WAYS-OF-WORKING.md

Ways Of Working

• Flexitime

    A neurodivergent person may have difficulty in focussing and effectively working during certain hours of the day, such as the morning or the afternoon, a working day can be ideally organised to suit the times that a person is typically at their most productive.  Some may even benefit from the option to work overnight.
  
    If a person is required to work in the office, flexitime allows then to avoid peek commuting hours, which may provide a stressful and overwhelming sensory experience to the neurodivergent person, they can often be exhausted just from the commute, feeling like they've put in a whole days work before the working day has even started.
  
    Define a core set of working hours and give trust to your employees to work their full hours how they choose.
  
    Consider if core hours need to be specified at all given the type of industry and work the company operate in, however, if a company is more open with it's working hours the pool of potential employees is widened with the byproduct of having people working & covering a larger portion of the day, which may be beneficially to companies needing to provide 24 technical support to their customers.
  
    A culture of trusting the employees needs to be nurtured when offering flexitme, trust that an employee will work their contracted hours will be rewarded with better productivity in a majority of the cases.        
  

• Offer hybrid & fully remote working options

    Fully remote should be the default preference, if hybrid or full office work is required this needs well stated justifications why office working is required on certain days.
  
    Often forcing mandatory office working days may already be at odds with how a person is already working, and a neurodivergent person may have a legal right to accommodations to continue working in this way.
  
    Some neurodivergent people however may be more comfortable working late hours, consideration should be carefully assessed to whether this is viable for your workplace or not, first instinct may be to have this accommodation rejected, even if practical realities make it entire reasonable to support.
  
    Don't be afraid to suggest compromises and trial periods for different working hours, but it's important to understand there are many big personal consequences a neurodivergent person may experience that are not externally visible, it's important to trust when an neurodivegent employee says they need remote working, that they really do need remote working.
    
    This further supports the idea of flexible, hybrid and remote working.
  

• Be flexible with a persons working style

    A neurodivergent person may do a single persons work week in a single day and it's important there is an understanding of this, the negative consequence of them continuing to deliver 110% day after day for many subsequent days & weeks will result in burnout and needing time off, there may be a self-imposed rule the employee may hve given themselves that they need to be constantly delivering.
  
    Often the guilt of not doing something even after delivering a mountain the day before overrides the rational to need rest. 
  
    Encourage a person and reassuring them they've already done enough promotes balance in the work place.
  
    It's possible somebody in the workplace is viewed a superstar employee but the negative sides to this are not often advertised and a potential warning sign they are overworking themselves, often a superstar employee can fall dramatically when burnout takes hold.
  

• Enable maintaining personal daily structure

    Structure and routine are important mechanisms for a person with autism for managing persistent anxiety and providing a form of comfort, a break in routine can be very distressing, promoting feelings of losing control, contributing towards burnouts and meltdowns.
  
    Establishing structure and routine may also help a person with ADHD cope with a frequently distracted mind.
  
    Enabling somebody to create structure in the workplace helps promote a healthy workplace, structure however needs to be respected by other employees and encouragement is needed to ensure they respect this, which can often be difficult,  disruptions can include last minute meeting bookings (or any other last minute changes to plans), interrupting a persons existing daily plan.  
    
    Often people may feel their particular disruption/meeting is an exception to the rule, whilst this may not be the case,
  
    A daily work structure and routine isn't just helpful towards those who are neurodivergent but to everybody, consistent unplanned events and surprises are a sign of disorganised workplace, resulting in lost of productivity.
    
    Examples of good planning include;
    
    - calendar bookings for breaks (to ensure people don't book other meetings in their place)
    
    - calendar bookings for quiet time (a space where it is made clear messages or phone calls won't be answered), personal or an agreed shared time throughout the company
  
    - ensuring lunch times are respected and no meetings are organised between certain times, for example 12pm till 2pm.
  
    - that meetings aren't organised on times of day where everything is likely to be forgotten, i.e. Friday afternoon, late afternoon in general
  
    - ensuring that there is time in-between large blocks of meetings for rest and processing time
  
    - meetings are booked well in advanced
  

• Encourage regular breaks

    This is a further reflection on the point above, it's important to keep sacred times scared, i.e. lunch time, and time where an employee has booked out a break time in the calendar.
  
    This prevents disruption to routine and avoids scenarios which may commit to meltdowns and burnouts.
  
    don't encourage brown bag and lunch and learn meetings that overlap with break times, schedule them during regular hours (do not infringe on the employees free time) scheduling meetings at such time creates an exclusionary environment.  Break times should encourage time away from the computer screen.
  
    It's also important to encourage people not work beyond their contracted hours, to maintain a healthy balance, even if a deadline is looming, if a piece of work is unable to be completed within the deadline during normal working hours, then it is a sign of something else going wrong culturally.