Post by Paula J.

What Autistic Employees Need From Managers (That Has Nothing To Do With 'Understanding Autism') Your organisation spent £2,000 on autism awareness training. Your autistic employee still doesn't know if they'll have a job next month. Those two facts are related. Here's what nobody in your DEI programme will tell you: Autism training doesn't redistribute power. It just makes the power imbalance more comfortable to look at. Your autistic employee doesn't need you to understand how their brain works. They need you to understand that you control their income, their stability, and whether they can pay their rent, and that they have very few ways to pretend that isn't true. That's not an autism problem. That's a power problem. So what do they actually need? Predictability. Not because autistic people "like routine." Because unpredictability is expensive when your nervous system is already running in overdrive. Every surprise restructure, every vague "let's catch up soon," every goalpost that moves without explanation — your autistic employee has already war-gamed every possible outcome before you've finished the sentence. Give them information. All of it. On time. That's not accommodation. That's basic respect. Legibility. Explain decisions in full. The actual reasoning, the timeline, the criteria. Stop expecting people to decode what you can't be bothered to say clearly. Repair. This is the one nobody talks about and the one that matters most. What happens after a conflict? After someone loses their composure or gets something wrong? If the answer is "we move on" — you don't. The autistic employee doesn't. The incident gets filed. It becomes evidence. Neurotypical professionals repair through rituals they don't even notice: a joke, a coffee, an implicit "we're fine." Autistic employees can't always access those. Without explicit repair, there is no repair. Managers who can say "that was hard, let's reset" are worth ten who can say "I've done my autism training." Psychological safety doesn't mean everyone feels comfortable. It means people can tell the truth without it ending their career. Autistic employees learn fast that honesty is tolerated in theory and punished in practice. So they go quiet. They stop flagging problems. They smile through things that are breaking them. And you call that professionalism. You didn't lose them to burnout. You lost them to the slow realisation that belonging was always conditional. Because staying required a level of self-erasure that eventually became incompatible with survival. You don't need to understand autism. You need to understand power, trust, and what it costs a person to keep showing up in a building that was never designed for them to stay. Start there.