I found this article in The Atlantic
The majority of those with autism are unemployed, but new pilot programs at big companies, such as EY and Microsoft, are discovering unexpected benefits from having “neurodiverse” colleagues.
Interest in what’s called neurodiversity is growing at American companies. This year, the accounting firm EY (formerly known as Ernst & Young) has been piloting a program to employ people with autism in order to explore the benefits of having workers of different cognitive abilities, such as greater productivity and building a more talented workforce.
According to a recent study by Drexel University, 58 percent of young adults with autism are unemployed. And yet, many of them have skills that businesses are looking for. “This program leverages the skills that people with high functioning autism often have: looking at data, dealing with mathematical concepts, attention to detail, the ability to focus over long periods of time, and looking at large bodies of information and spotting anomalies,” explains Lori Golden, EY Abilities Strategy Leader who led the pilot program. Right now, EY’s program has four employees who work as accounting-support associates.
EY recruited the candidates, and adjusted its training and onboarding processes to become more comfortable for individuals on the autism spectrum. In addition to regular training, Golden says that EY provided hands-on training during which employees in its neurodiversity program could watch work happen in real-time as part of job training. In turn, the program has also resulted in some thoughtful reflection from the company’s managers. “One thing that happened that I thought was really interesting was that, as our supervisors went through training these individuals everyday, they stopped and asked ‘Can this be improved? Are we communicating the right way?’” says Golden. What EY found was that having colleagues with autism challenged the office’s status quo, and made it easier to broach questions about whether or not communication and management strategies were effective and logical.
“It’s a relatively new thing … but I would say it’s gaining momentum,” says Rob Austin, a business school professor at Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario, of the growing interest in recruiting neurodiverse employees. “One of the things that companies are discovering is that there are benefits that they did not anticipate.”
Austin explained that the push for neurodiversity in the workplace has Danish origins. Thorkil Sonne, a Danish telecom worker, was the instigator for bringing people with autism into the professional space. Sonne’s own son has autism and he founded the company Specialisterne in 2004 with the specific aim of employing people with autism and preparing them for the workforce. Employees at Specialisterne were high-functioning autistic people who were offered jobs in the IT and technology space.
