A group of neurodiversity advocates backed by three big NZ companies are launching a certification programme they hope will change the world for neurodiverse people at work. Because at the moment, they say, “it sucks”.
Rich Rowley had a tough start. A tough four decades, even. He failed school, got involved in drugs and crime, turned things around a bit and went to university, passed a law degree without attending lectures, spent a couple of years as a lawyer, before going into computing and then into teaching, where he “survived” until he was in his early 40s.
“I always felt like I was an alien. My whole life I’d never been able to articulate why.”
At 42, Rowley was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) – the first of his ‘diagnoses’.
These days Rowley identifies as “neurodiverse”, defined by a Harvard Medical School article as “the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways.”.
The theory is there is no one "right" way of thinking, learning, and behaving, and differences are not viewed as deficits.
Neurodiversity encompasses a range of different ways of thinking - often, but not exclusively, involving people on the autistic spectrum or with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia or sometimes brain injury.
Unemployment for neurodivergent adults in the US runs at least as high as 30-40 percent, according to the Centre for Neurodiversity and Employment Innovation. Exact figures are unknown, including in New Zealand, because hardly anyone's tracking the problem, but at that rate, a neurodiverse person is eight times less likely to have a job than a neurotypical person and three times less likely than someone with a disability.
For Rowley, understanding why he felt like an alien in the workforce helped. But more critical was a career move - from being a teacher to a job with education innovator Frances Valintine at Mind Lab and Tech Futures Lab. Valintine’s companies provide post-graduate programmes upskilling teachers and workshops for business people around change, collaboration and digital transformation.
Suddenly Rowley’s skills - skills that had never really fitted into the traditional work “box” (and never will, he says) - were in demand.
“Frances was charging me out for big sums of money to do workshops for big corporates. I was talking to them about human-centred design, about the innovation process, how to make change quickly, and about the role of people in ‘Agile’ and ‘Lean’ [management processes]. Suddenly I was someone who could add value to these big businesses.
“For the first time in my life I was doing something I was really good at and loved doing. It was purposeful and had meaning.
“Frances gave me a space to be me.”
Being Rich Rowley involved bizarre work schedules, days when he might not work at all, and mad periods when he worked all the time. It meant not being expected to go to lots of meetings or answer lots of emails - both things he despises. Most importantly, it meant being judged on what he delivered, not how much time spent at his desk.
“Some people might say ‘you get away with murder’ because I’d go to work some weeks and I would literally sit on my own, downstairs with head phones on, doing whatever the hell I wanted. And no one would come and talk to me and ask me what I was up to or say ‘Where’s ABC or XYZ?’ It was just ‘Rich is doing his thing’. They knew when something needed doing it would be delivered and it would be good.
“And that was totally contrary to all the work expectations I’d ever had in my life.”
Being able to be Rich Rowley also meant the company giving him help with what he was hopeless at - notably organisation. Mind Lab staffer Melissa Fincham was on hand to make sure he knew what he was doing each day, where he was going and to remind him what he needed, he says.
“I can’t describe what it’s like, being allowed to be really awful at the stuff I’m really awful at. It was so glorious I could cry. Literally it brings me to tears how joyful that time in my life was.
“And everybody should experience that at work.”
Rainbow Tick for neurodiversity
Which is where Brain Badge comes in.
The organisation, also known as the Neurodiversity Education Programme, was set up a year ago by Rowley and a group of others, including educators, doctors, scientists and business people to develop a workplace certification programme for neurodiversity recognition.
Brain Badge is modelled partly on the Rainbow Tick sexual and gender diversity scheme.
The business programme is set to launch in July and is being funded in its early stages by Auckland Transport, KiwiBank and The Warehouse Group.
“We’re committed to reframing neurodiverse ‘disorders’ and ‘disabilities’ into valuable and necessary mindsets able to unlock business and societal sustainability,” the Brain Badge website says.
“[Being Brain Badge accredited] demonstrates the value that the business places on neurodiversity and as such, [how it] recognises, welcomes and most importantly, supports its neurodiverse employees.”
The certification programme will be a five-year commitment for companies, Rowley says. But rather than being compliance-based (a set of criteria companies have to meet), it will focus on a business identifying gaps, committing to improvement, and implementing goals around inclusivity and empowering neurodiverse people at work.
Sarah Codling is another Brain Badge advisor. “The certification is about saying ‘we as an organisation have begun this journey. We are invested in making workplaces better for everyone, including our neurodiverse employees’,” she says.
Auckland Transport is one of the early adopters of the Brain Badge concept, putting money and staffing resources into developing the certification and training programmes.
Brett Bishop, the organisation’s ‘people experience lead’ says when his team put out a call to employees to get involved in the project, he was “swamped” with emails.
Of the 50 or so staff that got in touch, many were neurodiverse employees and others were parents of neurodiverse children. A handful were involved in education in some way, shocked at how badly served some kids were by schools.
Masked and unmasked
Bishop talks about “masked” and “unmasked” when it comes to neurodiverse people. Being “unmasked” is the equivalent of being “out” in the LGBT community.
He says 15-20 of Auckland Transport’s 1500 staff members are “unmasked”, but the real number of neurodiverse staffers would be far higher, likely more than 10 percent.
“The only way we find out is actually by saying, ‘We're open for business, it is okay, we understand the value that you add as a non dominant.’”
AT’s diversity and inclusion strategy involves a workforce “that represents the face of Auckland”, Bishop says. And Brain Badge is a good fit.
“We've got to provide a public transport system to Auckland, so we really need to be in a position where we understand our customer base, and what better way to do that, than having a workforce that includes everyone's views.”
Then of course there’s the fact that, like so many other companies, Auckland Transport is impacted by the talent shortage, particularly in the infrastructure design and build part of the business.
Working towards Brain Badge certification will involve a big change in company HR processes, Bishop says, everything from recruitment to onboarding, developing performance to supporting staff.
Challenged and challenging
It’s something Frances Valintine knows all too well. As well as being Rich Rowley’s boss at Tech Futures Lab, Valintine’s 100-strong team includes a good percentage of neurodiverse people. She figures if you are trying to shift the way we think about education and about management processes, it pays to start with a reasonable number of staff who think differently about, well, most stuff.
Valintine is not neurodiverse herself, but “I do gravitate towards people who found the education system challenging. People who are very bright but have different learning styles.
“They bring clarity to situations, particularly if you are trying to solve a problem. There is no such thing as typical - no typical customer, learner or employee. If you are building solutions for people who are just like you, you are going to miss the mark.”
Valintine says Rowley is “one of the most astounding and extraordinary people I’ve ever met”.
Not only was he good at working with companies around transformational change and digital upskilling, but he was also increasingly confident about sharing his own experience and challenging executives around diversity and inclusion.
“As diversity became a key matrix for companies, we were able to offer someone on our team who understood diversity in the context of how people were thinking about systems change or agile cultures. He’d weave his story in - often people were in tears because it resonated with their own story.
Fostering flexibility
Still, being Rowley’s boss, and leading a team full of different thinkers does require considerable flexibility, Valintine says. Some neurodiverse staff, including Rowley, can be highly anxious and find some work tough.
“If you are having a bad day; if you are in a funk you can’t be productive.
“Some of them have shared words to let us know it’s not a good day today, others might just say they need to be off the grid, but will still be functioning.
“I truly understand.”
Valintine says she and others in the company have learnt to recognise situations that are low risk and high risk for different individuals - and develop strategies to manage that risk.
It might be having a backstop - an alternative - in case someone can’t work on a particular day, or it might be working with a particular staff member to find out what they need to make life easier.
When Rowley was leading workshops, for example, he liked to have someone he trusted standing at the back of the room at the beginning of a session - until he felt settled. No problem: Melissa Fincham did that too.
Valintine says even before the pandemic, lots of her staff worked from home. She has one employee she has only met once face-to-face - he doesn’t like being in an office. “He’s really good at what he does and we have roles where you don’t need to come in. Why would I not hire him?”
“Life does not come in tidy boxes; if you put flexibility around your workplace, you get trust and respect in your organisation and you attract and retain good people.” Frances Valintine, Mind Lab
Meanwhile, quite a number of staff work four days a week - though on full salary. It allows people - neurotypical as well as neurodiverse - to deal with all their life stuff on a weekday and still get two days to unwind. She reckons those people are just as productive as if they were working five days.
“The idea is if you accommodate the needs of someone that thinks differently, you learn to accommodate others - someone with an unwell parent, or kids at home, or so who needs flexibility in another way.
“Life does not come in tidy boxes; if you put flexibility around your workplace, you get trust and respect in your organisation and you attract and retain good people.”
Staff turnover at Mind Lab and Tech Futures Lab is extremely low, Valintine says.
A key to employing neurodiverse people is to see it not as a “nice thing to do” but as good for the business, she says.
“You need to understand the evidence of the benefits, which are very well documented, whether it’s around contribution to strategic thinking, responding to the needs of different customers, or having internal people that challenge you. You want to hear that criticism from people that work for you first, not people on the outside.”
'Reasonable accommodations'
One of the key jobs for Brain Badge will be working with companies to understand what is “reasonable accommodation” to make it easier for neurodiverse people in a workplace.
It might be around the recruitment process - a big stumbling block for many neurodiverse people (see Newsroom’s 2019 article ‘The autism employment conundrum’).
It can be as easy as changing the wording on job adverts, of adapting (or abandoning) job interviews.
Many neurodiverse people perform badly in interviews.
“If they just sent out a pre-interview note saying ‘this is who is going to be interviewing you, this is their background’, just something really simple like that, I’d already be 30 percent less anxious,” Rowley says.
Other accommodations might be companies providing a quiet space, or noise-cancelling headphones, in an open plan office.
For Sarah Codling, the most important thing is judging people’s work on outputs, not on hours worked each week.
“Maybe I can do something fast because my brain is wired that way, but it still takes just as much energy. There are sprinters and there are marathon runners.”
You wouldn’t expect a sprinter to run 20 races for every one race run by a marathon runner, just because 100 metres is so much faster, she says. But companies do that when they expect people to spend 40 hours a week at their desk, no matter how quickly they achieve a result.
“If it takes eight hours or 20 hours or 40 hours, I’m just as tired.
“If managers really focus and hone in on the result, and not the process, it opens up innovation, because it enables people to create whatever process they need in order to achieve the result. It gives them more time, it gives them more energy and it gives better results.”
Auckland Transport’s Brett Bishop says having a culture where it’s easy for staff to talk to their managers about their neurodiversity will make things easier for staff and bosses. The organisation recently started working with Autism New Zealand on strategies to get the best out of a couple of staff members.
“One manager spoke of an individual she saw had huge potential, but where she felt she could be doing more to help them. Long story short, we reached out to Autism New Zealand and I don't think they've ever looked back.”
Homosexuality was a "disorder" once
If the situation with neurodiverse people being very reluctant to talk about their challenges in the workplace, out of fear of losing their job sounds familiar - that’s because it is.
Rich Rowley remembers his uncle, a gay man in the 1960s and 1970s when homosexuality was seen as a “disorder” or a “deficit” by many.
The American Psychiatric Association did not remove “homosexuality” from its list of psychiatric diagnoses until 1973.
And acceptance of homosexuality - particularly in the workplace - took decades.
It was only in 2014 that former BP chief executive John Browne (Lord Browne) wrote his story of being outed as a gay man at the head of one of Britain’s biggest companies.
In his book The Glass Closet: Why coming out is good business Browne writes that firms that allow their staff to be open and honest will be more profitable than companies that make gay employees live a lie.
After 25 years living a double life never mentioning his homosexuality at work, he talks about what a colossal waste of energy that had been, and how much more productive employees could be if they were able to be open.
“Maybe this is a very neurodiverse way of looking at it, but we are like, ‘Why should we go through all those steps - awareness, tolerance, acceptance, embracing and empowerment?’ We are just going straight to the empowerment stage.” Sarah Codling, Brain Badge
One of the core group putting Brain Badge certification together is Gresham Bradle, chair of the Rainbow New Zealand Charitable Trust.
Rich Rowley hopes the change in attitudes towards neurodiverse people moves faster than they did for the LGBTIQ community.
“It took the gender pride movement 20 or 30 years to really begin making significant inroads. We can’t wait that long for neurodiversity.”
Codling says she hopes working with the business community - and after that with schools - will fast-track the process.
“Maybe this is a very neurodiverse way of looking at it, but we are like, ‘Why should we go through all those steps - awareness, tolerance, acceptance, embracing and empowerment?’ We are just going straight to the empowerment stage.”
Rowley would like to see 100 New Zealand companies working on certification within the first couple of years of the programme - and the Brain Badge concept being picked up overseas.
Being able to prove the advantage for the business community is key, Rowley says.
“Employing neurodiverse people is proven to add value. That’s how you make a big difference and shift people’s attitudes.
“It would kill me if it took 20 or 30 years to make an impact.”
