New partnership highlights neurodiversity as a strength in the workplace

Friday, 21 April 2023

Javier Vasquez’s mind solves problems in a way that others might not think of.

Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.

“I find that verbal communication can be ambiguous,” he said.

So when it comes to the workplace, he’s figured out his own solutions to what neurotypical people may see as problems.

“I have learned to develop flow charts about conversations that help me to understand the logical order of information and can help me to overcome a lot of these ambiguities.”

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Vasquez, who is neurodivergent, is two months into his role as a pricing analyst at insurance company Fidelity Life.

Fidelity Life was approached by and has partnered with auticon​, an autistic-majority company that partner IT professionals, many who have autism, with companies like Fidelity Life while providing neurodivergent training in the workplace.

As part of a pilot programme, Fidelity Life has employed two neurodigvergent people for a 6-month period, and were providing neuro-inclusion training which include staff workshops.

Vasquez has an electronic engineering degree and came across the job through LinkedIn and hopes to stay with Fidelity Life beyond 6 months.

His favourite part of his job is finding solutions to make systems more efficient, and he’s had a lot of guidance from his supervisors, sitting alongside him to help reach his goals.

Fidelity Life chief sales and service officer Bronwyn Kirwan said neurodiversity can be a strength in the workplace.

“But it requires the right kind of environment to foster that potential,” she said.

Kirwan herself is on a journey of understanding her own neurodiversity which is “quite a challenging experience”.

She said being neurodiverse was something she’d suspected for a while, but it only “came to a head” last year at an event where she felt a “desperate feeling of needing to withdraw and a deep, deep social discomfort and anxiety”.

While she hasn’t been officially diagnosed, she has been working with psychologists “to really unpack what this means for me”.

“As a successful, high performing female in a corporate career in financial services, it's taken some time to really confront the fact that actually for many, many years I've felt, particularly in a social sense in the workplace, something of an outlier.”

While the process has been challenging, it’s given her a sense of comfort and a deeper understanding of how neurodiversity manifests in the workplace and what leaders can do to embrace it.

And because of her own journey, bringing in more neurodiverse staff into the business is even more meaningful and it’s not just a tick box exercise.

“When this is accompanied by the personal experience of one of its executives, it adds that extra level of both authenticity, but I think also relatability.”

She said Vasquez has contributed a lot of value to the business.

“He's been just incredible, bringing a fresh set of eyes on how we automate some of our occasionally analog processes,” she said. “He's been amazing in streamlining some of the ways we calculate things and generally report things.”

Although the partnership between auticon and Fidelity Life is starting with a two people on a 6-month programme, Kirwan said they would be open to expanding it with other auticon candidates should the right opportunities arise.

To other people who are neurodivergent and looking for a job, Vasquez said don’t give up.

“It’s not easy, but there’ll always be a place where you can find kind and patient people to help you and support you.”