How HR leaders can help them thrive

Every October, we observe National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and this year’s theme is “Access to Good Jobs for All.” HR leaders can use this occasion to make workplaces more hospitable and accepting of autistic people.

Too often, these employees are discriminated against and even fired for autism-related problems, meaning organizations often miss out on autistic employees’ unique skills and valuable contributions. When adequately matched to a position, autistic employees can be up to 140% more productive than average workers.

Here are some ways HR leaders can reevaluate their hiring, talent management and culture practices to ensure all employees feel valued and can work together to drive the business forward.

Autism is a developmental disability, with key traits of atypical communication and repetitive behavior.

Although autistic workers can contribute in valuable ways others cannot, they can have autism-related workplace challenges. For example, they may have trouble with nonverbal behavior, eye contact, anxiety, comprehension of another point of view, executive functioning and change. Sensory issues could cause problems with smells, lights and office noises. Their tendency to try to help by being among the few employees speaking up about office issues could irritate colleagues. Literal thinking could cause them to do unnecessary or unwanted work; they can ask the same question after not receiving an answer and might struggle with other autism-related communication problems such as emailing too much or asking too many questions.

As autism manifests itself differently among people, no two autistic people are the same. Given that, it is crucial for HR professionals to know that all autistic individuals do not have the same workplace problems and thus need varying forms of assistance. However, they are all worthy of acceptance and appreciation.

10 best practices for working with autistic employees

Often, the mistreatment of autistic employees relates to the medical model of disabilities, which views a disability as a problem to be fixed. Too often, autistic employees are expected to conform and behave as if they are not autistic.

To counter those trends, here are some best practices to embrace:

• Celebrate individuality. Autistic employees should be empowered to bring their whole selves to work, as forcing them to conform to allistic (non-autistic) behavior can be detrimental. Acting in ways that are not natural for them, these workers may camouflage/mask to fit in. This can drive autistic burnout—which is physical, mental or emotional exhaustion that can come with losing skills—creating negative effects that include sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, suicidal behavior or an increase in autistic traits. Conformity is an example of “neuro ableism,” defined by experts as “the specific type of ableism experienced by neurodivergent people due to systemic oppression in a … society that values neurotypical-ness as the ‘right’ way to be, think and act.”
• Offer training for working with autistic employees. Because autistic people have an up to 85% unemployment rate, many neurotypical individuals do not know how to work with this population. Instead of being tolerant, they get irritated and sometimes fire these people because of autism-related traits. Instead, HR leaders should create training or hire external experts to teach staff how to work with autistic employees.
• Understand and work to provide reasonable accommodations. Reasonable accommodations are designed as an ongoing interactive process that takes workers’ preferences into primary consideration. However, employers frequently mismanage the process, ignoring requests for accommodations, failing to create an interactive process and making unilateral decisions. HR leaders, professionals and supervisors should be careful to allow workers to explain their chosen accommodations, provide a reason if they reject requests, discuss how accommodations are going and more. It’s also important for HR leaders to ensure that their offices have procedures for requesting accommodations and create a safe environment where employees feel comfortable making such requests, without fear of being judged or punished.
• Protect employees’ privacy. Disclosure of autism is a choice and employers should not force autistic workers to share this information. This includes “outing” employees by revealing the autism indirectly, which can be especially challenging for autistic people who may already feel different. HR leaders should ensure that only the people who need to know about the employee’s autism have this information.
• Rethink communication standards. Although atypical social communication is one of the hallmarks of autism, organizations can have unreasonable expectations for how much autistic employees need to communicate, which experts say can prevent full inclusion. HR leaders are advised to ask autistic employees about their communication preferences and tailor at least some organizational communication to these needs. In addition, avoid comparing autistic employees’ communication with the communication of allistic staff; it’s wrong, illegal and is workplace ableism, defined as “measuring performance against non-disabled people.”

• Allow autistic employees to ask questions. Because some autistic people think differently than others, they could do incorrect work if they are prohibited from asking questions, even though colleagues can get irritated with autistic workers’ questions. However, employers should not prevent such questions. HR leaders could model how to appreciate such questions and help foster a working environment that welcomes questions.

• Stay tuned in for potential problems. Managers and leaders can directly discriminate based on disability in a variety of ways related to autism: sidelining and marginalizing these workers because they do not want to deal with autism-related problems; removing job duties or not assigning them new work; removing duties before allowing these workers to show they can do the job with reasonable accommodations, which is illegal. If HR leaders learn about the sidelining of autistic employees, they should investigate the cause, then intervene and ensure that the duties are returned to the workers.
• Focus on culture. People in the workplace can make disparaging comments to autistic employers about their autism-related behavior, such as, “Your stimming embarrasses us.” HR leaders should help create a tolerant work culture, where personal attacks are not tolerated and employees can contact HR if they hear these comments without fear of retaliation.
• Root out retaliation. Retaliation against autistic employees who have raised issues about their treatment can take many forms, including exclusion from meetings, demotion, loss of duties, negative performance review, being put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) and termination. HR leaders and professionals should ensure that PIPs are actually needed and not the result of irritation with autism-related behavior.
• Remove disability from performance management considerations. Some supervisors are overly hard on autistic employees for their work, so they can say they are firing them based on performance, not disability. HR can try to prevent this mistreatment by advising against such actions and ensuring performance management follows standard protocol.

Final thoughts

Organizations, HR leaders and other employees have important roles in accepting autistic employees and helping them thrive. HR leaders can train managers and staff about how to work with autistic workers, preventing unnecessary problems and potentially costly, time-consuming and embarrassing lawsuits. They can help foster a nurturing and accepting workplace.