Neurodiversity and Office Insurance policies | Employment and discrimination weblog
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POLONIUS: What do you learn, my lord?
HAMLET: Phrases, phrases, phrases.
(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)
Neurodiversity Celebration Week befell between 21 and 27 March. The next week was Autism Acceptance Week, culminating in World Autism Consciousness Day on 2 April. This implies neurodiversity has featured closely on social media just lately.
Throughout Neurodiversity Celebration Week, I spent a while reflecting on my observe as an employment lawyer. Had been there any areas of my work that weren’t significantly neurodiversity-friendly? Might I enhance issues for neurodiverse shoppers? Was it one thing to contemplate?
On the time I had acquired a case file that included round 50 pages of insurance policies on disciplinary, grievance, and harassment at work. The dispute concerned a dyslexic member of workers. I perused the densely packed textual content. “Hardly dyslexia pleasant,” I mused to myself, observing the irony.
I attempted to think about being dyslexic and receiving all that textual content to learn as a brand new worker. How would that make you’re feeling? How would it not have an effect on your notion of that employer?
What’s neurodiversity?
The time period “neurodiversity” (or ND for brief) was first coined by the social scientist Judy Singer within the Nineteen Nineties. It refers to a distinction in mind processing that may have an effect on social interplay, studying, consideration, sensory processing, and different features of interacting with the world and different folks.
It has develop into a collective time period for situations similar to autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia. The phrase was an try and reframe the narrative away from the detrimental connotations that the situations have been pathological issues needing to be remedied. Think about it as simply one other facet of range.
I acquired a analysis of autism a few years in the past. It was a shock on the time. However that was resulting from my very own perceptions of what autism meant, little doubt influenced by the film Rain Man.
Visible pondering
The American scientist Temple Grandin has written extensively about how her autism is an asset in her specialist area of designing services for livestock. One in all her theories is that autistic individuals are extra more likely to be visible thinkers. She has even written a ebook entitled Visible Pondering, which describes the best way wherein she thinks, fairly actually, in footage.
This idea of visible pondering has been commented on by various specialists as being a standard expertise throughout the ND neighborhood. Sir Richard Branson, who’s dyslexic, has spoken about how he is ready to “see” improvements and enterprise alternatives. He has additionally written about the best way dyslexia formed his strategy to growing services and products at Virgin by specializing in brief, concise slogans that resonate instantly. Principally, dyslexia helps him reduce out the waffle.
Written insurance policies within the office
Some estimates recommend 15% of adults are ND. That interprets to 1 in seven workers. Doubtlessly, a sizeable chunk of your consumer’s workforce might be alienated by the presence of a text-heavy workers handbook. And if these 15% usually tend to be visible thinkers, preferring diagrams and footage, how efficient is the normal workers handbook for guaranteeing info is absorbed?
As an employment lawyer, I realised that the majority office insurance policies are introduced as pages on pages of textual content. Normally they’re typed as 10-point Arial or Instances New Roman. Every coverage specified by paragraphs. Blocks of textual content, damaged up solely by headings and titles.
However is there any authorized or technical purpose why a workers handbook have to be formatted as pages of steady textual content? I can’t consider any authorized requirement for the contents of a workers handbook to be introduced that manner. So why do employment legal professionals proceed churning them out when requested?
Is it comfort (I imply the lawyer’s comfort, not the consumer’s)? In spite of everything, what might be simpler than accessing a precedent, changing the sq. brackets with the title of the employer, and sending it to the consumer? And maybe the consumer feels reassured. In spite of everything, if their lawyer has offered all these paperwork, it have to be to fulfill a compliance obligation of some kind.
Considerably paradoxically, there may be one explicit part of the workers handbook that’s at all times laid-out clearly in bullet level format, with numerous house for the textual content to breathe: the non-exhaustive record offering examples of gross misconduct that might represent dismissal. Legal professionals at all times get that bit proper.
Alternate options to textual content
In 2018 I recall seeing a pattern topic entry request process within the type of an infographic. Two pages of bins, icons, and signpost textual content explaining how to reply to an information request. It was unbelievable. It communicated the required info in a transparent and concise manner. Certainly that’s the objective of a office coverage: to convey important info that the employee must know.
There may be circumstances the place a text-heavy coverage is required, which is ok. But when not, do legal professionals have a duty to contemplate alternate options, similar to utilizing flowcharts, graphics or course of maps? They’re more likely to be extra inclusive in the direction of the 15% of your consumer’s workers who’re ND. Can we, as employment legal professionals, ever point out this to a consumer?
I may be unsuitable, however I think there’s a worry that turning office procedures into infographics would seem unprofessional. Type over substance. A office coverage is a authorized matter which mustn’t contain a graphic designer.
It might additionally make the coverage look infantile. There’s a counter to that: Steve Jobs (himself dyslexic) instructed his designers at Apple to make the iPad really easy to make use of {that a} small youngster might choose it up and begin utilizing it instantly.
Think about the final time to procure a gadget or piece of tech like a smart-TV. Normally, it comes with some type of “fast begin information”. Is it ten pages of unbroken formatted textual content? Extra seemingly it’s a sequence of numbered graphics and textual content bins explaining the right way to set-up and use the system.
There’s a purpose why they’ve been designed in that format. They’re aiming to speak important info to a various vary of individuals. Does that remind you of something?
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