have been enough studies out there that show, that the more cognitively diverse teams are, the more successful they are.
Nancy Doyle: That is right. Yeah.
David Green: And for exactly some of the reasons you said there. Creativity, innovation, etc.
Nancy Doyle: Yeah. Now the other thing to remember is that, whenever you have a diverse team, you have got diverse values and diverse principles and diverse styles. So you have to work quite hard on making sure that they don't rub up against each other the wrong way. I think at the sharp end of neurodiversity inclusion, the organisations that I work with who are doing this well, where they are starting to come adrift now, is that they, it is not like they have got one token autistic and therefore everyone can accommodate that person, they have got three autistics and two ADHDs. The ADHDs are annoying the autistics because they are inconsistent and they keep breaking all the rules. And the autistics are annoying the ADHDs because they keep turning all the lights down because they don't like the sensory overwhelm. And then there is an autistic person that has got PDA, who doesn't like consistency and finds that upsetting. And then the other autistic people are saying to them, I don't think you have got autism because that is not how we are autistic, I think you have got ADHD. Then they start falling out.
So you have got to handle that cognitive diversity in a strong and proactive way. You need to set the rules of engagement and you need to create structures for handling conflict, miscommunication, misunderstandings. You need to expect them. They are coming. So rather than assuming everyone will rub along quite nicely together and it will all be fine, what are you going to do when you have got two people with protected conditions and the adjustment they need is in conflict?
David Green: Now, that is the conundrum.
Nancy Doyle: Totally. You have got your autistic person who wants low lights because they are overwhelmed from the stimulation and then you have got someone with a visual impairment, or someone with ADHD, who needs bright lights because they like the stimulation.
So what do you? That is just a very simple example. That is like the simplest example I could give you of that and it has got the simplest solution, you need individualised lighting. But that is the kind of thing that is going to happen. The more diversity we bring into our organisations, the more those diversities start to conflict with each other. The easiest to read text font for dyslexics is Sans-Serif fonts, but for visual impairments it is Times New Roman, which is curly and weird.
So it is not about going, oh, I have ticked the box, I have done it. All my fonts are Sans-Serif. And then you get someone with a visual impairment walking into the office and you go, now I have to change it all again.
That is the other reason for having more than one neuro type. A huge business benefit of this, which we don't talk about enough, is the commercial aspect. So the world is neurodiverse. If you only have neurotypical employees, you are designing your services and products for neurotypical customers and so therefore you are missing a huge target market, potentially. The discretionary spend of adults with cognitive disabilities alone, in the USA, is 1.1 billion a year. And around 73% of people with cognitive disabilities report finding it difficult to access banking systems and difficulty to complete financial transactions online. Without that inclusion internally, you are not going to be able to design services, products, and structures that are going to meet the needs of your customers. And that is, I think, a really important carrot to this movement and something that the organisations that I work with, that are doing this well, have completely embraced that. That is what they are doing and that is why they are doing it. They get that and they get that very commercial value add of this process. It is not just about being nice, and it is nice to have different people, and it can be a bit creative sometimes, it is also that you have got to represent the communities you serve, as a business.
David Green: Can you share a couple of examples of organisations who are tackling neurodiversity inclusion well?
Nancy Doyle: So, I work with Microsoft and Microsoft, I think, are doing a fantastic job. Microsoft are doing a fantastic job of disability per se. They have embraced neurominorities within the broad umbrella of disability, and they are doing an amazing job there.
The international chief accessibility officer is a deaf woman. Their head of accessibility in the UK, is an autistic man. They have got representation in their disability inclusion work streams and as a result, they are doing amazing things. I don't know if your listeners know this, but in PowerPoint now, you have got a button where anybody presenting a PowerPoint over Zoom, it will automatically do closed captioning for you. It is on the, present your slides tab. You can automatically set up closed captioning if you are presenting your slides and your microphone is next to you, PowerPoint will start doing close captioning for you, which is just phenomenal.
So they are starting to build in things as standard. That is a useful function for a sensory impairment, but also for cognitive differences as well. Lots of ADHDers like to see the words at the same time as hearing because it gives us a more rich sensory environment. It holds our attention longer because we are seeing and listening rather than just listening.
But they are not just doing it in terms of representation and the services they provide, they were one of the early adopters of the autism hiring movement, but they have also started to shift that to not just autism. One of the things that we are working with them on at the moment for example, is making their apprenticeship and internship programs, neuroinclusive. So actually doing that thing that I said at the beginning, instead of saying, we are going to have an internship and apprenticeship program and then we are going to have a few autistic ones. So rather than having that as a separate thing, they are going, how do we make our internship and apprenticeship programs neuroinclusive, but not just neuroinclusive, inter-sectionally inclusive.
That is about challenging where people hire from and saying, have you looked at populations of people who are long-term unemployed, who never went to university? Genius Within, work with around a thousand individuals a year who are long-term unemployed and we have got lots of autistic people in that group who haven't been to university. That doesn't mean that they won't turn out to be the best coder that you have ever met or the best legal document challenger that you have ever met. They absolutely can do those things. So what they have done is really broadened their horizons around inclusive hiring. Inclusive hiring as the mission, rather than hiring as hiring and then we do an inclusion project. And so that switch that they have made I think, is where everybody is going to end up going. It is wonderful, actually, they are doing a wonderful job.
And then the other organisation that we work with a lot who are doing a good job of this, are some of the health education England bodies, around the UK. So they are responsible for employing early career physicians, paramedics, dentists. It is people who have finished their education, but they have still got professional training to go and so they don't become a fully qualified doctor until they have finished those training courses.
And so where their people are coming unstuck is, they have been the kind of student that has always been able to over rehearse in order to do well. They have been able to pass all of those very challenging, medical based and dentistry exams, because they simply spent 50 hours revising, as opposed to some of their peers who might have spent 10 to 15. But now, all of a sudden, they are doing a 50, 60 hour week and still trying to pass exams. So their over rehearsal strategies are no longer available to them and they are hitting what I would call, the neurodiverse ceiling. Which is where they, all of a sudden, those troughs in their profile have become too much of a weight and they can't get anywhere near the peaks of their profile because the troughs have tripped them up. And so they have got a lot of adult disclosure happening in that area, where people are suddenly going, oh my goodness why is everyone else able to do this and not me?
So what they are doing, which I really like, is what I call flipping the pyramid. So in a lot of neurodiversity, neurominority systems, what happens first is diagnosis. So in schools and in a lot of businesses, if you say, oh, I think I might be dyslexic or I think I might have ADHD, the first thing that happens is you have to have an assessment and nothing will change until you have had that assessment. Now in the education system that can take two years, it can involve three different professionals, and it can involve 3 or 4,000 pounds. In a workplace, it is usually a bit less than that, it is usually less than a thousand pounds, but it still takes a couple of months. And in that time, no help is provided. So individuals are waiting for some sort of help or assistance, they are not getting it because they have got to go through this gatekeeping process. It is also usually the most expensive thing.
So what is very silly about this pyramid is the thing you do at the beginning is the most expensive thing, and it doesn't provide the help. So after you have been through the assessment, you might get told, right you need some ear defending headphones because you can't concentrate in busy environments and you need read aloud software to help you process large volumes of written texts. That software costs less than, in fact it is built into Microsoft software now, you don't even need to buy it separately. You might end up with adjustments that are free or a couple of hundred quid that are immediately available to you, that you can get within a matter of days, but you have had to wait several months and pay a thousand pounds to get to that process.
There are other organisations that are doing this, but some of health education England is doing a really good job. What they are doing is, they have worked with us to flip that pyramid. The first thing they do now is our questionnaire, we have got a version of the questionnaire that we designed specifically for them. So we went through all of the different options for how you deal with straightforward day-to-day problems and made it specific to their environment. We worked with their practice supervisors to make sure everything we were recommending was things people could implement themselves from a stationery budget, without needing any money, without needing any more specialists, without needing any more advice. It is just something they can implement with a stationery budget today, having had a little conversation with their practice supervisor or someone. So that is the very finest point and then we go, does that work? And if that doesn't work, then the next point of contact is a review with an occupational psychologist who will go, oh, I can see why that is not working for you. Tweak it a bit like this. Have you tried that? Have you tried this? Or, are you doing background colours on your screen to reduce the glare? Oh, you are not. Okay add that.
So you can do a little bit of tweaking and again, very straightforward and very little cost. But then the other thing that psychologist can do on the phone, is triage. So if that person is then going right, this is going to be more in depth. You are going to need way more assistive technology than that and you are going to need training to use it. Then that psychologist can signpost straight to that service or if that psychologist thinks actually, this person is going to need a lot of adjustments and exams as well as day-to-day practice, so probably best for them to have an assessment actually. Then they can signpost to that.
So then the last thing that happens is that big fat cost, rather than the first thing that happens. What we found in doing that, is that we take 20% of people out of needing any extra costs for their adjustments.
David Green: I feel foolish now asking you this question, after hearing all your expertise and passion about this topic, but why did you set up The Centre for Neurodiversity at Work? And also, maybe as part of that answer, you can share about some of the current research that you are doing and funding?
Nancy Doyle: Yeah. We have got lovely research jobs going on. Okay. So one of the reasons I set the centre up is a, kind of, lifelong frustration between the gap that exists between science and practice. I have found that frustrating in my entire career, but the gap goes both ways.
So if you go to academic conferences, you will find lots of professors bemoaning the fact that practitioners don't listen to the research that they are doing. They will be saying, well, we have been doing research on performance related pay for 50 years and it doesn't motivate people, but people are still using it, it is very sad. And you will get lots of grumbling about that. But my critique back to Professors and academics has always been, well research things that people are interested in. If I see one more taxonomy of leadership traits, I shall explode, I am bored of it. What can you research that will actually make a difference to practitioners? Where is the connection where the research is listening to real world everyday problems? If the problem you are trying to solve with your research, is one that you have got from reading other people's research, then it may have absolutely no real world relevance. So the idea with The Centre for Neurodiversity Research at Work, is that it is an alliance between the practitioners at Genius Within and the researchers at Birkbeck. So we can feed problems that we are having, into the centre and then the centre, will commission and organise research that will do that.
But it is also about separating the researched and the researcher. The centre is majority neurominority, if that makes any sense at all. So there are more neurominority researchers on the board, in the leadership, and in their PhD pipeline, than there are neurotypicals. So it is also about not having this kind of, we will try to understand how it is for autistic people. It is more like, autistic people will research things that autistic people will find interesting in the workplace and important. So in that vein, we have got a couple of really good projects on, at the moment. I have just submitted a paper to a journal, which is a survey of nearly 600 autistic people across the whole world, looking at intersectional exclusion. So that kind of critique I made at the beginning, about autism at work programs being predominantly white and male, I have got data for that. I didn't just say that, that is data I have collected. Because I want to make that point and I want to understand the extent to which that point is a real issue for people across the world. So that is a big project we have got on at the moment, understanding the different experiences of inclusion, exclusion, being able to be your authentic self in the workplace, which is a kind of common buzzword. How true is that for autistic people? And is it more or less true for autistic people that have other identity demographics that might create stigma and exclusions such as, race, LGBTQIA2S, gender, and transgender. So that is what we are looking at. We found, particularly autistic people with visible additional differences are struggling more than those with invisible. So socio-economic status didn't seem to make a difference, to the extent that there were differences between black and white participants. Trans and non binary people experienced more ostracism in the workplace compared to women, who again, experienced more ostracism in the workplace compared to men. So there is this this graph with the averages for each, kind of getting worse or better, depending which way you are looking at it.
So that is one project and we want to use that to really create a call to action for people who are involved in these sort of autism hiring programs, to start doing what Microsoft are doing and to start going, this isn't about handpicking white, male, privileged, technologists, from the best universities, just because they are autistic and calling it inclusion. Let's use this to start doing really inclusive hiring. So that is the kind of connection where we have seen a problem in practice. We want to find out the extent to which it is true, in an objective systematic way. We have done that, now we know the extent to which it is true, we are going to create first, an academic paper, but then some lay summaries and some practice guidance for organisations, for people, for your listeners. So we will take it through the academic process so that we can vouch for the credibility of the research and then we will bring it through into advice and guidance for people who are actually going to have to deliver these changes. Another piece of work that we are doing is a rapid evidence review of what we know from race and gender inclusion, that we can apply to the neurodiversity movement.
So for example, in race and gender inclusion, we know that token gestures are not welcome. So when you get your one Asian woman on the board, to be in charge of looking at all of the policies and deciding whether they are sexist and racist, and your one Asian woman on the board happens to be a finance director, doesn't really know much about HR. It is tokenistic. It is not her job. It is not a fair thing to ask of her. It is additional to her extra work. So we have learnt that that is not cool in race and gender inclusion, but we have not learnt that that is not cool in disability and neurodiversity inclusion. That sort of stuff is still happening. Another project is to systematically go through all that research that we have got on race and gender, which is much older, much more mature, much more developed and credible, and say, where are the points of principle that we could apply to neurodiversity, that would save us some time so that we are not playing catch up and we are not repeating the same mistakes that other forms of DNI inclusion have made. And we can short circuit some of those processes.
David Green: Great, there are some really important questions there, regarding the neurodiverse experience at work that you are obviously trying to answer. I like the way that it is not just for academic sake, it is actually to make it practical and put it in the hands of practitioners, so they can make a difference with it. You gave a little bit of a synopsis there around how bridging the academic practitioner gap can help organisations. How can organisations best keep up to date with the research that has been done?
Nancy Doyle: I really like it when organisations work with us on the research, we can't do the research without organisations, so work with us on it. Offer to be one of the people that send out our surveys. Join our mailing list. Be aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it and join in. These things that we are doing at the moment are quite preliminary. The next stage is to look at interventions and to look at the success of interventions.
So for example, that flipping the pyramid thing that we are doing with Health Education England, I want to quantify that. I want to work with an organisation who will take that approach in one of their departments or geographical locations and leave the other geographical location just as it is, and then track what happens in that organisation and go, do we notice a difference in turnover, performance. What objective measures can we look at to see whether that is actually making the difference to performance that we think it will make? And do we have proxy measures that we can survey at serious points, such as organisational engagement and perceptions of your employer. So can we measure that stuff? Can we see what difference it makes?
I am a big fan of quasi experimental research. Randomised control trials don't really work for our industry, they are too clinical and sterile. You have to actually get into an organisation and go, what happened? Let's look at what is actually happening. So I would say yeah, the best way for an organisation to keep up to date is to join us.
David Green: So there we are listeners, there is the invitation and we will give Nancy's details at the end, so you can get in touch if you are interested. And now Nancy, a fascinating conversation, but we have reached the last question.
This is the question that we are asking everyone on the series, how does behavioural science help improve the workplace?
Nancy Doyle: Ooh, that is a very large question. I am hoping that everything I have just said answers that question.
David Green: I think it does partially, well more than partially in fact. Perhaps you could provide a summary?
Nancy Doyle: I think it is about challenging and checking that what we know isn't a reflection of what we have always known and a confirmation bias, versus challenging ourselves to think in new ways. The thing that behavioural scientists, like occupational psychologists and management scientists, do is we use evidence to justify what we are saying. We don't just have opinions, what is that wonderful phrase? The plural of anecdote is not data. Someone said it, it is not mine. You can't credit it to me.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
And understanding how to avoid biases in the data that you collect, so that you are collecting good quality data. We have this all the time with bias data, have you heard about the hiring AI’S that taught themselves to be sexist? This is what happens when data scientists don't work with behavioural scientists, that is exactly the kind of thing that happens. So if you have got people with hard engineering skills, that have never learned critical thinking or the way behaviour is socially constructed, you will end up with hiring AI’s that teach themselves to be sexist. But when you bring behaviour into science and you bring psycho-social norms and cultural influences, into the understanding of data, you avoid things like that and you just get smarter about it.
David Green: That is really interesting, Nancy. We work with a lot of organisations who have people analytics teams and many of those teams have that blend between data scientists, behavioural scientists, and IO psychs as well, to do exactly what you said, just provide that check and balance.
Nancy Doyle: And I think the critical thinking is important, as an IO psych myself, we have all been trained in how to construct a decent questionnaire. I was working with an architectural firm who wanted to understand the sensory inputs for neurodivergent thinkers. They were planning on surveying 20 people. And I said, okay, so 20 people. Is that 3 dyslexics, 4 dyspraxics, because they are all going to have different sensory profiles. Okay. And where are you going to get them from? I don't know.
The risk was they would take the results of 20 autistics and then start implementing design policies across the whole world, that suited autistics but that hadn't taken into account people with visual impairment, people with ADHD.
We are annoying, behavioural scientists. We are annoying, we will tell you where you are going wrong and that is annoying sometimes, but we will stop you therefore from making really big mistakes. Like creating an entire hiring AI that teaches itself to be sexist, because it has learned that women don't get promoted, so it started ignoring CV’s that have the word women in them at any point. We would spot that error.
David Green: A very, very good call for behavioural science there Nancy, to conclude this. Thank you so much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Absolutely fascinating listening to you and I learned a hell of a lot over the last 50 minutes or so. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you on social media and find out more about your work?
Nancy Doyle: Sure. I am an avid Twitterer @nancydoylepsych on Twitter. I like Twitter, I know it gets a bad press, but I like it. I don't like Facebook, don't look for me there. I am not a fan of LinkedIn, it is a bit posturing for me, but I am on LinkedIn. I do respond to LinkedIn and I do Instagram, I am on NancyDoylePsych on Instagram as well. And by going on there, you will also be able to find links to the Birkbeck Center for Neurodiversity Research at Work, which has a mailing list, which you can subscribe to. You will also find details of Genius Within and how Genius Within can be contacted.
David Green: Brilliant. I am sure many of our listeners, particularly those working in large companies in HR, will be in touch after listening to this. So Nancy, thank you very much for your time.