The last day of the summit started off with a video from NBC about Ford Motor Company’s hiring program. Notable in the video was the pride in the new engineer’s job with the complexity of his work and the relief his mother felt at his son finally being hired with a satisfying job. The NBC announcer concluded with a neat twist on Ford’s motto: “Inclusion is job one.” Autism Alliance of Michigan was instrumental in helping Ford start their program.
The first speaker of the day was Holly Robinson Peete. She is an actress, singer, reality TV star, husband of NFL player Rodney Peete and the daughter of Matt Robinson (who played Gordon on Sesame Street) and most importantly, the mother of an autistic young man.
Her family life is the subject of a Hallmark TV reality series, “For Peete’s Sake”. She showed some clips from the show, including one in which she reviews pictures of her son from a modeling shoot. He is a striking young man at age 21.
Peete calls the day her son was diagnosed with autism “Never Day”. That was the day she was told her son would never speak to anyone, never get a job, never say, “I love you” to his mother. She then showed us a video, narrated by her son, in which he would say, “The doctors said I would never do _____ “, repeatedly, and ending the sentence with different actions each time but always punctuating with an exclamatory “WRONG” as the video showed him doing the action.
Peete and her family started the HollyRod foundation to support Parkinson’s research because of her father, but later expanded their scope to include autism.
In addition to videos of her son in a modeling shoot, there were those of him working as a bat boy for the LA Dodgers and giving speeches – another thing he was told he would never do, much less speak at all.
She was a very energetic speaker who repeatedly praised the companies there working to hire people on the spectrum. During the Q&A session she was brought to tears by a woman who explained that Peete’s book, “My Brother Charlie,” and work were very inspirational to her family.
Panel discussions started up after that. The first one that I attended was about the first year of employment.
SAP’s Jose Velasco was first to speak, stressing the importance of keeping local partnerships with groups like The Arc, with whom they frequently partner in the cities in which SAP works. Velasco also stressed the importance of teaming with the government vocational rehabilitation programs. He also talked about the crown jewel that ensured the success of the employee for the first year – a support circle that included a job buddy, a mentor inside the company but outside of the immediate job, and a community support buddy outside the company.
Ford Motor Company’s Meeta Huggins was next, explaining their small pilot that resulted in four people being hired. They relied heavily on Autism Alliance of Michigan. Huggins stressed the importance of AAOM’s robust process, in which their staff come in and learn the jobs that the candidates are being interviewed for and suggest improvements and structure to the jobs to accommodate persons on the spectrum.
EY’s Hiren Shukla talked about the geographical variances in setting up their program. There are different NGOs in every different state they operate, and in some cases there are no local NGOs that can help them as The Arc does in other places, so they forge their own path following what they have learned.
Shukla stressed the need to convince the stakeholders in the hiring program to change management and process practices permanently and across the company for all employees because – as if often repeated in these summits – the accommodations that are good for autistic employees are good for all employees, increase morale and job satisfaction, and make better managers and coworkers.
All the panelists spoke about or agreed on this idea and offered examples such as making explicit such information that we assume everyone else knows or can just figure out on their own, such as:
· Suggesting how to process email queues
· What company or industry acronyms mean
· Where to find Information about corporate policies
Each of the panelists also stressed that when vetting candidates, you often don’t get a great resume because of lack of practical experience that we look for in neurotypical people. You might not find an internship, for example. So, you try to draw out of them other examples of what they have done to demonstrate leadership – being an Eagle Scout, for example, or moderating a video game platform.
Two great questions came up during this session. First: What is the right amount of staffing to devote to this? Jose said that at first the program was created with no central leader and run by volunteers helping the recruiters and HR – becoming buddies or mentors. It was not until the program was about a year old that he was selected to be its leader full-time. Ford’s Huggins said she is expected to process this as part of her day job. EY’s Shukla said roughly the same.
Second, Colleen Allen of Autism Alliance of Michigan had more of a statement that ended with a question: You get great talent as a result of the help from all the state agencies and NGOs - what is the corporate responsibility to support these external orgs? Jose Velasco responded that their work helps future communities as well as their companies, but the program was not part of SAP’s corporate social responsibility office, yet.
The second panel of the day was one that I participated in with three ladies, one each from PWC (Tamara Burks) , EY (Teresa Tatum), and Freddie Mac (Sarah Crump). We were to speak about the surprises and trials of just starting a program. We each had different approaches to how we started the program and the model that we used. Some did their own vetting and interview process, IBM used a model that Specialisterne provided with assistance from AAOM that involved a long interview process – four weeks, really. Each of the major companies who sponsored the event do it slightly differently.
What came as a surprise to me was one well-known disabilities advocate and expert telling me that “IBM Japan has an amazing autism hiring program”. While my colleagues and I have spoken to then as recently as last summer, we were unaware of their progress since then, and at this writing I have not heard back from them in my request for information about their program.
One more point that came out of this panel discussion was a question from the schoolmaster at Hilltop Preparatory school in Bryn Mawr, PA. He wanted to know: how do you find the companies that participate in these programs and how do you connect with them? I stated that aside from contacting any of us directly while at the conference, some companies have special portals for persons with disabilities or check boxes that they can hit to ask for accommodations during the interview, or one to click to indicate they are disabled and need accommodations (the latter meaning they disclose their disability). I also implored the crowd – composed largely of schools and NGOs – to start writing to other employers and make their concerns heard.
The last panel of the day was about mentoring the new hires. Microsoft’s Jenn Guadagno explained that in the mentoring culture of Microsoft it was easy to implement a program for new hires with autism. They looked for volunteers and gave them special training on working autistic people, and many have developed strong relationships.
EY’s Jamell Mitchell said that in his organization he tries to change up mentors once in a while to vary the experience of the mentor and the mentee, but often times people who’ve mentored a person on the spectrum want to keep their relationship going.
A good question from the crowd was: what if you have people who are already hired before the program started and they want a buddy? Jenn at Microsoft said they were offered the same option to have a special buddy if they so desired. They would also be asked who could know about their disclosure and how open they wanted to be about it, and their wishes would be respected.
After a few discussions about inappropriate behavior between mentors and mentee, all on the panel agreed that these behaviors should be mitigated carefully and neither should the behavior be blamed on the autism nor should autism be used as an excuse for the behavior; HR policy and performance criteria can apply to all people equally whether they are on the spectrum or not.
After a lunch we gathered all together in one room again and the sponsors of the summit – EY, SAP, Microsoft, and so on – all said goodbye and asked for feedback from the crowd. Many people suggested small improvements or praised the use of captions on screens before the crowd.
The most compelling comment I heard, though, came from two autistic individuals who stood up and asked for more representation by autistic individuals. They both thought that there should be more #actuallyautistic people attending the summits in the future. It echoed John Elder Robison's comments from the two previous summits: “Nothing about us, without us.” This is a great movement but we should not forget that we are trying to serve a community in addition to ourselves, and corporations would do well to get input from the very people they are trying to help. NGOs, state agencies, academics and researchers should, too, but to a lesser extent. We’ve come a long way from merely casting aside autistic people, but we have a long way to go before we better integrate them in school, work and society as our equals, and that must have input from them.
The summit was hosted by Microsoft and sponsored by them, EY, Ford, SAP, JPMC and DXC. As with the two previous summits it was a great way to connect with like-minded people and learn a lot about how to recruit, hire and maintain autistic people. I want to thank Jen Guadagno and Neil Barnett of Microsoft for their hard and impeccable work in putting on this summit and for allowing me to participate in a panel. I hope that IBM and other companies will do more in this movement in the future.
