Tag Archive for: Reasonable Adjustments

reasonable adjustments

Six reasonable adjustment examples

Have you ever wondered what a reasonable adjustment is?

Here are six recent examples from The Neurodivergent Coach’s work. To protect identities, names have been changed.

1. Dealing with overwhelm – reasonable adjustment

Alex was utterly overwhelmed. His main complaint was that he was overwhelmed daily, with too much to do and no idea where to start.

Working with Alex revealed that he required regular breaks in his routine to reset, as he learned to manage his energy levels and begin to approach tasks confidently. This developed into how he managed his calendar, scheduling extra time at the end of meetings to recharge and making this time non-negotiable. This allowed him to fully reset and be his best, most present self, especially when feeling overwhelmed.

2. Fogettory – reasonable adjustment

The most common trait I hear when assessing neurodivergent individuals is their struggle with short-term memory.

I recently worked with Paula, who had an influential job at a UK university. Her role involved interacting with different people and producing detailed reports on academic papers. Paula explained that she often forgot what was on one screen when she flicked to another. Paula had been working on her laptop for extended periods and found it frustrating and exhausting to remember what was on the previous screen. For Paula, the solution was to increase the number of available screens. She started with one extra screen and then rapidly grew to two, meaning she could lay out all the information she was working on simultaneously without printing it. She could highlight and reword areas without fear of losing where she was.

Screen real estate matters!

3. Meetings, meetings, meetings

John described how he spent most of his time in meetings and often came away stressed, frustrated and unable to see how he had contributed well to the meeting.

Working with John, it became clear that it was not John’s issue. The problem was in the structure of the meetings in which he was being asked to participate.

Often these meetings were ad hoc without a clear agenda, and from John’s perspective, he didn’t understand why he was there. Working with John and his line manager, we created a new process where the organisation implemented structured meetings that included an agenda and a clear indication of what was expected of everyone who attended.

This helped John feel confident about why he was there and what he would be expected to do. Interestingly, fewer meetings took place as an additional benefit, and fewer people were involved because the meeting organisers were forced to take a long hard look at who needed to be there and why.

This example highlights why neuroinclusive workplaces are better for everyone.

4. No place like home

Alice hated doing detailed work in the office as too many distractions took her away from the task she had to do. This ultimately meant she was not present when she needed to do her work. This was compounded by the expectation that she should be sociable in the office.

Working with Alice quickly revealed that she required a dedicated space to complete her work when she needed to concentrate. She also needed to know what was expected of her when she went into the office so that she could prepare to interact with colleagues and participate more actively. This looked like agreeing to three days working at home and two days in the office with the flexibility to change based on business requirements.

We discussed this with her manager to find out what the expectations were when she was in the office, as there were a lot of unwritten rules about the company culture. It was agreed that Alice would arrange to catch up with two colleagues when she came into the office. These meetings could be set up in advance with a clear outline of what they would discuss. In Alice’s case, it gave her a natural springboard to be her best at work.

Rules of engagement are essential!

5. Open plan is sometimes like having no walls on your toilet

Adrian worked in an open plan office as part of a large county council. His work was quite often sensitive, and Adrian often used dictation as part of his work. He also experienced distractions from people moving around and from conversations in the office. Adrian described being in an open-plan office as, “going to the toilet and there being no walls”. He felt unable to be his most effective work.

The adjustments for Adrian included working part of his week at home, and when he was in the office, there would be a space available where he could work quietly — enabling Adrian to do his best work.

Open-plan offices have their place, but if you’re easily distracted or need to undertake sensitive work and use tools like Dragon Dictate, they can be an incredibly noisy and unpleasant place to work for neurodivergent individuals.

6. Changing the communication channel – reasonable adjustment

Sarah worked in a busy publishing house where she was in charge of a large team. Because of the high turnover of staff and the complexity and types of projects she had to interact with her large team regularly, helping them understand what to do next.

Often a request would come in over Messenger, which would end up as a lengthy conversation where the other party still didn’t understand what to do. Sarah recognised that many of these conversations would be better over video or face-to-face. However, the organisation’s culture didn’t seem to make this accessible. Sarah’s adjustment was to clarify what questions needed a video or face-to-face conversation.  Then to give herself and her team permission to communicate clearly that they needed to have a physical meeting instead of chatting over Messenger. They could switch back to another channel if a conversation wasn’t necessary.

Changing channels with permission was crucial to ensuring they understood their tasks and improved communication.

These are some of the recent reasonable adjustments I’ve seen through my work. I’ve not mentioned specific conditions because cooccurrence is the rule rather than the exception, meaning that someone with ADHD has a high probability of having autistic or dyslexic traits. It doesn’t matter what your diagnosis is, because each individual is different, and everyone will need a different adjustment depending on their strengths and difficulties. This can only be achieved through conversation, trust and willingness to learn and grow from the individual and the organisation.

If you want to know more about how to support your people in your workplace, drop me a line.

If you are wondering were to start, a good place can be a Workplace Needs Assessment.

Find out more here.

Scales weighing up the reasonable adjustments with one side lower than the other.

Reasonable adjustments, so what is reasonable ?

Reasonable adjustments are subjective and the term is often overused; well, I think it is!

Let me give you an example. I recently worked with someone who thought it reasonable that her employer makes sure she feels in a good mood when she goes home. Now on the surface, that might sound reasonable, but let’s think about it. What is entailed in making sure someone is in a good mood has many variables. This could include interactions within the workplace, conversations and even things that that individual has brought into the workplace. Suddenly that doesn’t sound like a reasonable adjustment; it sounds like a dream!

The equality act gives us some guidance on what reasonable is, but even this isn’t enough as we try and work out what is helpful in the workplace. So here are some of my thoughts on how we can get to reasonable:

It needs to be effective in removing a barrier!

So will the reasonable adjustments remove the barrier, and will it do it for the long-term? In being effective, there is another question, will it work with the rest of the organisation? This is a wise argument as it might be effective for the individual but not for the employer.

Real-world example, I worked with a teacher struggling to keep their equipment together. She worked across ten different classrooms, and because of her short-term memory, her equipment was never in the right place. Several reasonable adjustments were considered, including an electronic calendar and some creative processes to ensure her equipment was moved to the right place at the right time. Along with several other exciting and innovative options on the surface which all seemed great, but they were on the complicated side. Would you agree?

Ultimately, the changes involved giving that teacher a fixed classroom so that her equipment didn’t need to move.

It turned out to be a brilliant adjustment because it was simple and solved the problem. This problem could have been solved in far more complicated way that would have ultimately broken down and put more significant strain on everyone.

Don’t let the solution become part of the problem with reasonable adjustments!

It’s got to be practical!

Being practical matters. If it’s not, we all end up in a big mess.

Being practical means it needs to be practical to implement and practical to use both for the individual and the organisation. Perspective is critical because what is practical for the individual may not be practical for the organisation. In the same way, what is practical for the organisation may not be practical for the individual.

I hope your head is not spinning with the word practical now!

So to work out what this means, we must have conversations and not throw lists of stuff over fences metaphorically because reasonable adjustments are about including people, not putting additional barriers up.

Real-world example:

I worked with an individual with anxiety issues around understanding what they needed to do and when. The organisation conducted an assessment that suggested several interventions, including using whiteboards, apps and other to-do list-style reminders. Giving credit to the individual and the organisation, they’d worked through several different solutions and finally came to the one they felt best: the to-do list app. The app itself worked fine. Things got tricky when multiple managers used the same account to set tasks, and the individual was confused about who she was accountable to and for what.

This is an excellent example of something that started off incredibly practical, but became impractical because the process around it got confusing. In this situation, there was a simple remedy of using initials for each manager. This illustrates that we have to keep reviewing what’s going on; otherwise, we will likely make adjustments to the problem.

Though I say, the remedy was simple, getting the individual managers involved to buy into it and implement it is still an ongoing process.

Never forget the people element of change.

How much are these reasonable adjustments going to cost?

Cost is significant, especially in our current economic climate. Many adjustments are not expensive, particularly for neurodivergent individuals. Often they are about process changes that positively impact individuals across the organisation. There are also grants and schemes available to support equipment purchases, potential coaching, and other ongoing support.

I think it’s helpful to approach adjustments like a project, considering their merits and impact on the individual and the business.

We often don’t know how an adjustment will work until it’s tested.

When it’s tested, it’s essential to understand what needs to be modified and the fitness of the adjustment to perform the task. There can sometimes be a train of thought from the individual that suggests this is being paid for me, so I have to use it regardless of if it adds benefit. This isn’t helpful and can sometimes result in individuals creating additional obstacles for themselves to use something unsuitable.

Real-world example:

I worked with someone recently who was given dictation software as part of a reasonable adjustment. On spending time with them, it became apparent that they were a touch typists who was very comfortable with writing at speed and accuracy, but they felt obliged to the organisation to use the software that ultimately slowed them down and didn’t allow them to operate at their best.

We need to talk to people, not just provide vanilla solutions, because we think we understand them.

In the long term, it’s essential to keep adjustments as simple as possible and actively remove the ones that no longer serve a purpose.

All adjustments need to have a review-by date built in.

Do they still work, or does something need to be done differently? Otherwise, we risk assuming that we did something once and that it will last for a lifetime.

I was thinking about my car. Would I seriously take my vehicle for one service in its lifetime and have one MOT and never have another?

Once we’ve looked at this, there is an implication that if we conclude something is reasonable, there is a legal obligation to do it. Don’t forget to make sure solving the problem is a reasonable adjustment.

Note: The Equality Acts linchpin is that once an adjustment has been deemed reasonable, it is unlawful not to implement it. That’s why it’s essential to consider what is reasonable as part of the implementation, then build reviews and document conversations that will allow you to respond to the individual’s needs and business requirements.

It’s about trust and an ongoing conversation about what works and what doesn’t.

No one needs adjustments that don’t work for them or the business, so ensure you keep this alive and real.

If you need help navigating this, don’t hesitate to contact me at The Neurodivergent Coach.

dyslexia

How well does your workplace fit you if you have dyslexia?

Let me introduce you to Sarah, she has recently finished university and started working for a large retail bank in the UK as an Account Manager. She is responsible for developing clients for the bank by introducing them to the bank’s products and helping them understand how these products can make their businesses work better. Sarah’s role involves a large quantity of writing proposals in addition to producing other written materials.

Sarah was diagnosed with dyslexia at school and as a result, had some help so that she could study effectively and pass her qualifications. This help continued through university but since leaving university she has been able to cope without any help.

Unfortunately, in Sarah’s current role things started to get a little bit difficult as she is struggling with spelling and punctuation, in addition to remembering all the tasks and actions that she is given by her boss and team daily. Fortunately, when these issues were flagged to Sarah’s HR department, they immediately recognised it would be appropriate to ask Sarah what was going on. As a result, Sarah shared some of the tasks that she was finding difficult so the company initiated a Workplace Needs Assessment.

A Workplace Needs Assessment

An assessment that should be carried out by a qualified Workplace Needs Assessor who looks at an individual’s workplace, role, job description and tasks. Then working with the individual to make suggestions called Reasonable Adjustments.

Reasonable Adjustments

These are adjustments that can be made in the workplace to help people who have difficulties completing their everyday tasks. As an employer there is an obligation to provide these if you know, or could be expected to know, an employee or job applicant has a disability.

For Sarah to have this assessment, she did not need to have a formal diagnosis, she just needed to recognise that something was not working for her in her workplace. This assessment helped Sarah understand some of the difficulties she was facing. It also helped her understand some of the strengths that she offered to her workplace.

A vital part of the Workplace Needs Assessment is to amplify strengths and manage the difficulties of the individual.

Sarah’s employer had a legal responsibility under the Equality Act 2010 as Sarah is a neurodivergent individual who has a substantial and long-term condition that is covered under the act because of the following wording:

You are disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

This is important as Sarah’s Workplace Needs Assessment suggested a large range of different technologies along with some workplace coaching. In Sarah’s case however, several of the pieces of technology that were suggested did not work with the systems used by her employer. This resulted in a large amount of stress and anxiety for Sarah as she felt it was her responsibility to make IT work. Sarah’s manager tried to support her in this implementation but unfortunately was unable to make any headway in a reasonable time. In Sarah’s situation, the stress and anxiety got to a point where she was unable to continue working and had a prolonged period signed off sick from work.

I would like to make it clear Sarah’s is not an isolated case, implementation of help can cause even more stress and anxiety sometimes making the issues an individual faces far worse.

This unfortunate situation illustrates the need for a joined-up approach to reasonable adjustments within the workplace. It is vital when technology solutions are suggested that they work with the existing organisation IT infrastructure and policies. In Sarah’s particular case this situation could have been remedied very easily by having an IT representative involved in the process to ensure the technology suggested would work with the existing infrastructure. This is unfortunately overlooked in many situations causing a large amount of stress and anxiety for the individuals involved who are asking for help.

The final component is awareness within the organisation of the impact change has on individuals with neurodivergent conditions. What is often not recognised is that any change can be stressful and anxiety-inducing. To help alleviate some of this it’s really important that everyone within the organisation has an appreciation of what neurodiversity is and how it can impact their colleagues.

Some ways to help avoid this situation include:

  1. Creating a list of approved applications that IT are happy with will work within the organisation’s infrastructure and fit within the organisation’s policies.
  2. Making sure supervisors/managers are spoken to as part of the assessment process.
  3. Having a dedicated IT contact who can support the implementation of assistive technology.
  4. Ensuring that all members of the organisation have attended neurodiversity awareness training and are aware of who to speak for support.

If you would like to know more about Workplace Needs Assessments and how to implement them effectively within your organisation, please get in contact.