I want to understand about autistic adults difficulties which they face in workplace.

Hello everyone. Hope that all are fine. Thanks everyone for making me understand about your problems which you face in everyday life in your workplace. I am taking this project further in terms of visual language and grammar. It is one of the subjects of graphic design where you express words in terms of forms (geometric or abstract). 

I know its a bit difficult to understand as everyone is not familiar with graphic designing. But, I would like to put some of designs of my publication here. 

Please let me know if you guys have any suggestions.

Also, the project is still going on. Working everyday on it to make it better.

Thanks.

Trying to attach a pdf here. I hope it works

In my opinion, this thread both exemplifies and explains the problems we experience in the workplace.

community.autism.org.uk/.../cliques-and-gossip

We can't get into the main clique so that poses us problems. It also means that we have to work harder than our neurotypical peers, even without all the extra tasks they tend to give us.

Hey,

I would like to know what kind of job do you do. I mean in which sector?

It would be great if you could tell me in brief about it.

Thanks.

Hello guys,

I am really sorry that I couldn't be here for so many days. I haven't replied to so many of you. But I really appreciate the fact that I got so many replies from you guys. I am currently doing my post graduation and I was busy in another project. But I am here again and for the rest of the time I will be working on this project. At present, I am going through each of yours replies and will be replying to each soon. My research question for my project has been finalised now. It is this:–

How can publication design be used to explore problems faced by autistic adults in their workplace?

I would also like to add some brief introduction about myself –

I am studying post graduation diploma in Visual Communication Design at London College of Communication, UAL.

I am from India and before coming to London, I have studied Architecture with Interior designing from one of the universities in India. 

As I am International student here, I may not clearly understand some of your problems. For example, if you talk about some policies, I may not be aware about it. But, I would reply you, if I have doubts regarding something. 

Thank you everyone for putting your time into this. I really appreciate it.

The problems I have/have had in work are as follows:

1) Difficulties in ‘fitting in’ and forming relationships with colleagues e.g. I had colleagues in the past who thought I was being sarcastic when I wasn’t, and they thought I was being smug when I was actually distraught, they thought I was being cheeky when I was just being honest... I think it came down to me not displaying the expected body language, but the stupid part was they knew I was autistic so shouldn’t have expected the usual body language in the first place. As you can imagine though, it really eats away at you to be told you’re behaving in rude ways that you are not intending in the slightest.

2) Telephone communication. I can do this best when I am in a room on my own and not being overheard by other people, as that makes me extremely self-conscious. Either way though I find it very anxiety provoking - I’m never sure when to speak,what to say, how to handle unexpected topics being raised, how to handle angry people...it’s just all too unpredictable!

3) Sensitivity to noise/lighting/temperature within the office environment - I have very sensitive hearing so by the time we have two conversations and the radio on in the office, I can no longer concentrate on my work and I just want to cover my ears or leave. Flickering or very bright lights are also a terrible distraction and will give me a migraine. Also, I’m always way too cold at work (though I’m not sure if that’s to do with my Asperger’s or not).

4) Being expected to go to other areas or do tasks I am unfamiliar with, without any prior warning. I get really anxious about going to unfamiliar places without being accompanied the first few times. Also, I get anxious if I have new work tasks just shoved onto me without a full explanation of what to do.

5) Constantly changing expectations/instructions between a manager and a colleague. As I say, I like to know exactly what I am doing, so if a colleague gives one instruction then the manager gives a contradictory instruction, it’s a recipe to drive me mad!

6) Car parking - as the journey to work can be stressful as it is, then I get really anxious if there is no parking space at work when I arrive. I am very conscientious and I won’t just dump my car anywhere, so I start panicking over where I can viably park my car and that people are watching me from the office and probably thinking ‘just park it on the road in’ (even though we are not supposed to, and I can’t break rules just like that).

7) Eating and drinking in front of other people. This has always made me anxious, and it is so bad I work that I invariably go all day with no food or drink until I get home, which isn’t very healthy and makes me feel unwell all the time.

The things that help me in work are as follows:

1) Having control over how I organise my own work, and what order I do things in on a day-to-day basis.

2) Being able to work flexible hours so that if I am having a bad day then I don’t feel pressured to go to or stay at work (which could lead to panic attack/meltdown), and I can just make the time up when I’m having a good day. This also avoids having to record a lot of sick time, and is particularly helpful if, like me, you are struggling with mental health problems too.

3) Not having a phone on my desk, and using emails/letters as the main form of communication instead. I do still make the odd phone call, but it’s at a time, in a place I chose (usually my manager’s office as it is more private there) and I make sure I am fully prepared beforehand.

4) Working for an organisation that understands autism, and is therefore willing to make any reasonable adjustments I ask for without fuss.

5) Not having to share a desk or work, which means that everything is where I expect it to be from day-to-day, which also helps to lower my anxiety levels.

6) Working in a small office with not too many other people, which allows me to feel more able to communicate with my colleagues verbally, and give me opportunities to speak to them one-to-one (which is the best scenario for me when communicating verbally).

7) Having friendly and sympathetic colleagues who only care for you if you are having a bad day, and do their best to assist, instead of mocking you for it or moaning to others behind your back about it (which I have experienced in the past). The latter only serves to break a person and ensure they have no confidence left to be able to do their job properly.

That’s the main things for me personally (there are others, but I didn’t want to waffle on too much, and these are the most important issues for me). I hope that’s helpful to you.

People perceive me as rude sometimes because I am direct and honest. I can’t do the fluffy, fussy small talk. I want to just get on with the job. 

I have to write everything down. 

I can’t always grasp what people are saying. 

Sensory difficulties are a constant torment - mainly noise. 

Paperwork - particularly stuff which I feel is unnecessary - I’d rather keep info on computerised records, but my industry lags behind. 

I’m logical rather than socially emotional which people don’t really like in women. I have few feminine traits. 

NeuralSoupKitchen said:

Pointless and patronising questions like "How are you feeling", autistic nightmare question which will certainly provoke a response "I'm fine" followed by at least 1/2 an hour of anxiety.

This is a huge problem to me. I experience the same.

NeuralSoupKitchen said:

Meetings with more than 3 people in them, which are entirely pointless anyway but doubly pointless for anybody with ASD or ADHD

Completely agree. I cannot focus. I am too anxious.

I don't mind the how are you, I'm fine thing, but when they ask how you are and you say I'm fine, then they start interrogating you: "just fine?" and then you have no idea how to answer that. Do they genuinely care about your life, or are they simply trying to fulfill their own need to have everyone around them appearing to be smiling and happy so they can feel good as well?

In my experience, NTs are more content when you are miserable but force a smile and pretend to be happy than when you are actually feeling good but don't openly express it. What a strange way to interact with the world, intentionally engaging in self-delusion just to be able to get through the day!

Even with all the BS we have to take from the rest of the world, I'm glad not to be NT!

Agree with all the comments, I will add a couple:

• Pointless and patronising questions like "How are you feeling", autistic nightmare question which will certainly provoke a response "I'm fine" followed by at least 1/2 an hour of anxiety.
• Meetings with more than 3 people in them, which are entirely pointless anyway but doubly pointless for anybody with ASD or ADHD
• Any "giltchy" communications, phones were terrible but were 100% superior to glitchy/jittery skype calls. 
• In general having to explain deeply technical things to NT's is pretty pointless because NT's can't understand technology, they might as well give up trying and just sell the stuff.
• Being expected to talk to anybody who is not immediately relevant to the problem I am trying to solve.

Tried the grievance procedure. The employer didn't do anything. They were especially worried about admitting that I actually had a disability which would make what the others did to me harassment, so the determination was that there was no evidence for anything I claimed, again because they didn't want to have to admit there was any wrongdoing which would make them liable in the tribunal.

Tried a trade union rep. Got a bit of help at the beginning and then they abandoned me because I had joined too late. They decided that I should accept the insulting offer that the employer made to me and that if I didn't, they wouldn't offer me any more help. It was the trade union rep's observation upon first meeting me that led me to get the diagnosis in the first place.

I had disclosed several symptoms I was having, which corresponded very closely with Aspergers symptoms. It was after that disclosure that my colleagues were sending around emails making fun of my interpersonal skills, something I specifically said I was having trouble with. Even without having told them about the Aspergers specifically, surely a symptom someone discloses as part of an illness they were having, whether it corresponds to a disability or not, is off-limits as far as ridicule among colleagues is concerned? My Line Manager had no business telling everyone about my illness in the first place.

Hi. Since you are kind enough to ask, the main issues for me at work are

• a lack of control over my working environment
• white desks that reflect the flickering fluorescent lights
• high energy decoration (high contrast patterns that don't resolve) on the carpet and cupboards
• narrow, adjoining desks that force employees to sit close together (I like to be with other people but not that close)
• high noise levels from chatter (my year 1 teacher would never have allowed it)
• reliance on telephone meetings (how does everyone know when it's their turn to speak?)
• hot desking (and the unwritten rules that go with it)
• the organisational assumption that employees are identical units of work whose needs are all essentially the same (which is evident in all the above, whatever the diversity policy document says)
• the refusal of managers to shift from that assumption, forcing me to medicalise the issue by getting a diagnosis
• the patronising attitude of a few (but only a few) of my co-workers when I was offered home working following diagnosis
• the difficulty that neurotypical people tend to have with the idea that what is obvious and intuitive to them may shrouded in mystery to me, and vice versa.

Very best wishes with your project.

Thanks for fleshing out the story. It sounds like a toxic environment. Maybe your line manager and colleague were afraid of your ability, and now you're gone will have to find someone else to pick on.

As I understand it, bullying is not 'perfectly OK'  in the UK. It should be covered under a grievance procedure. It's definitely something an employment tribunal would look at, and if it's also part of a pattern of discrimination against someone with a disability, that must be worth something. I've seen that having a trade union rep can make a world of difference.

I can relate to working into the night to get things done. Odd that the 'reasonable adjustment' boils down to 'be reasonable'.

I'm not one of the people who would usually have needed any more reasonable adjustment than simply being treated like everyone else, but, unfortunately, that didn't happen, even when I begged to not be given so much more than everyone else to do because I had to work into the middle of the night just to get done everything I needed to do.

Everything I did, even when I did everything right, would be picked apart. I did everything everyone asked me to do, but my Line Manager set me up for failure. She would tell me to wait to do a task until we had a meeting about it, but then at the meeting, she would ask very pointedly whether I had done the exact thing she had specifically told me to wait to do, and humilate me in front of my colleagues because I hadn't done it yet. She would also base a given performance evaluation on something she hadn't even told me in advance would be expected of me. This would be something she didn't ever do to my colleagues in the same position.

I worked in an educational institution and of course student feedback is very important to evaluate job performance. One of my colleagues was always ridiculing me behind my back in front of the students. He told them I was "useless" even though my knowledge and skill far outmatched his own. The only reason the students liked him so much is that he was too lazy to give them homework, so they got away with doing no work and consequently gave him good feedback. He is even seen on a video recording making scathing jokes about me to a room full of students.

Of course, as a result of my colleague's behaviour, the students complained about me, cast aspersions on my knowledge, and repeated on their feedback forms that they were told I am useless, and that caused me to lose my job. Even with all the evidence against him, the colleague who did this is still working there and I am unable to even function because of what he and my Line Manager did to me.

That same colleague also took credit for my work. He tricked me into sending him info documents that I had given to my students, then he apparently claimed that he had prepared the documents and that I had got them from him. Of course my Line Manager believed him and didn't care what I had to say in my own defense. She also didn't care that he would often just take off travelling for days at a time, even when he was supposed to be teaching. That left me to cover the work that he should have done, and I was accused of being "disorganised" because I was often having to scramble at the last minute.

My Line Manager always made such a big deal of the fact that the students found me "unapproachable" but that was only from students supervised by my colleague. He had apparently told them that I would shout at them if they approached me. Nothing the other students (the ones not suervised by that colleague) had to say made any difference because a small number of his students had been coached into making horrible complaints about pretty much every aspect of my being, even personal stuff. The group of students supervised by my colleague gave me ratings 50 points (out of 100) lower than the other students gave me, but nobody cared. I was told that the negative, personal, and offensive student comments would be taken very seriously, and it didn't matter that the students themselves had been influenced. I finally just had it and got out of there because I couldn't take the undeserved criticism any longer.

It was pure bullying, but, of course, bullying is perfectly ok according to the law in the UK, so I now have to prove that I had a disability in order to get any justice for what I suffered.

Could training have prevented my situation? Perhaps, but not if they were determined to give me a hard time, which it seemed they were. Even more helpful would be not to employ sociopaths and bullies in an educational setting, or at least don't allow them to rise into positions of authority and to DO SOMETHING when someone is bullied or harassed at work.

Those people got off on how badly they were treating me and how I was having more and more difficulty coping. After all, I had nobody other than my Line Manager whom I could approach when I had difficulty, and when I did, she pretended to care, but then took note of everything I said and then used it against me in my performance evaluations.

I am so glad I started recording my meeings with her. I would recommend that anyone having difficulty at work to get yourself a free app for recording sounds and use it discreetly on your phone. Otherwise, nobody will believe anything you say.

Thanks for the nice post, NAS24456, and sorry to hear about the terrible experience. I'm guessing from what you say that you think that your most recent job won't give you a good reference. If you are willing, maybe a bit more detail would help us and the original poster understand what happened, and what form the exclusion and bullying took. Is it something workplace training of managers and typical colleagues could have helped with?

I'd agree autistic people are often more intelligent than the people around them, and this can be part of the communication difficulties. I sometimes want to put quite a complex argument, throwing in a lot of incidental detail, but people only listen to a part of it. Also agree that autistic people can be more conscientious, and fail to get deserved credit, possibly because they're more modest, or don't use typicals' ways of claiming success. Do you defend yourself against the criticism? How do you think it would be if you had more autistic colleagues?

I wouldn't necessarily agree about being relatively immune to cognitive bias or confirmation bias. Such things can still come to bite one, which is why I like to triple-check everything before making a firm statement. For example, what evidence is there against your account of a general underlying bias in your post?

There's an old Dilbert cartoon where a character listening to a presentation says something like 'there's no point in this - either you're telling me what I already know, or you're wrong'. It's still de rigeur to listen to other points of view and try to take them seriously, trying to work out any difference of fundamental assumptions.  I said above that I could pass at banter (and nowadays even eye contact), and it doesn't feel like it's about ingratiation - maybe we can see mutual strokes and compliments as not just social lubricant, but a work motivator and feedback according to our own values, whereby everyone can achieve their best potential. Maybe that's unrealistic, but it's deliberately an aspiration.

I have just been through yet another terrible experience at work which has lost  me my job, and probably my whole career this time. I think it can be boiled down to this: whereas everyone needs to have people "on their side" in anything they do in order to succeed, neurotypicals tend not to be on the side of a person on the spectrum. It's like running a race having to wade through deep thick mud, when everyone else gets to run on dry ground. You have no chance of winning unless you are a really really fast runner.

Even though I am more capable and more intelligent than just about everyone around me, I never get any credit for my work and effort, more is expected of me (in terms of working hours and tasks), I get criticised for things I do that would be overlooked if anyone else did them, and, even worse than all that,  I have even been openly sabotaged by certain of my colleagues and my employer refused to take any action. I was treated about the same both before and after my disclosure, so it's not about whether people consciously know about the autism.

It all boils down to cognitive bias. I know that autism is supposed to be a disorder or a disability, but many people on the spectrum are actually far more intelligent than their neurotypical peers, and also have a better work ethic. Moreover, people on the spectrum are not nearly as susceptible to cognitive bias as neurotypicals.

A neurotypical forms an opinion and then their whole perception is altered based on the strength of that opinion. If they don't like someone (for example, if they have heard from another person that the person is weird or unfriendly), all they will see is that person's negative points, and they will disregard anything good about that person as some sort of aberration. That is all to protect their point of view, to reassure them that they were "in the right" all along. That is called "selective perception".

A very closely related cognitive bias is "confirmation bias", in which any evidence they receive from their senses confirming their own preconceptions is given much more weight than is evidence that would tend to disprove their preconceptions.

The really annoying thing is that neurotypicals don't even know they are subject to cognitive bias. After all, to realise that their own perception could be anything other than perfect would damage their fragile little egos that are telling them they are perfect and can't possibly make a mistake about someone else.

If the majority of people had an autistic type brain, that which is less susceptible to cognitive bias, more capable of making decisions based on logic rather than emotion, and generally more efficient overall, then the people who are called "neurotypicals" at present would be the ones who are considered deficient or disabled.

However, that isn't the world we live in. We have to put up with distracting noise and annoying fluorescent lights because they don't really bother anyone else. We have to work with people whose primitive minds reject us as different on the subconscious level and will not even give us a chance to prove ourselves, much less succeed. We are considered dishonest because we don't like making eye contact, even though we are much more honest, on average, than most people. Our lives are made difficult by little people with little minds who cannot bear for anyone else to prove them foolish or anything less than the alpha dog. People find us annoying because we just want to do our work and don't want to waste our time exchanging mindless banter in coffee breaks. I guess they can't stand the feelings of rejection because we aren't falling all over ourselves to socially ingratiate ourselves to them.

Well, guess, what, neurotypicals, the slight feeling of rejection you get when one of us isn't as quick to give eye contact as you think we should be isn't anything compared to how we feel when you shun, exclude, and outright bully us. Is it really surprising that we are shy about socialising with you when you treat us that way?

For a lot of people, work problems include sensory sensitivities including strip lighting, noises or smells, decoding office politics, having to make pleasantries and conforming. I don't think I have any of those problems (but then my self-monitoring is really poor), but rather the problem is not being able to say what the problem is.  In my case it's quite elusive.

I do find switching attention difficult: working on a computer I can have too many different tasks vying for attention. My executive function is not good - I can be self-motivated, but then question myself about whether I was motivated to do the right thing or got distracted.  I can stay very late at work. I have had meltdowns when I've felt I'm persistently not being understood. A lot of it is self-doubt, possibly unjustified, and doubt about how worthwhile some of the role or organisation is. There's no opportunity to talk about those kinds of things.  I can make banter and be very co-operative, but I'm not great at making friends - I probably appear shy or standoffish.

Before my diagnosis, I had to take time off with depression: I was forcing myself to work at something with whatever the opposite of enthusiasm is, maybe a kind of internalised 'PDA'; I thought I wanted to do a work task, but I couldn't make myself do it, possibly because of anxiety that I'm not aware of.  These are all quite internal things, perhaps because I'm lucky enough to work in a good progressive organisation and my colleagues are all nice.

I think I would enjoy life and be happy if I would be on Universal Income, work for an understanding employer, be self-employed or receive Employment and Support Allowance/Personal Independence Payment.

I am forced to be around people too much. This makes me really unhappy.

I do not feel I have work-life balance.

I feel that I live to work.

Interesting point.  I've seen 'Spotlight' three times.  Excellent film.

California said:

To me a big problem is a open plan office. I cannot focus. I can focus much better when I am alone. I am a completely different person. I am so focused then.

I also need to get away from everyone for it to be a worthwhile break.

Same here on both points

The job interviews is a total nightmare for me. The role plays is simply torture for me.

To me a big problem is a open plan office. I cannot focus. I can focus much better when I am alone. I am a completely different person. I am so focused then.

I also need to get away from everyone for it to be a worthwhile break.

I know that some organizations are very bureaucratic and everything moves soooooooo slowly.