Alex likes her job, has high standards, and works hard to get good outcomes. There are times however when, as a neurodivergent person, she finds her colleagues really difficult to work with, especially in relation to formal meetings.

Alex likes to have a good grasp of things, especially of what is expected of her at work. She can therefore become very frustrated if formal meetings are called with little or no notice. Alex finds it especially difficult if there is no agenda for the meeting, or if the agenda items are just one-word entries, with no owner assigned to them.  Because this lack of specific information agitates her, and because she is worried that she might need to prepare something for the meeting, she responds by writing emails to the chair, to ask for clarification about what is to be discussed in the meeting. 

Since it takes her a while to process the information, and to work out what is expected of her, she might send a number of emails asking for clarification in the time leading up to the meeting, to ensure that she is properly prepared on the day. Alex is baffled however as these emails are often not very well received. The chair’s responses seem aggressive, and they often accuse her of being overbearing, yet she does not know why this should be so, since she was just trying to make sure that she didn’t overlook anything. As soon as she gains a proper explanation of what is required, she always says thank you, and stops asking questions. Despite that, her colleagues still seem to behave strangely. She wonders, has she missed some sort of social code here? She thinks that this might be so, as she often notices people looking at each other after she has spoken at meetings. She doesn’t know what the looks mean, but they make her feel like she is not part of the team, and this further increases her anxiety. 

For an individual with suppressed immunity, working in a university environment can present many challenges. These barriers have been, and continue to be, significantly exacerbated by the ongoing nature of the pandemic, albeit at a more attenuated level.

Even before the pandemic, a person with suppressed immunity would have needed to be very careful about leaving the house and limiting/controlling their interactions with others. Their close family would also have needed to be risk-aware to avoid bringing unnecessary contamination into the home environment.

After the end of lockdown, and even now, the risks posed by covid 19 to immunocompromised individuals are significant. Although some hybrid teaching remains in place, much teaching has returned to face-to-face delivery. Some universities are putting tremendous pressure on immunocompromised individuals to have an on-site presence, in preference to remote teaching. If those individuals are put under duress to go on site to work, this exposes them to significant risk and generates anxiety. If they are pressured to fund someone to go on site to ensure that the remote delivery technology in the room works on the day, that causes a significant financial pressure on the individual.

It may be that the immunocompromised person’s partner is also an academic. If they are required to work on site, this creates a situation where they are forced to detox before entering the house, in order not to compromise the safety of their partner. Lack of support for remote/hybrid working creates a great deal of strain for immunocompromised individuals and their families.

Years of needing to be exceedingly careful can leave a strong imprint. It is perhaps no surprise then that being immunocompromised is often accompanied by hyper-vigilance and anxiety. Therefore, the workplace pressure to attend in person, can also create a significant amount of anxiety, which can lead to overwhelm- a kind of ‘freeze state’ where the individual simply cannot progress their work, no matter how hard they try, or how much they want to. If the pressure that caused the overwhelm continues, and amendments are not made, sustained overwhelm can lead to burnout, which has a long recovery time.

In addition to the individuals who experienced chronic fatigue syndrome before the pandemic, many people are now facing life with long covid. These conditions can have a really debilitating effect, and may mean, for example, that someone who once ran marathons may have become a wheelchair user, who cannot currently walk to the park without experiencing exhaustion. Chronic fatigue, as a condition can be unpredictable, and energy levels can fluctuate significantly, which brings additional challenges, especially for individuals who are trying to continue working.

For someone with very limited energy resources, great care needs to be taken about how those resources are spent. We can draw on the spoon theory model, to see a person’s daily energy budget as say ten spoons. If three/four of the spoons have already been spent getting ready for work and travelling onto campus, and a similar allowance is needed for the journey home and basic self-care/nutrition, then it is clear that little energy remains for onsite teaching, research and related admin.  In this situation, fatigue levels can be greatly increased by the demands of back-to-back teaching and the requirement to attend long meetings. 

If the person with limited energy resources is also neurodivergent (ND), they are likely to require more processing time, which further drains their energy budget. It may be that the individual does not feel comfortable disclosing their ND at work. If their colleagues and managers are unaware that the person is neurodivergent, then it is likely that the individual is putting energy into ‘masking’ their ND, and this masking activity also generates a high energy cost.

Even where an individual has been able to carefully choreograph their diary to sustainably manage their energy levels, last minute demands for ‘urgent’ admin./grant application/teaching audit type tasks can destabilise that careful planning and cause a serious energy imbalance, which is also exceedingly and perhaps debilitatingly stressful. 

If the individual chooses to/is pressured to keep going and ‘push through’ their daily energy budget to complete tasks, then this can have a serious impact on the following days, leading to exhaustion and overwhelm. If this overspend is sustained, the potential for burnout/breakdown is exacerbated: the longer the imbalance is sustained, the longer the recovery time required.

In my experience, the vast majority of academics are in post because they care passionately about their subject area and want to share that energy with others through teaching and publication. Sadly, academia can be a very harsh and stressful environment, and the care and commitment that academics express towards their subject area, their research and their students, can intensify the institutional pressures and stressors that academics experience. For academics who have hidden disabilities, including neurodivergence, negotiating the workplace barriers caused by inherently stressful institutional practices is even more challenging. 

The professional cocktail of research, teaching and admin creates heavy academic workloads. As young people’s mental health is increasingly causing concern, the significant pastoral responsibilities that are an integral part of the caring academic’s load also generate significant stress, especially since academics do not generally receive regular therapeutic support for their pastoral duties.  

The comparatively constant stress of any given week can however be seriously exacerbated by unexpected demands that can materialise at short notice. As university staffing levels are consistently being reduced, sudden sharp increases in workload can be created when colleagues are signed off long term sick, and we have anecdotal evidence of some workloads doubling almost overnight when such cover is required. Providing extensive cover at short notice can be profoundly stressful, even where lecture notes are provided. It is very difficult to work from someone else’s notes, even if they are within your specialist area. If the material lies beyond your specialism, this significantly intensifies the strain and discomfort. This situation can then cause a significant loss of self-esteem and well-being for anyone required to provide such cover. As the hours in a ‘normal’ academic working week are already very long, additional demands can rapidly spiral into exhaustion. This is the case for all academics, but it is even more intensely experienced by colleagues who are stressed, anxious or ND.

 

Other ad hoc demands are often generated by centralised/managerial departments, who work on different calendars to the academics, and who demand rapid feedback as a matter of urgency to meet their own calendar demands. 

Experience suggests that these ad hoc urgent managerial requests often materialise at pressure points in the academic cycle (e.g. in the heart of the marking period) when academic staff are already facing a lot of tight deadlines, which they have based their workloads around. The overheads generated by urgent last-minute requests of this nature are therefore particularly keenly felt. Meeting such demands represents a common stressor in academic life, especially as many academics are worried about their job security.

However, neurodivergent/anxious colleagues can experience the cumulative and unpredictable nature of these stress cocktails as significant barriers that impede their access to the workplace. This is because: ND colleagues process material more slowly than their neurotypical (NT) colleagues, and therefore:

-ND colleagues need to be able to plan their workloads to avoid overwhelm/burnout

-sudden unexpected changes can be experienced as deeply disorientating until processed

Task instructions need to be clear as ND colleagues cannot necessarily decode implicit meanings, so ambiguity, jokes and other forms of imprecise/non-literal communication can be opaque to them, so are best avoided.

Anxious colleagues need to be able to plan and control their commitments carefully so that they can manage their anxiety. Sudden or arbitrary changes in goals or schedules can therefore be deeply unsettling. The difficulty of changing plans midway/without adequate preparation time can lead to feelings of overwhelm in the face of the extended workload, which may be accompanied by feelings of eroded self-esteem or shame. Sustained exposure to these kinds of stressors can lead to ‘freeze states’ - where the individual cannot progress their tasks no matter how much they wish to. If support is not provided these pressures can push the individual towards burnout or breakdown.

Robyn has very high standards for her own professional conduct, and she likes to make sure that she is absolutely clear what is required of her in the workplace. Her programme manager however tended to communicate in ways that she (and her support worker) found vague, unprecise and difficult to unpick. The programme manager could be unpredictable in their actions and was sometimes verbally aggressive towards Robyn, especially when she sought to clarify the manager’s instructions so that she could action them. Other colleagues, including Robyn’s reports, also found her manager difficult to work with, and Robyn sought to buffer them from the manager to create an inclusive work environment for her team. This buffering came at a high personal cost for Robyn.

The programme manager’s conduct created a lot of pressure for Robyn, and was a contributing factor to a period of burnout that Robyn experienced. Post-burnout, she sought specialist help, and was advised that she was ND autistic. This led to an award of funds, including workplace inclusion training for her team, to help them to communicate in more accessible ways.

The programme manager was aware of the training and had given their consent to it. Consequently, when the programme manager decided- at the last minute- to unilaterally withdraw their agreed consent and to obstruct the team inclusivity training that Robyn had arranged, she found this unbearable. Robyn therefore decided to make the refusal the subject of a single-issue grievance. Robyn’s intention in making the grievance was that HR and the programme manager’s line manager would read the grievance, understand that the programme manager’s actions were aggressive, unwarranted and discriminatory, and then speak to the programme manager to ensure that they apologised and changed their management approach to the whole team. From an autistic perspective, swift corrective action that halts the initial problem and prevents it proliferating for others was the logical way forward. However, this is not how grievance procedures in large institutions work.

Rather than enabling the rapid and effective change of approach that she had hoped for, Robyn found that the university corporate appeals process was highly bureaucratic, and expressed through a series of processing-heavy formal face to face hearings spread over a period of months. The process was not fully explained to Robyn, the online grievance resources were almost exclusively student-facing, and it was unclear what sanctions/corrective actions the process allowed for. This lack of clarity and transparency would be difficult for anyone, but is excruciating for an autistic person, as it encompasses many of the behaviours that autistic people find most difficult to process.

The formal grievance period was intensely painful for Robyn, since she wanted to maintain her professional responsibilities and carry on with her role. Carrying on with her normal role meant attending regular meetings of over 2 hours per week with the person with whom she had an active grievance. Since the grievance process was confidential, Robyn could not acknowledge her discomfort either within the management team, or to her direct reports. 

As the programme manager was not suspended from their normal duties during the course of the investigation, it was left to Robyn to find a practicable work-around for an intensely difficult professional situation. In the absence of support or direction from HR, Robyn suggested that she reduced her attendance at the meetings so that she would be able to keep in touch with the programme management, whilst limiting her time spent with the programme manager to an hour a week. She proposed that any other requests were made by email. This proposal was agreed as a pragmatic way of proceeding, but it nevertheless left Robyn feeling stressed, pressured and unsupported by HR throughout the whole of the grievance process.

The length and formality of the grievance process, combined with the employer’s lack of clarity concerning the nature of corrective or compensatory outcomes that Robyn could request, made this a deeply painful process for Robyn.