Employers Attitude “Everyones a little autistic”

I think at this point anything I request is going to ruffle feathers. I asked for an internal transfer to another store and have been told I have to go through the “recruitment process” new application, assessments etc for the same role at a different location. This is baffling me because recently we have had a few transfers and they didn’t have to do any of that. There isnt an internal transfer policy for reference, but now I’m really beginning to feel discriminated. Its causing alot of mental stress and no job is worth anyones health to be compromised.

I advise that if you have not already asked for reasonable adjustments, ask for them. ACAS and Scope have templates for letters to ask for reasonable adjustments (in the letter you could ask for notice to be given when the rota is changed and a consistent lunch break and help with scheduling). Ask for reasonable adjustments in a letter (save a copy for reference) and get a written response from your employer. This will be important if you need to take action later (as I'm unfortunately doing just now. My old employer discriminated against me, rather like what's happening to you). If your employer won't give you a written response, that's a red flag for discrimination.

Anyway there was a point I was trying to make for the OP before I had a real bad strike of the ADHD deciding it wanted to be the dominant neuro-mode of my brain and derailing me for a full 24rhrs....
Rosina
I suspect your employer like many people who have encountered enough people like my other half who has traits but isn't actually autistic so have then been incorrectly self led to the conclusion that because lots of people have traits, most people must be "a little bit autistic".

Rosina said:

My manager changes my rota without asking which disturbs my routine, I am told I will never progress for promotion where I am due to my health issues although I haven’t asked for any workplace adjustments. I don’t get regular lunchtimes. When I confided in a senior at the company, he said “everyones a little autistic”.(I am a adult late diagnosed, whilst working for this company, HR never came to speak to me about it post diagnosis, pre diagnosis the HR Director said “autism is very common these days”).

I am told I should learn to adapt my autism to the work environment by a senior staff.

It sounds like they are allowing this bias to inccorectly believe that you can and should adjust to the workplace but tha is incorrect, they legally must make accomodations for you and they are not allowed to bully you or fire you for raising your needs. I suggest getting someone to be a liason/advocate type role and remind your work place that by disreagrding your needs tehy are in breech of the Equality Act 2010,  which states employers must make reasonable adjustments to support disabled job applicants and employees.

hi i am like you and despite being so upset by the mistreatment i am also unable to deal with confrontations and will just shut down, scared that if i highlight im not happy with the treatment it will end up making the other colleagues treat me even worse! 

in my last job which this happened really bad at eventually i just left, it wasn’t worth the emotional turmoil. what i did do however is write down how i truly felt in an email and sent it the day i left so i wouldn’t have to be face to face. i said basically how i was shocked that senior employees could act like this, and definitely list how it is illegal to discriminate against this- you always know more than the manager, always. 

also cc in the owner of the company / head office / all HR you can find and hopefully at least one of these people will be a kind and understanding person who will be willing to take it on board and make change

Rosina said:

Goes back to one of my parents saying to me as a child, “even if you know all the answers in class, don’t put your hand up, nobody likes anyone smarter than them all the time, especially the teacher”

Oh I wish someone had told me this when I was young. 

Is there a position you might be better suited for there? It sounds like you add value in ways often overlooked.

Thanks Joe I appreciate the comments and I agree that sales/target driven environments can be cut throat, almost ruthless in terms of making allowances for people who may think anything differently that just aiming to exceed targets, that is all that matters to them. After months of awful comments, taking a good battering on my self esteem and confidence, I have come to the conclusion my time in this industry is up. I have seen other sectors/businesses offer sick pay, mental health first aiders and those who are disability confident, those who would value my academic credentials and experience. You can’t win em all and that’s what I’ll take from this. Do I regret telling my employers about the autism? No. This is who I am, take it or leave it.

im the same, i reported my supervisor but i dont like speaking or confrontation.... i do write to compensate for this.... so yeah, i wrote like lots of letters and sent them to my bosses boss, and the union rep, then to a person who sent them to the operations manager, then got a meeting on it to which i wrote pages of notes and emailed them to the op manager before the meeting, then i also wrote tons of pages of more notes, made sure union rep read them all too so he understands what goes on. i wrote letters of complaint on behalf of the foreign staff who wanted to complain too but couldnt write letters... basically i went total ham on writing and made it my obsession.

still had to speak a little in the meeting, but with all i wrote i had alot to lean on and alot of things didnt need to be spoken as i had already said alot through writing.

oh yeah i get bad treatment from my supervisor but to be honest he treats everyone bad and tries to walk over everyone, he fires people as if laws dont exist. he fires people if he so much as doesnt like them, he forced this one guy to cancel all his medical appointments and said hed fire him if he doesnt... yeah my boss sucks, i reported him and got him told off and forced to apologise but his superiors totally limited the damage to just a apology when quite clearly i could have got him fired for his behaviour. hes been quiet and evasive since.

but yeah hes always used changing my times as a weapon against me, day shift but now my start time is pushed to 4pm and i work through midnight on day shift lol i cant sleep very well as i get up early by my natural body clock and cant sleep longer than 7am. but i tolerate it as much as i can, somedays i feel like smashing my head into the wall repeatedly which is probably a common thought to have at work in jobs like these. 

Hi Rosina,

Been reading this thread and wondering how best to respond. On the one hand it sounds like there are aspects of your job you enjoy and are good at. On the other your employers sound bad.  Strikes me that if they are doing this around autism they'll be doing this to other people around other things too.  I've only done sales once and lasted 4 days as i hated it. I've also worked in IT for a largely sales based business and I didn't like the way they treated staff either.  All the target stuff just gets cut throat.  People I'd be working with one day would be gone the next and it made me feel insecure.

I think I'd make a list of pros and cons. If there are more cons, dust off my CV and start looking whilst I still had the job - like you seem to be doing. Sounds like you have a bunch of job transferrable skills so make sure that's on there. There is no harm looking for something where you will be more appreciated and in the meantime if things do improve in your current role, great, stay, but from what you've described it doesn't sound likely.

*face palm* I know it's a spectrum. There's more to it than just the overview I wrote here. Also it doesn't matter what anyone thinks if they want to pidgeon hole him, if he doesn't identify with the autistic experience despite meeting criteria then he isn't and nobody can push an identity onto him especially since he's never been bothered enough by the criteria he meets to ever want or need to get assessed. If he is masking that well then it's not necessariliy an autistic mask, because masking isn't actually unique to autists. The fact that he can take his down and put it up and hold it up flawlessly at will with no drain to his battery is another reason it's not possible to say he's autistic, only that he has traits, which is the issue here because either you are autistic or you aren't, having traits isn't enough to make someone autistic. Some people have ADHD with similar experiences with autistic ppl but they are not necessarily autistic too.
So that's why I propose there is something else, another neurotype that hasn't been named, which like other neurotypes has overlapping traits with other types which are causing it to be obscured.

indeed.  unpacking the things that you assumed were 'normal' is difficult, as they are normal for you.  we learn our 'normal' as much as habit as anything else.

🐝 Bees 🐝 (they/them) Autism resources in bio #stoptheshock #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs said:

"when talking to people do you have to remind yourself to act normal (smile/make appropriate eye contact, etc,)?" and he sad no.

If he has unknowingly been masking for a very long time, he may not realise.

After my recent diagnosis I have been thinking over my life. I have realised that although I make eye contact in, I think, an appropriate manner, I actually prefer to find ways of avoiding it (holding onto and petting my dog is a very acceptable way of achieving this). I do know that as a child I hid behind my smile. If I am walking along a street, I compulsively smile at everyone coming towards me. Is this what NTs do?

Remember that autism is a _spectrum_ condition, not every ND ticks every box and those that they do they may have in varying degree and exhibit in different ways. On top of that, ASD people have personalities as well as ASD too.

My otherhalf ticks so many criteria boxes for autism that I don't so I suspected him to be autistic for a while, but it came down to this question:
"when talking to people do you have to remind yourself to act normal (smile/make appropriate eye contact, etc,)?" and he sad no.
So now I'm convinced there is a middleground state between being ADHD and Autistic but is in fact neither, but it's own thing that looks like a really nebulous unplaceable nerodivergent. Because whatever he is it isn't neurotypical. And I am now suspecting there are more like him out there that are not diagnosable as having a specific neurotype other than literally "not neurotypical". If anything it's like a psuedo neurotypical, they function well enough to slip "under the radar" but outside of a professional setting when they get home and their mask comes off they are definitely some kind of neurodivergent in interests, mannerisms, emotional responses etc. In their natural relaxed state they are definitely not "typical" anything.

I have read the stats on autistic adults and suicide being higher. What we find is people trying to relate or think they are making us feel inclusive. They fail to see, they invalidate an individuals experience of the condition. Every autistic is different and whatever images or experiences they may have had or seen in the media via films and characters, does not mean the autistic person they have met in me resembles any of those. Huge lack of education in this condition. 

This is the only place online I can come to when I feel the world doesn’t understand. 

If possible, join a trades union. They can provide legal help, a case worker to support you and sit in on any meetings with management or 'human resources' that you might have. With your selective mutism, having someone on your side in meetings would be particularly useful.

*Potential trigger references*

A very good counter to the, "Everyone is a little autistic", is to point out that 66% of autistic adults have considered suicide, this is much higher than the UK general population, where the rate is about 17%. If over half of adult autistics have considered suicide, it is hard to trivialise the effect that it has on people.

JuniperFromGallifrey said:

I was in a position years ago where I kept explaining that being dyslexic, I cannot work any faster. And while the individual I reported to appeared understanding, the chap above him was not. However, in this hierarchy, I was told my depth of knowledge was such that they were taking notes from! I was informed I was costing them money at my slower pace even though my knowledge was an asset.

This is exactly where I am, I exceed all other employees in other areas, I find anomalies others can’t see. My ideas and opinions are taken into account by the upper management. Yet my lack of sales is the problem, although it has improved since my diagnosis. This is a company that has nearly 100 people in the same job role I do, dotted across the different stores, and only a fraction are hitting the required target. To me this threat of performance reviews is futile because statistically they should have half the selling staff on it already. 

My challenge is if some of my NT counterparts are weak in every area of their role yet still employed how can I be threatened with reviews based on just one area. This is more to do with my characteristics, we have those colleagues who do as they are told, follow orders blindly, right or wrong, and we have me who needs a logical explanation and answers to questions to do things and that itself can be problematic to managers who don’t know the answers in front of others and it makes them feel less authoritative. 

Goes back to one of my parents saying to me as a child, “even if you know all the answers in class, don’t put your hand up, nobody likes anyone smarter than them all the time, especially the teacher”

Hi Rosina 

This what happened to me of changing my hours without any warning and put me down for a shift without asking first. Plus phoning to say I'm not required, anxiety went through the roof and I'd got the impression that I was lying to people (when went below contract) 

people don't understand I was there for a longtime and mortified what I saw. Wanted to stay if better managed.

Ending up leaving due to being bullied and miss treated. The last resort is go to the GP. Have everything written down in a notebook or diary.

2015 had a nervous breakdown, went to GP who wrote a letter and managers ignored it. Was told to lie as didn't want anyone to go on sick leave. 

Hope this helps you. 

This is good case for why we need to untangle the narrative of "My Autism". It's not mine. It's human.

It's also a good one be begin to explain that we cannot have it both ways: Detail oriented is not Big Picture and they cannot co-exist. Eric Fromm speaks about this a good deal. One of the most overlooked sociologists in history.

I was in a position years ago where I kept explaining that being dyslexic, I cannot work any faster. And while the individual I reported to appeared understanding, the chap above him was not. However, in this hierarchy, I was told my depth of knowledge was such that they were taking notes from! I was informed I was costing them money at my slower pace even though my knowledge was an asset. I just didn't bother to go back the following week. 

It's not "my" autism. It's a COMPLETELY different way of receiving and mentally disseminating information which all autistics experience to one intensity or another. Either you appreciate this out-of-the-box difference or you don't, and with it comes strengths and limits. 

I would write down and gain clarity for yourself on what you were hired to do, contrast with current expectations. Write down the positives of working with your strengths (introversion) and the negatives of not being mindful of your limits. 

Freud originally stated "We're all a little Neurotic".  Except we're not, some of us are Autistic (and these are in polarity). It is a Lack of Empathy when your employer states they're also autistic. Clearly they don't understand the Autistic Difference. 3 fundamental values which make us all different are a difference in using language, a different salience network and the monotropic brain. Have a look into these so when you put a case together in context with your job expectations, you'll be able to show how an Autistic person would thrive in this position best. And how they would fail. I would be angry if my employer was purposely setting me up to fail. 

Thanks