Building a workplace that is inclusive for neurodivergent people is something every employer should be doing. However, there is still widespread ignorance about neurodiversity and relatively little discussion about it in our industry.
My guest this week is Theo Smith, recruitment manager at The National Institute for Healthcare Excellence. Theo draws on personal experience and some in-depth research to share his insights into how and why companies should attract, include and retain a more neurodivergent workforce.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is neurodiversity and how is it misunderstood
- The challenges neurodivergent people face in the workplace
- Empowering superhuman abilities
- The importance of sharing stories.
Theo also talks about the companies who are getting this right and shares his advice on the steps companies can take to improve the employee experience for neurodivergent people.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 213 of the recruiting Future podcast. Building a workplace that’s inclusive for neurodivergent people is something every employer should be doing. However, there’s still widespread ignorance about neurodiversity and still relatively little discussion about it in our industry. My guest this week is Theo Smith, recruitment manager at the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence. Theo draws from both personal experience and some in depth research as he shares some excellent insights into how and why companies should attract, include and retain a more neurodivergent workforce. Hi Theo, and welcome back to the podcast.
Theo Smith [00:01:55]:
Hi Matt, thanks for inviting me back on.
Matt Alder [00:01:57]:
Absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. For people who may not have heard when you were on before or may not know you, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Theo Smith [00:02:07]:
Yeah. My name’s Theo Smith and I work for a company called nice, an organization called nice, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. We look after the research, the evidence based research for the health sector, specifically within the NHS but also globally across the health sector. And I had a recruitment there, but I’ve also got some side interests. I’m neurodivergent and I guess that’s something we can talk about in a moment. But that’s, that’s why I’m back here today.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
Absolutely. So I think this is a topic that certainly I’m hearing more and more about and really trying to educate myself, educate myself in and I thought it’d be great to have you, have you sort of talk a bit more about it. So first and I suppose obvious question, what is neurodiversity? What does it mean to be neurodivergent?
Theo Smith [00:03:01]:
The reality with being neurodivergent is that it’s more complex than perhaps we once thought. So neurodiversity, I guess to give the professor’s example of what Neurodiversity is. It’s a concept where the neurological differences are recognized in human variation. I think over some time, through neuroscientists, we’ve been able to understand that being different, thinking and acting differently, whereby you may have autism or where you may have ADHD or ADD or dyspraxia or dyslexia, these are not illnesses. These are not to be thought of as negative. They are actually strengths and they are natural parts of human evolution. But what’s happened over time is our built environments, our working environments, our educational systems and structures have actually disabled these individuals and made it very difficult for them, because the assessment processes for organizations are designed by those people who are neurotypical, those who perhaps don’t fit. What we would say is this 15, 20%. Now, there’s lots of stats on this. They say approximately 10% of the UK population are dyslexic, around 5% have ADHD, around 3% have autism. But the reality is, and this was the big one for me, Matt, that I only realized a year and a half ago, is that you can have more than one, so that you can actually be adhd, but you can also be autistic, or that you can be dyslexic and you can also have ADHD. So just put this into context. When I was 21, I went to university as a mature student. I’d failed all my exams, I’d left school with barely anything to take with me, and I’d really struggled, but I’d managed to get to university in the end as a mature student. And the thing that really fascinated me is I found out I was dyslexic. And that was a big eye opener for me. But I thought that solved the challenges I’d faced in my life. Whereas in actual fact, I find now, at the age of 39, probably at 38, the other impacting factors that are going on. And actually I potentially suffer from ADD or adhd. I’m still going on that journey to fully understand that. So neurodiversity is about thinking differently and it accounts around 15 to 20%, but we think drastically different. And it’s neuroscience that’s really been able to help us understand that. But that’s kind of, you know, if we look at what a professor would say or what a neuroscientist would say, that’s how they would describe it. I think for me, there’s a bigger issue, a bigger thing that we should think about within the workplace, within the education system. And I was at recfest a couple of months ago. And I was there with the founder of a startup company called Tap in now, they provide careers content for students, and they have over a thousand micro influencers across universities, but they have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of students who tap in to listen to the careers content on YouTube, what have you. And I was sat there with Mills and I said, mills, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could find out from students now what they know about neurodiversity? And he’s like, yeah, we can do that now. And I was like, what? He was like, yeah, Theo, we can literally find that out. Now I’ll ask my thousand micro influencers across all the leading universities. You know, several questions. What would you like to ask them? So I asked them three things. Do you know what neurodiversity is? And they started to come back immediately. And once we got all the results from these micro influencers, 17% of them knew the term neurodiversity. We then asked them, would you identify yourself as someone who is Neurodiverse? 16% of them came back and said yes. So that’s only 1% of students. And we’re talking about the most engaged, top performing students, those ones who are willing to be an influencer within this space connected to tapping, the tapping community. That’s only 1% who didn’t identify as being neurodiverse, who knew what it was. Now, these are the future leaders of tomorrow, and they don’t know what neurodiversity is. Now what my wife turned around and said is, Theo, but that doesn’t matter, surely, because they will know what ADHD is, or they will know what dyslexia is or dyscalcia. My answer to it was, well, possibly they will know, but they will have the same perception of these as other people, that they are a disorder. And this is the big problem that we have, and this is what we have to resolve. Because if the future leads us tomorrow, only 1% of them, and that 1% may not identify being neurodiverse, but actually they may have a brother or sister or cousin or friend who’s neurodiverse. So even though they’re not neurodiverse themselves, they’re aware of it because they’re connected to people. What about the, you know, what about the 80 plus percent of other people, you know, who don’t even know what the term is? So for me, it’s really important that people just don’t think of the negative terms like adhd, which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It’s identified as a disorder because that’s what we’ve created here. You know, we’ve looked at these, if we look at, you know, kind of the medical paradigm, it’s that these have been disorders. We look on the news and we see hospitals in Ireland where people with autism have 24.7k and whether or not they should even have this care is questionable. You know, this 24.7K, whether we should have different options for these individuals. So when we start to break neurodiversity down, it’s really fascinating, really interesting what it means and that actually it cross pollinates across all of these areas that there are real links. So for me, this data, the fact that our future leaders don’t really know what neurodiversity is, is an issue. And this is why we need to talk about it today. But actually I’ve been doing some research with Horsefly. They’ve been working with me to look across the data they have globally. And this is online data, careers focused. And they’ve pulled lots of data for me that I’m collating to write blogs and to put into other content, books and other information I’ll be putting out. And just some early insight for you because this is not. Nobody’s seen this and nobody’s seen that data from tapping yet. But that data tells us that nobody online with careers profiles is really presenting themselves as being neurodivergent or putting neurodiversity within their profiles or putting adhd, dyslexia. The only people who are are those people who work within the field. So that data basically told us that if you’re a neuroscientist or if you’re a nurse or somebody within educational profession, a teacher, sen coordinator, somebody who would be working within this field or specialized within the field, they may possibly put this information on their profiles, on LinkedIn or whatever else it may be. But people are not normal people who are looking for careers. And why? Because I think this is the same challenge we face around people who are coming out who effectively want to express their sexuality or somebody who wants to express their ethnicity, their religion. People are cautious. And why are people cautious? Because organizations unfortunately sometimes will not have the structure in place to ensure that they recruit fairly. And that is a big concern on what we need to really think about now in the work that we do bringing this to light.
Matt Alder [00:11:53]:
There are some fascinating statistics there and I suppose to just dig a little bit deeper into that and this might be quite difficult to answer, a sort of a generalization level. But what kind of issues are neurodiverse people facing in the workplace today?
Theo Smith [00:12:11]:
So the challenge we have as a community, as a neurodivergent community, is that we’re not always fully aware of our own challenges within these organizations. We’re not always able to break them down ourselves. So the fact that people are now talking out about this, we’ve got advocates like Agony Orti, we’ve got individuals who are really willing to be outspoken and support other people in the community, means that people are building confidence around themselves and actually going, oh, that makes so much sense for me. So the types of things organizations will see is that somebody may be affected by light or sound. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re neurodivergent, but there is a good chance. So somebody who’s autistic perhaps might be highly affected by the built environment within the organization, by the swirls on the carpets, by the lighting being very bright, by the noise, the intense noise. Open plan offices have been shown to have a negative impact on those who are neurodivergent. Not all of them, because some people thrive off it, some people don’t. But if you can imagine, we can be hypersensitive to some of these things, so they can really affect us negatively. So as an example, somebody may not, like I use the word desk drop, you can desktop somebody in the organization. I like to desktop people because I like face to face contact, I like to talk to people, I like to engage with them. Part of my ADD and dyslexia means that, you know, I’m probably just better at getting up on my feet and directly having a conversation with somebody. However, even I need to consider that some people perhaps who are neurodivergent, let’s give an example of being autistic, me going and desk dropping them, actually can have a huge negative impact. But not just like somebody else who may get frustrated that I’ve interrupted their work. They may be able to hyper focus, which means they can go to levels that we couldn’t even imagine in terms of focusing on specific detail. This is why we have, you know, wonderful scientists. This is why we had people like Alan Jordan. You know, we have other incredible people who study PhDs because they’re able to hyper focus. The challenge is though, you go and stop that person in their tracks, you go and interrupt them. It may take them 30 minutes to an hour to get back in that mode of focus. So that can really negatively impact an individual just because walked up and desk dropped them. Now what I might be able to do is just take a post it note and drop that post it note next to them and say, theo here would love to talk when you’re ready. Just as an example, it’s me just I use. It’s a covey phrase, you know, seek first to understand, then to be understood. I think it’s from biblical texts, but you know, this type of methodology that you seek first to understand the individual and their needs. But the danger here is that that individual won’t just go, go away. They may implode or explode. So that may mean they need to go and find a quiet space because you’ve disrupted them in such a way. You’ve exploded their mind. You’ve really interrupted the work that they’re doing. And that can have a real negative impact. So if we keep interrupting an individual, they’re gonna implode, explode. We’re then gonna feel that negatively as an individual, as an organization, as a team, we’re gonna start to question the individual. A manager might start to question the individual because the other members of the team will go, that person’s insane. So the way the analogy I use, Matt, that people tend to like is, we all want Superman. We all want Superwoman, we all want superhuman abilities. We want Superman because he can shoot lasers through steel, he can fly, he can do incredible things. He can save people’s lives. Who doesn’t want Superman? But we bring Superman into our environment, we bring Superman into our assessment process. And then what do we do? We say, oh, by the way, we’re just going to make you work with this kryptonite. We’re going to put this kryptonite all through the recruitment process and assessment process. We’re going to put kryptonite all around your work environment. But do we really need this kryptonite? You know, John is our top performer and he’s fine working with kryptonite. He says, hey, everyone’s got to work with this kryptonite because I’ve had to work with it for years. So, you know, we bow down to John or whoever it may be, our leaders, our managers bow down because they just don’t want the hassle. But what we’re missing out here is on individuals who have superhuman abilities. And we have to believe this because, you know, Bill Gates, ADHD potentially now, you know, he leads Microsoft. They have some of the best programs in autism, SAP. They’ve been running programs to hire people who are autistic because they’ve seen they’ve got crazy skills that are adding Real value, these big organizations. Alan Turing paved the way of the modern computer and artificial intelligence. It’s very much believed that he was autistic. I mean, go and watch the film and you can see the actor does a brilliant example of somebody who faces challenges in the workplace and challenges with their colleagues. You can see the individuals just don’t understand it. And I think what we need to do is we need to step back and go, why is this individual imploding or exploding? Could it actually be something that we are doing as an individual, as an organization, and actually think about that is good practice anyway, you know, if we’re talking about candidate experience, we’re talking about employee experience, we’re talking around focusing on the individual to get the best out of them. So when we look at solving the problem for those people who are facing these challenges, linking back to employee experience, we are improving the environment for everybody because if they can work with somebody who can solve problems that nobody else can solve. And this is where I come back to. Do you want a culture that is defined by an individual because they’re the high performer or defined by a team or defined by the organization, or is it defined by the actual culture of the organization, what you really want to achieve? Sometimes that means having teams that don’t naturally look like they fit. You know, look at baseball, Moneyball, you know, the film where they got the best cross of players based on how they fitted within to that specific role. And I think that’s what we need to start doing. Why is this individual having problems with the environment? Why is light affecting them? Why is sound affecting them? Why do they explode? Why do they need to go and find a quiet space? Are we able to provide them the quiet space? Because what we’re going to get back, Matt, is something incredible. But if we’re not willing to fully understand this individual’s needs, then we’re going to make it really difficult for them.
Matt Alder [00:19:56]:
Picking up on what you said about Microsoft and SAP in your research, have you found sort of many positive stories from employers in terms of what they’re doing? And if so, could you tell us a little bit more about them? Yeah.
Theo Smith [00:20:10]:
So, I mean, Microsoft and SAP are good examples of global organizations who recognize the potential of people who are autistic, who could work within specific technology roles, whether it’s as developers or coders or whatever it may be. Now, they’ve been running these programs for years, and the information and data that’s coming out is that they’ve been highly successful. Now the thing is, when you’ve got an organization like Microsoft or SAP, and this is where it may scare other organizations and people where we need to make the big shift. They’ve got the size, the scope to deal with this. And if we look at some of the innovators who are perhaps neurodivergent, you know, we come back to Albert Einstein, you know, it’s deemed that he was potentially, who knows, dyslexic, adhd, autistic, we don’t know. But certainly he fits into the kind of Alan Jordan mould, Bill Gates mould in terms of just doing something crazily insane, in terms of creating something that, you know, changes the world and did it in a very alternative way. You know, if we match that to people who are neurodivergent today, we can see there are real similarities. So they’ve got the benefit of being led by somebody who’s neurodivergent and being technology driven, where we can see people who are neurodivergent historically have made and been very successful. So I would say let’s put them to one side. They could say let’s pick Australia. We’re going to pick an office where we don’t put anyone else other than people who are autistic, and we’re going to get them performing brilliantly well and all that energy is going to be put to make sure they’ve got wonderful employee experience, right? And we’re not going to put anyone else in there to disrupt that. Where I’m seeing now other organizations make headway and do some really interesting work is in smaller organizations. So, you know, you may have an auto trader as an example in the uk, who are really shaking things up and doing incredible stuff in Manchester in the uk, and, you know, you think autotrader, you think cars, but actually, no, you know, they’re an online organization, they don’t deal with any cars themselves. They have a lot of developers, they have a lot of, you know, technical people, digital people. So the things that they’ve been doing in their smaller community is looking at how they can improve the environment for everybody. So sometimes it’s something simple like if every. If you have a town hall meeting, you know, where the CEO, MD may be, you know, talking to the whole office. And you could have 100, 200, 300 people all in a single space now, lots of people clapping, applauding can actually be quite intrusive and quite intense for somebody who is autistic, as an example, and for other people, actually. So introducing something like raising your hands in the air to celebrate rather than clapping or screaming or shouting. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to follow that. But if you can reduce that noise by 50%, that can have a positive impact on somebody. You otherwise wouldn’t want to be in that environment. And we can put that across meetings. We can say when we have a meeting, can we ensure that the meeting, that the room is fit for purpose, that the room isn’t too small? Because again, somebody who’s neurodivergent can be put under huge stress and anxiety by being in a room that is noisy, that is overcrowded. And you know, it’s when we think around people who perhaps have migraines as well, you know, some of these people get visual aura. We’re not just talking about somebody dislikes being in that environment. And that’s what we need to understand. We’re talking about people who are actually hugely impacted by these environments. So it’s these types of pieces of work that I want to bring out that I want to showcase, that I want to see more of, because these things are happening. But you go research this online, Matt, and you won’t find enough of it. What will keep coming up is Microsoft and SAP. What won’t come up is these small organizations, whether it’s Auto Trader or whether it’s nationwide or whether it’s organizations just trying to make a difference in whatever small way they can. I think this is what we need to start doing. We need to start getting these organizations to talk about what we’re doing. BBC is another great example where they’ve done some work within the Citrasol team, within the, the IT team. They’ve created content and they’ve taken it upon themselves to put out information, guidance content to show what it is to be neurodivergent, what it is to be autistic. And they’ve utilized that content within the organization, within the BBC. But actually they’ve also presented that information externally. So you can go and find that content where they’ve made videos of what it’s like to be somebody who’s autistic in a meeting, what it’s like to be somebody who’s autistic who has to get in a lift, go up that lift, walk out of that lift and go and talk to their manager. And then that starts to open it up for people. So I want to hear more of this, more of these good news stories around what organizations are doing. But there’s other support out there. So I don’t want organizations to fear, I don’t want Individuals to fear taking the first step because it can be big and it can be complex like anything. If we’re looking at diversity generally, it can be scary. But actually there are simple steps that we can take and there are some good examples that are starting to come out. And hopefully after people listen to this, they’ll be contacting you, man. They’ll be contacting myself saying we’ve got some great stories that we want to share. After all, it was only a year and a half ago that I understood what the term neurodiversity was. And it was down to the recruitment events company and the RL100 where I was invited to go and hear some people talk on the subject. Specifically Ed Thompson at Optimize and Uptimize provide online learning for organizations who want to really take the next big step and they want to re educate the organization. They can use online learning tools to be able to educate both the employees, the managers and to really make that shift. Because often it is that it’s being able to embrace neurodiversity for what it is and then show the rest of your employees that you buy into it and that you want to make a difference. And okay, you may be in the early stages, but you’re willing to try and see what you can do. And you know, this is even though at NICE we provide the evidence based research on if you are autistic or you’re ADHD and you go to your doctor and you seek medical assistance because sometimes you do, sometimes you need medical diagnosis of these things to get the support within the education system, within the health system, dependent on, on the complexity of your diagnosis. Then ultimately, even though NICE provides this guidance, even we have to continually look at ourselves and work with our employees to understand that we’re doing the right thing. And it’s evolving all the time because you have different types of people joining you. So I would say no organization is completely fixed. This. It’s about, you know, continually working with it as an, as an idea, as a concept. And I believe that are amazing, mad crazy skills that people can benefit from if they’re willing to take that step.
Matt Alder [00:28:26]:
Final question, and you’ve touched on this a lot already, but perhaps as a summary, what would your advice be to employers in order for them to attract and retain neurodivergent people?
Theo Smith [00:28:39]:
I guess to keep it very simple, the first thing I would do is to allow your employees to have the conversation. Because the reality is, Matt, you have people who are neurodivergent in your organization. Even though and these are the scary stats. Even though a lot of people who neurodivergent unfortunately are in prisons, they may have some care because there are other complex needs that can come out of being neurodivergent or they may become entrepreneurs. The scary stats, they did a study in Chelmsford where 53% of prisoners were diagnosed as having dyslexia. Texas prisoners done similar studies and they’ve come out with similar amounts. 50%. Sweden and Norway have done similar studies. So we can say that if you’re working class and you’re neurodivergent, there’s a good chance you’ll end up in prison. 30 to 50% of entrepreneurs, different stats, depending on where you look, are deemed to be dyslexic or possibly 50% neurodivergent. So there’s clear stats to show if you’re working class, you could end up in prison. Good chance, if you’re neurodivergent or if you come from a good family, you may well become an entrepreneur. So what I think organizations need to do is they need to take a big leap and realise that if they can start to respect those people within their organisations who are neurodivergent, give them the platform to talk and to speak about the challenges and to share it with other employees, that is already going to be groundbreaking within the organization. It’s already going to push the boundaries because those managers, those employees who sit next to them go, why is that person making funny noises? Why are they tapping? Why do they explode when I desk drop them? Why do they get so agitated in meetings? If we can start to lift the lid on some of this stuff, that’s half the problem. Because then what we can do is we can attract more of these people because we’re not then going through court cases because we’ve not treated these people properly, or we’re not allowing 80 plus percent of people who are autistic and not in current full time employment. All the statistics are absolutely disgraceful, they’re horrendous, we shouldn’t be there. But they’re simple or they’re global statistics that are saying the same things. So it’s not just the uk, Sweden, Norway, the us. We really need to shift the dial on this, go into your organization, let them know you want to start having this conversation and allow your employees to step up and talk about it through blogs, through informal meetings, lunch and learns. And that’s when you’ll really start to get your head around the complexity of the issue, how people are affected within your environment, and then you can think around the simple changes you can start to make because you will understand your own environment.
Matt Alder [00:31:53]:
Theo, thank you very much for talking to me.
Theo Smith [00:31:55]:
Matt, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.
Matt Alder [00:31:58]:
My thanks to Theo Smith. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
