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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Think like the manager, an autistic worker’s account of a London warehouse job
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, a panellist described fixing a bottleneck on a warehouse floor without permission, and argued that putting a problem in the manager’s terms changed how the employer responded.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
A panellist on the employment panel offered a blunt piece of advice for autistic workers who see a problem their manager cannot. “I wouldn’t tell them I’d do it.” It came at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024, as a direct response to Rebecca McCash, who had just described getting into trouble for offering managers solutions they did not want to hear and for going around chains of command. The panellist, who is not named in the captions, agreed with her that managers often dislike being told something is wrong, then told a story from a job taken while travelling that went the other way.
The job was in a warehouse in London. The panellist said there had been no prior experience and the role was picker. Within a couple of days the warehouse was providing training, and then had the new picker training other people and taking on other tasks. Moving between areas of the floor, the panellist began to see problems in different parts of the operation. The principle drawn from that, the panellist told the room, was to think like the manager and put yourself in the manager’s place.
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Sources the story draws on
- The compelling case for disability employment in Australia: the unrivalled benefits of an underutilised labour market (opens in a new tab), JobAccess (funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services)
- Employers' perception of the costs and the benefits of hiring individuals with autism spectrum disorder in open employment in Australia (opens in a new tab), PLOS ONE (Scott, Jacob, Hendrie, Parsons, Girdler, Falkmer and Falkmer)
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