Creating a neuro-inclusive workplace: Tom Rourke hosts a conversation on the importance of neuro inclusion in the workplace. Hear from Gert Vanhaecht and Dirk Rombaut about their experiences and strategies for fostering a neuro-inclusive culture.
Our experts discuss the convergence of technology and social inclusion, examining innovative methods and tools designed to assist neurodiverse employees, while emphasizing the significance of accessibility features, data analytics, and remote work solutions. The discussion also highlights the benefits of partnerships with tech firms, digital training initiatives, and technology-driven strategies that improve the everyday work experience for neurodiverse individuals.
Our guests weigh in on how they are leveraging technology to foster a supportive and empowering work environment.
Featured experts
Tom Rourke00:00
Tom, hello and welcome to The Progress Report. I'm Tom Rourke, Vice President for Design, Insights and Innovation at Kyndryl. Recording The Progress Report is always a wonderful opportunity to engage with fascinating speakers on a wide range of topics. Today's recording, however, was a little special. As the father of an autistic son and someone who's observed the challenges that he has faced as he's worked his way through his way through his academic development, and also as someone who had a relatively late diagnosis on my own neurodiversity, I was particularly interested to meet today's speakers who approach the issue of neurodiversity from different perspectives. From a sense of addressing social injustice, but also from a sense of addressing lost opportunity, recognizing that there are individuals in our society who have an opportunity to contribute greatly to the workplace when accommodated with some relatively modest, well-considered accommodations and supports. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Gert Vanhaecht, who is the Director of Technology at Belfius Bank, and Dirk Rombaut, who is the Chief Marketing Officer and New Business Development Director at Passwerk.
Tom Rourke01:09
Gert and Dirk, you're both very welcome to The Progress Report.
Dirk Rombaut01:13
Thank you, Tom.
Tom Rourke01:14
If I could maybe just ask both of you, I mean, as we're going to talk a lot today about neurodiversity, if you could maybe just share what does neurodiversity really mean to you in terms of perhaps a definition or an experience, and maybe Dirk, if I could start with yourself.
Dirk Rombaut01:31
Yeah, we have to include neurodivergent profiles. We are talking about neurodivergent profiles, and what are we talking about? It's not just autism, where we are talking about but also we are talking about Tourette's, about dyslexia, ADHD, dyspraxia, giftedness, high sensitivity, but also neurotypicals. People without a specific neuroatypical profile, I would say, and we are talking about more or less of 15% to 20% of the overall population. In fact, every company of a certain size has at least 10% of neurodivergent employees in service.
Tom Rourke02:17
And Gert would you add anything to that definition?
Gert Vanhaecht02:20
I think that Dirk's answer is very complete. It's an impressive number of people that are in the neurodiverse population, and they are all people with skills and potential. And so I think that the challenge for companies is to welcome them very actively and to give them a bright future where also the companies can benefit from.
Tom Rourke02:42
Dirk, if I can turn to you maybe just to just explain a little bit more about what it is that that Passwerk actually does. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company.
Dirk Rombaut02:51
Yeah, first of all, maybe I would like to add that only, only 30% more or less 24% of the employees disclose their neurotypical profile, neuro profile, in fact, they're anxious of the fact that they would miss promotion or support or will be bashed by colleagues and so on. We started up in 2008 and we consider ourselves operating in the convergence market, where the economic and the social dimension are equal, in fact. So that is important. We start to move, not just when we can make profit out of it, but when we find it worth of our work to move when there is a societal added value that we can contribute in a positive way to society. And our mission is, in fact, that we want to create opportunities for people on the spectrum with an autism spectrum profile, create opportunities in the regular economic in a regular economic environment, in fact. And the scope is that we have now 175 consultants with an autism spectrum profile in service. Now the success factors; we have two main success factors. First of all, it's our tailor-made approach, and secondly, it is our focus on talent management. For example, we organize an assessment during three weeks in order to learn more about the specific profiles and to understand the needs of support they have in respect to their autism profile. We also have job coaching - dedicated job - coaching that is essential every other week: biweekly. We have a conversation with the single point of contact within the company of the customer. And there is, of course, the presence of the consultants as well. And so we can adapt very easily the approach. And of course, they can contact us 24 hours a day, I would say, if there are issues, specific issues, or at the start of new cooperation, for example, they are not used to work with with people on the spectrum, and they have some more questions, for example. But we prepare them as well, because we organize and we call it a sensibilization presentation about autism, in order to tell them that we are not sending "Rain Man" to their company. Let's be clear about that. And we are active on the on the south part of Belgium, the French speaking part and the Dutch speaking part as well.
Tom Rourke05:57
If I could ask maybe, what inspired your interest in this area, because obviously you both have done tremendous work, both individually and together. Maybe just talk a little bit about what inspired you to pay attention to this as an area and what's brought you to it.
Dirk Rombaut06:12
For me, it was a question of social injustice I saw around me for for this group of people; that's the first reason. And the second reason is that I saw such a potential in this group of people. It was such a pity that that we didn't make use - on a societal level - of these capacities, of this of these talents of people, in fact. I said I have to take action in respect to this, and I was looking around on a global in a global perspective. And so I found out that there was a company active in Denmark, Specialisterne of Thorkil Sonne. And I visited the company, and I showed him my business plan at that moment for Passwerk, and he said, "you are much further than I was when I started up that business." We searched, first of all, some money in order to start a business, because we started from scratch, and we found some some investors, and we started up our business in 2008 so 17 years ago.
Gert Vanhaecht07:28
So I was responsible at about 15 years ago, next to my to my job as a Program Manager within technology of the bank, to find ways to improve collaboration between business and IT - to work in much stronger collaboration. And so testing was one of the ways to do it. And we saw that we had a series of issues that we wanted to tackle. It's not that visible, that it is somebody on the spectrum. Dirk came along, and we met, and he was explaining what he was doing. You really have a huge variety on profiles that we can easily or with some efforts, integrate within the professional context the way they were doing what they were doing. And so I really believed, on the one hand, in the quality they were offering, but also I saw an opportunity to do something for society. What I learned from that journey in the beginning, it were really people who needed to have a lot of attention, integrating those people and by making sure that we that we continue working with them, and if we can tell the story, we do in the hope that other people could awake and to do the same, so that a lot of those people that are really good and qualitative find a professional future and feel a big belonging thanks to that.
Tom Rourke09:01
That's fantastic. I know my own connection with the topic, actually, is fueled by my my son, who's in the adjoining room here, who's who's autistic, and he was maybe in his early teens. And what's interesting is, as a result of that, I myself had kind of re looked at my experiences at his age, and went to some assessments and somewhat on the spectrum. But I think it's really interesting that both of you came to it not necessarily from that personal space, but from just the sheer objective value that this brings to the business, and then we have a societal benefit. But Gert, has it begun to influence beyond your department in the bank? I'm interested to you know, having demonstrated the value, to what extent has that then expanded or changed, how Belfius, as an employer, operates?
Gert Vanhaecht09:48
The answer is yes, for sure, on different levels. When we talked about diversity years ago, it was about finding the balance between male and female, and that was quite the only topic. In the meanwhile, other diversity topics came along. But finally, also the neurodiversity topic is on the table, and it's because at this moment we have, we have eight consultants of Passwerk within our organization. We did a lot of communication. We informed the boards, we informed the works council, and so everybody understands it and knows it, and it makes the topic much more accepted. We are not there yet that it's normal, but within the company, everybody knows it that we do that, and it changes things, and certainly within the teams where the consultants are active, often in the beginning, people are a bit afraid, but after some weeks, and certainly with the context we, together with Passwerk bring along, they start seeing that diversity works, and that having people with a with another, maybe literally mindset, with another, with other ideas, with another way of thinking of working is more enriching than against what they were were thinking before.
Tom Rourke11:24
It's interesting. Something you just said reminded me that what strikes me about my son is that he is quite upfront when he enters a new work environment in describing his situation, and people respond very well to that. They sort of say, "Oh, well, if it's this, then it's this." And I suppose when I think about it, there is probably a much wider range of our colleagues that if we were a little bit more open about what we preferred as our work styles and our own limitations, we might perhaps all communicate a little more effectively. Maybe if we could just talk about, when you were trying to talk about the business value of this to your colleagues, you know, I mean, this is obviously, there's a great there's a great There's a great sense of purpose behind this, but there's also a clear business value. How do you express that, particularly maybe when you're talking to a new organization that hasn't either within Belfius or a new company Gert, if it's somebody you haven't worked with before, how do you help those companies get to understand the business value of this?
Gert Vanhaecht12:19
So it starts with, we need a series of resources, skilled resources that are scarce. And we we try to find all kind of ways to find those, those people with the right skills. And so we are working together for our infrastructure, for example, with Kyndryl; we are not doing that ourselves. We have strategic partners working from India. We have, we try to find the right skills, also in Belgium, through internal recruitment or with external companies, and the specific skills those people have: the sense for detail, being very precise, things that every company is looking for. And if that helps you to reach your goal in a better way, and on top of that, you can help society? Yeah, then it's a win, win, win, win.
Tom Rourke13:18
Obviously this we're talking about something that's at the interplay between people on the spectrum or neurodivergent people and technology. And obviously, over the course of the last 14 years, the technology landscape has changed significantly in terms of how we work. So I'm interested both your views on the extent to which technology has either created new opportunities or presented new challenges for people that you're dealing with.
Dirk Rombaut13:44
First of all, everybody is different in respect to that homeworking and so on. But we were afraid when COVID was there. Okay, what will be the reaction of our consultants? And in fact, I would say, 80% to 90% was very happy to be able to work from home, because the commuting to the customer site, in fact, was the most stressful part of the day. Taking the train and the bus and so on and and all the traffic around them that was creating a lot of stress. So they were happy that that part of their working day was cutting out, in fact. So they were very happy and more relaxed and so on. And the performance was was even better than before. So in general, they were happy with the evolution, yeah.
Gert Vanhaecht14:45
I think COVID changed a lot. What we did from the beginning, before COVID, before we were aware that people also could do work from home - what we are quite probably all doing at this moment. We could not imagine that before COVID. We even had production weekends four times a year. We all went to Brussels to do the move to operations. Now nobody thinks about that anymore. It's remote. In a way that's certainly for certain of the profiles from Passwerk would fit better than the way we were before, because you can organize yourself in a different way. When you say organizing, it's for people that are neurodiverse in a certain way; it's important. So it gave us a lot of opportunities, and now it's a question of finding the right balance. But everything is now there to use it when it's when it's needed, and certainly for that group of people. On the other side - evolution of technology - I think that this as such a challenge for every company to follow up what is evolving on the technology markets, within the testing environments. In the early days it was manual; now it's more and more automated. We have the AI evolution that are all you can see it as obstructing points, or you can see it as opportunities you have to jump on to broaden the competences of your coworkers and also of the people working for Passwerk, and that is what you are doing constantly.
Tom Rourke16:36
I'd ask both of you, as we progress to the recording here, it's The Progress Report. Tor both of you, in the context of this conversation, what would progress look like as we as we look forward to how this might evolve and the opportunities it creates, both for individuals and organizations and society, if we were having this conversation, maybe in five years time. I mean, Gert, what would feel like progress for you? What would you like to see us get to?
Gert Vanhaecht17:05
As we were talking about just before we started the recording, I was attending yesterday, a kind of conference from the University of Leuven in Antwerp. And one of the quotes that I will remember for one it's the quote, "belonging without othering." The fact that people belong to an organization without having to feel "not standard": being different becomes normal. We are not there yet, so there is still a lot of work to do, but coming up with showcases, with success stories, leading by example, pushing from time to time. Sometimes you have to say you will take that guy. We know he's from Passwerk. He wants to become Java developer. We know that he's having the skills. You will take him. You cannot do that all the time like that, but from time to time, pushing a little bit to let feel people that it can be done in a completely different way. Yes, that can slightly change the world. So within five years, we will come back, and then we will see how far we are.
Dirk Rombaut18:22
That is the reason why we started up, in fact, our neuro inclusion services as well. That's a new line of services we started in order to give advice and support to organizations and companies in order to evolve towards a neuro inclusive culture. And so we offer, for example, an neuro inclusion maturity assessment where we find out what is the maturity status of your organization of company in respect to neuro inclusion. And we offer also specific training modules to staff and to leadership and so on.
Gert Vanhaecht19:02
If you change the way we are organizing our companies - and it starts with with a recruitment process - we can give a feeling of being welcomed to to every kind of people that come with the right competences.
Dirk Rombaut19:21
Absolutely and I completely agree with Gert, it will become a differentiator on the employment market. I'm sure about that. If you know that Gen Z, 53% of Gen Z recognize themselves in a neuro atypical profile, so they want to go for a job where they take that into account and where they accept this added, the added value, in fact, of of these types of profile, and if you don't take action in in that direction as a company, you will be not attractive anymore in the future for the future employee.
Tom Rourke20:05
You remind me of is a recent recording which we made with a colleague from another bank, actually a bank here in Ireland. And I think one of the conclusions we came from that was that when you create an environment where everyone can flourish, everyone flourishes. The work we do to create an environment in which our neurodiverse colleagues, can flourish, actually, everybody benefits because it creates a space where everyone can flourish. One of the things that strikes me is the rewards are clear for everyone, but that does require a certain level of commitment and persistence. Gert, Dirk, thank you so much for joining us on The Progress Report. It's been an amazing discussion, and I really wish we had had time for a second episode. Thank you both.
Gert Vanhaecht20:49
Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure.
Dirk Rombaut20:52
Thank you.
Tom Rourke20:53
So as is always the case, I invite our listeners to like, share and subscribe The Progress Report. I might today ask you to think about how widely you share The Progress Report recording perhaps members of your own family who might be encouraged by the contributions you'd have heard from Dirk and Gert today you.