Back on tumblr after possibly 4 years (profile still says I'm 25, let's run with it) because where else can I just ramble in introspection?
I'm looking into workplace accommodations for people who are autistic and/or hard of hearing, because hopefully either I'm moving to a new workplace, or I'm making this workplace make reasonable adjustments, and everything is just reiterating things that just aren't my experience of being autistic.
Like, routine in general is really, really good for me (having morning and bed time routines, eating meals at regular intervals, exercising at the same time of day, having chores run by routine so I don't have to think about them, etc), but I am so bad at following /routines/ and often find them boring and constrictive and make me less likely to actually do things? Which is fortunate as we rarely get work in such a way that we could schedule tasks or types of work to any kind of routine, so it would be a pretty tough accommodation to implement.
There's also a lot of info for employers about instructions in plain language, free from idioms or with idioms explained, not using sarcasm or making sure sarcasm is understood etc. Which is great that it's there, but again, not something I really /feel/.
I wish they'd advise employers to expect follow up questions asking for clarification when it is clear that they mean something different to what they have said, and the autistic employee is trying to figure out how to do both, so as not to get told off for not doing one or the other, or be seen as "sigh, I forget you don't understand what I mean" (which is frustrating on multiple levels), or how to ask for clarification without sounding like you're being rude or questioning authority ("when you said "list all the charts", did you actually mean "list all the tables", because as a company and in this product, those mean two different specific things, but it makes zero sense to list all the charts in this context, or did I misunderstand the broader context of the task"). Or give the advice that employers and colleagues may well misinterpret an autistic employee's tone of voice, and not get that they're responding to deadpan sarcasm with deadpan sarcasm.
I wish there was advice on how to turn down company social events like Christmas parties in very small companies, because I don't have the strength to investigate 4 venues and figure out if the lighting and sound and smell and table positioning is just going to be too much at any of them.
I wish they advised employers to request colleagues not to wear strong perfume/scents at work, not to spray deodorant in the office etc, rather than "position their desk away from the kitchen to avoid food smells, if this is a sensitivity". Which is good, but like, people take more offense to being told that a person can't be near /them/ because of /their/ smell, rather than near the kitchen/food because of a food smell.
I feel like accommodations should be more focused on maybe, if you schedule them in back to back meetings where they're having to interact with multiple people on different social/hierarchical levels, they're probably going to need the afternoon off, and they should be paid for that time, because their brain is still going to be processing everything that was said in all those meetings, and the implications of it, for several hours.
Or that they should be allowed to dress comfortably depending on their sensory needs for that day.
Or that if just existing in a room with multiple peoples conversations going on around them all day is exhausting to process, they should be allowed more work from home time if at all possible to the business, or more paid leave, else they will burn out faster.
It would be helpful to have clear instructions on procedures - how do you request leave? If its by email, what exact wording do you put in the subject, and in the body of the message? If you're ill, do you notify your line manager, and they notify the office manager and boss, or do you also have to notify those people, and potentially the people you're working on stuff with? Once you've finished a task, do you let your line manager know immediately (or whoever has given you the task I guess), do you give them a summary at the end of the day, or do you just keep going indefinitely until they ask/you completely run out of tasks without being given more (lol).
A lot of the accommodations are just making me realise that there's a lot of common experiences of having an autistic brain that I don't particularly get, and that there are a lot of things which I've been assuming are autistic things (and which I'm pretty sure are autistic things) which just don't come up in relation to making life/the working environment easier.
