Autistic Burnout Guide | Part 3 | 3/12/2021
We investigate the "why" behind autistic burnout in the workplace and practical strategies on "how" to tackle autistic burnout.
This section addresses accommodations employers can make to help autistic employees avoid autistic burnout.
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Workplace accommodations can transform the working experiences of autistic employees.
Here are some examples of accommodations to help autistic employees thrive at work and avoid autistic burnout.
Environmental accommodations concern how an employee can undertake their work. These fundamentally may take shape in two forms - physical environment and flexibility.
The common thread between these is the offer of opportunities to work-from-home (WFH), which lends itself to several benefits in autistic burnout management, chief among which is a reduction in incidences of masking. However, benefits to environmental accommodations are not limited to this.
Weekly Structure
Flexibility in which days of a week autistic employees can work from home or on-site, if need be, allowing for both them and their employer to manage burnout with agility, whenever it may arise.
Daily Structure - Breaks
Break time flexibility accounts for spacing, frequency and duration of breaks across each workday. Provided they remain able to work their required weekly hours, this enables autistic employees to take more, shorter, breaks if they must, as opposed to the traditional longer, but singular break, as a preventative measure for burnout.
Daily Structure - Hours
For some autistic employees, providing the opportunity for them to extend their workday ‘window’ beyond the kinds of hours that would typically be considered standard - e.g. 9am-5pm. This serves autistic employees in two ways. It better accommodates flexibility in daily breaks previously mentioned above, while also enabling them to maximise their potential output at work and simultaneously minimise the likelihood of burnout.
Energy management
Managing energy is a key strategy for employees subject to autistic burnout. Where structural flexibility in work arrangements is concerned, this could extend to meetings, where ‘walking meetings’ can take place as an alternative to sitting in meeting rooms. Further to this, if/where meetings involve ‘remote’ participation, permission for the employee to ‘walk and talk’ via phone can improve their energy management while they work.
When an autistic employee needs to work on location to perform their work, sensory overload can propel burnout, due to excess exposure to stimulus.
The following accommodations are suitable where this is likely:
Devices
Sensory accommodations may be requested by an autistic employee, in order for them to be able to perform work. Making provisions for these can prevent the employee from succumbing to an overload of sensory stimulus. Such accommodations typically include such noise-cancelling headphones, along with more workplace-specific measures like comfortable lighting (i.e., non-fluorescent) and avoidance of strong scents/fragrances.
Quiet workspace
A quiet room (or space - for example, a permanent/fixed desk space as opposed to a hot-desk) may be requested by autistic employees, especially for activities such as taking phone or video calls. Making such an allocation serves to reduce stress on autistic employees who may otherwise become quickly overwhelmed.
Quiet breaks
Along with quiet spaces, provisions for ‘quiet’ breaks (for example, a ‘walk break’) during a period of unforeseen excess noise also reduces autistic burnout potential for an autistic employee.
Clarity in communication
Communicating key organisational goals (e,g., daily, weekly, monthly) and timelines to autistic employees is a valuable preventative measure regarding autistic burnout. This helps the employee better plan and manage their workload to optimise finite personal resources and avoid exhaustion.
A constructive approach is likely to involve:
Deadline management
Where an autistic employee is negotiating the challenge of a difficult deadline, accommodations to manage this demand may be necessary due to autistic burnout.
These include:
Psychological Safety
A culture that embraces and encourages transparency is essential for both maximising the potential of autistic employees, and retaining them. They need to know they can feel comfortable flagging any potential for (and instances of) autistic burnout with managers, and ensuing delays due to stressors they face.
Providing autistic employees with multiple options for participation in team meetings is essential to maximising their capacity to meaningfully contribute, while significantly reducing the potential for autistic burnout.
Meeting Format
While the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a shift towards more remote-based discussions, the following opportunities should be made available:
Strengths-focus
Another measure an organisation can take regarding collaboration involving autistic team members is to adopt a strengths-focus. Critically, this enables the employee to be true to themselves as much as possible, thus vastly reducing incidence of autistic burnout
Higgins et al, ‘Defining autistic burnout through experts by lived experience: Grounded Delphi method investigating’ #AutBurnout (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13623613211019858)
Raymaker et al, 'Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout' (https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2019.0079#:~:text=“Autistic%20burnout”%20is%20often%20used,in%20every%20area%20of%20life.&text=Informally%2C%20autistic%20adults%20describe%20how,pushed%20them%20to%20suicidal%20behavior)