Published on 12, July, 2020
Just wondering is there any point declaring your autism at work? Would be interested to hear people's experiences
I declared mine before starting a job for the first time ever with my new job. I thought it would help but I'm not sure it has. I feel like my bosses treat me with more understanding which is a good thing but everything else is the same or worse
I had an Occupational Health Assesment where I said what my reasonable adjustments needed to be. The main one was having a regular timetable that didnt change without warning
2 weeks into the job and I am still the only teaching assistant in the college without a timetable. My boss said to me "You can design your own timetable" since she knows I need one. In a new job, where I know none of the classes or students. Also, the only way to do this is to use software systems that I have never used before and havn't been shown how to use, even though I am supposed to have been trained on them. She also sent me a email notification to have a 1-2-1 meeting with me at the end of the day with no message attached to explain what the meeting was about or any warning that it was going to happen. Yet she writes blogs on autism for the organisation's website so I dont understand how she doesnt understand these things.
Everyone's telling me different things today in the office. Different people from different departments are coming up to me telling me totally contradictory things about what I am supposed to be doing till the end of term, there's no communication and it seems even more confusing than my previous jobs.
Makes me wonder what the point of disclosing my autism was
Billy87 said:2 weeks into the job
This is a pretty common issue for new starters in general in my experience, mainly because the other staff are probably overloaded and are finding it challenging to carve out the time in their day to train you.
Thee fact you have declared your diagnosis means you are probably seen as more of a challenge than the average new hire, and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who are supposed to be training you are a bit intimidated with the task in hand.
Speaking as a manager, I would expect the initial 1-2-1 meetings to be mostly catch up chats to see how you are coping, if you are lacking access to anything and if things are working to plan.
From your side I would take the lead here and ask for a development plan and ideally a mentor who can offer some time to train you up, and offer consistent advice (maybe highlight the fact you are getting conflicting advice so you want to make sure you get it from a trusted source)
Highlight your inexperience with the timetable software and ask who can give you the training.
Offer any positive feedback on where the accomodations made for your autism have helped - some gratitude and acknowledging that their input worked always helps.
Point out that structure is important for you and you would like to schedule follow up meetings when the manager can accommodate these - offer to put together a tracking document for your training and porgress for them to review (a bit tip here is that a busy manager loves it when you offer practical suggestions to an issue and offer to do the heavy lifting to keep it on track. They often lack the capacity to do this in the way they would like so give them the rough draft to polish and they feel like they did it all).
Lastly, from a managers point of view, please remember that managers are just people too, some of us are autistic (undiagnosed for my working career) and we all have failings like anyone else.
Sometimes we lose sight of the daily issues you face but keep us in the look in as concise a way as you can and try to come to us with solutions to issues and you will get a lot more love and respect from us.
Be patient, be persistent and give the others the same understanding you would hope they would offer to you and I think you will do well,
Good luck.