You Deserve Workplace Accommodations

Maya Angelou said, “Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it.”If you’re struggling to find and maintain a career while autistic, you may feel like the playing field is tilted. It seems your only hope for equal rights and justice is to bend yourself into a pretzel trying to appease your neuro-majority supervisors and co-workers. You’d love to work full time and have a long career without jumping from job to job, but burnout overcomes you and you find it impossible to go on. You need accommodations in order to level the playing field.

Every disabled employee, including autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people, deserve, and are afforded under the law, reasonable accommodations at work.

What Are Reasonable Accommodations?

What’s reasonable varies, but it’s important to focus on the aspects of the workplace that are the most problematic for your own productivity, and the ones which will be most cost-effective for your employers.

Some reasonable accommodations for autistic employees might include alternative lighting, assigning a job coach or mentor, noise-canceling headsets, sensory breaks, visual cues, working from home for part or all of your work week, and a flexible schedule with reduced hours. A shorter work week may increase your productivity by reducing stress.

What do the experts say?

Devon Price, author of many books including Laziness Does Not Exist, wrote, “Research on productivity, burnout, and mental health all suggest that the average workday is far too long, and . . . not sustainable for most people.”

Joe Sanok, author of Thursday is the New Friday, wrote, “The four-day workweek is already here. We are the post-pandemic generation that will reshape how we look at work.”

You deserve to have a work schedule that doesn’t burn you out.

You are Your Own Best Advocate

There is no guarantee that you’ll be given every accommodation you ask for. Still, it’s important to advocate for what you need, emphasizing the fact that these accommodations will make you a more productive employee.

There are some things you can do for yourself, such as bringing your own noise-canceling headphones from home. Just be sure to tell your employer that you’re not listening to music or the ball game. Because of your sensitivity to sound or auditory processing problem, you wear them to filter out distracting sounds, so that you can focus on your work and be more productive.

Every employer wants productive workers.

Devon Price wrote this about her own workplace journey: “I took breaks and defended my free time fiercely. I taught myself, slowly, that I deserved to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy.”

You do, too. I hope that, like Devon Price, you find your path to create a work schedule that supports you, including ample time to rest from your labors and enjoy your other passions outside of work.

You deserve no less.

This piece is based on information originally published in Working While Autistic: Thrive in a Career You Love by Wendela Whitcomb Marsh. It’s the fifth book in the Adulting While Autistic series. If you’d like to read more, I hope you’ll ask for it at your public library, local independent bookstore, or order it online https://wendelawhitcombmarsh.com/working-while-autistic here. As an Amazon affiliate, I receive a stipend for books purchased through the links provided here. If you’d rather not use my links, you can look for them wherever you prefer to find books.