Employer Support - Columbus NextWork Academy for Autistic Adults

Accommodating Autism

By Supporting the Employer as Well as the Employee, We Can Better Accomplish Our Goal of Comprehensive Support While Building Relationships in the Workplace – Relationships That Result in Loyal, Hard Working, Employees.

By Supporting the Employer as Well as the Employee, We Can Better Accomplish Our Goal of Comprehensive Support While
Building Relationships in the Workplace – Relationships That Result in Hard Working, Loyal Employees

As service providers, our main focus has always been our clients, but we won’t have any success without our business partners providing jobs in the community. We recognize that employers want to increase the diversity of their workforce. Usually, when we think of diversity we think of race or gender or identity preference, but our experience has shown that disability is often overlooked.

NextWork has been placing clients in community employment since the program began in 2015. Our home office, Columbus Community Center, has been employing people with disabilities for over 50 years. Experience as well as evidence has shown us that supporting the employer is just as important as supporting the employee.

Hiring a new employee is always a risk. No matter how many interviews you do and how many times you read over a CV, people often surprise you when they’ve been an employee for a while. Someone who is friendly and gives an incredible interview may be a lackluster employee who only provides the bare minimum once they get good and comfortable.

Interviews inadvertently filter out potentially excellent employees because they rely on someone’s social skills. If someone with

autism applies for a job as a software tester, social skills may not necessarily be a primary function of the job. NextWork, along with our partners, want to help your business become more inclusiveby giving you the tools to communicate with a neurodiverse population in a way that allows you to see through social anxiety to recognize strengths. We do this through giving your talent acquisition team opportunities to engage in mock interviews with our clients and students. This is beneficial for both parties. We also can help you set up a mentoring program in your company, train your supervisors to adapt their communication skills to maximize the strengths of a neurodiverse employee, and help your staff as a whole become more accepting of diversity. We can also assess the physical environment and suggest reasonable accommodations that will make your business more autism-friendly and more accessible.

By supporting the employer as well as the employee, we can better accomplish our goal of comprehensive support while building relationships in the workplace—relationships that result in hard working, loyal employees.

For more information on our Diversity Training programs, fill out our contact form (below).