289. The Canary in the Coal Mine: What Autistic Employees Reveal About Your Workplace, with BPS President Elect, Dr Laura Dean

0:00Dr. Laura Dean:Today, the 2nd of April, 2026 is World Autism Awareness Day. Around one in 70 of your employees is autistic and there's a very strong chance you wouldn't actually know because many have spent years learning how to mask it or adapting their behavior to fit environments that weren't designed with them in mind. That's exactly why this matters so much because this isn't just about awareness days or good intentions is about how work actually functions day to day how meetings are run or how performance is judged essentially it's how communication happens the reality is a lot of what we call normal in inverted commas at work only works for a narrow group of people and everyone else is quietly working harder just to keep up so today felt like the right moment to have this conversation, not just about autism, but about what better work could look like for everyone.

0:53And I could not be more excited to introduce you to our guest today, Dr. Laura Dean. Laura is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, President-elect of the British Psychological Society, and one of the UK's leading researchers on autism in the workplace.

1:08Dr. Laura Dean:And she's got an approach that might make you change how you think about your whole team, not just your neurodiversion employees. We can think about autistic people as being that canary in the workplace, the same way you'd have a canary in a coal mine, that when we see the burnout in autistic people, it's impacting efficiency across the whole workforce. It's just impacting these people more. So any sort of adjustments we might make that are going to help them, probably going to help everybody, you know, all along the workplace there. That's the insight that changes everything. Autistic employees aren't a special case to manage around.

1:44They're the early warning system for an environment that is making work harder than it should be for everybody. And the fix is, well, they make work better for everybody.

1:53Dr. Laura Dean:Today, Laura is going to tell us what business owners constantly get wrong about autism, why the superpower framing is actually damaging, and the one thing you can do this week that will help every single person on your team, whether autistic or not. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne I'm a charter occupational psychologist. My name is Al I'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

2:22Dr. Laura Dean:I guess today Dr Laura Dean has spent 20 years teaching occupational psychologists researching autism in the workplace and is currently principal occupational psychologist at the cabinet office and this year she's stepping up as president of the British Psychological society she also has a daughter who is autistic which means this isn't just academic for her so after this short break we'll go and meet laura and get into it don't go anywhere you know that feeling when you've decided on a content strategy the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all this content that someone is you and it's due tomorrow that someone is often me but luckily brie's assistant can help it works right inside HubSpot, drafting campaign copy and blog posts and emails, all in your brand voice.

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3:23I'm Laura. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and I've taught in HE for 20 years now, but whilst also working in practice. So I've taught many, many occupational psychologists myself. And last year I took on the role of president-elect of the British Psychological Society. So I'm stepping up as president in a few months, actually, but there's been a lot of work associated with that before I get to the president role. So yeah, that's an interesting thing to be doing this time. Huge congratulations. And yeah, if somebody had told me when we start this little podcast I'll be talking to the president of the British Psychological Society I probably believe them so thrilled to have you here I could probably do a whole hour with you just about the BPS and where it's going and its role in this crazy world of work we're in right now but the topic of today's conversation is around autism so I want to start with a really basic question I don't want to make any assumptions can you give us a definition of autism what autism is?

4:28Autism is just essentially a difference in how the brain processes the world. So that means like having different sort of default settings for sensory input, for communication, for desire for predictability. What that means in practice is that autistic people, it requires more effort for them to do things that we might take for granted. So things like they might have to manually work out when it's their turn in a conversation or, you know, really think about whether something was a joke or whether it should be taken literally, you know, what the social rules are. But the flip side of that is, you know, it's often portrayed as being broken or a deficit.

5:10It's a problem. But the other side of that is the difference in processing and the way in which autistic people engage with the world mean that they have strengths in areas like pattern recognition. They might be, you know, a lot better at pattern recognition. They're often better at identifying when things aren't logical. They're less likely to be influenced by peer pressure and hierarchies and, you know, how things are usually done. So that's all beneficial in the workplace because that means they can sort of challenge things that are flawed early on and jump in and correct errors more directly, which might not always be received well, but is helpful for businesses.

5:49The problems really arise when organisations don't allow those differences and when autistic people are essentially operating in a world that doesn't tolerate any difference from those standard ways of communicating and engaging with the world. And when people hear the word autism, what do they usually get wrong? I think one of the biggest ones is sort of defaulting to those stereotypes of, you know, a greasy haired boy in a basement doing things on a computer, you know, that sort of idiot-savant approach to things. Assuming that autism is about purely social awkwardness, sort of missing those cognitive and sensory elements to this.

6:37The other one is about thinking about it as if it's something that's really rare. This isn't incredibly rare. This is in terms of, you know, reaching those clinical diagnostic thresholds. We're talking about one in 70, one in 80 people. So a significant minority, which reflects how beneficial autism is for society, that we have these large, large minorities of people there. I think a really big one, though, is about misunderstanding, empathy and thinking that autistic people can't empathise. Can you tell me a bit more about that empathy issue? Because I have a nephew who is one of my best mates, to be honest.

7:19He's in his mid-twenties. And he is autistic and he is one of the most empathetic people I've ever had the pleasure of spending time with. So what is this issue around empathy and what are we misunderstanding? Yeah, so there's different types of empathy, essentially. We have this cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is you very easily understand somebody else. You can put yourself in their position and with no difficulty at all, you can understand. And autistic people really struggle with that. It doesn't come naturally to them and they have to really work at it. What they have intact is affective empathy.

7:55So affective empathy is about actually wanting to put themselves in other people's positions, understanding and wanting to help other people. then autistic people have actually been shown to usually have a more heightened level of affective empathy that coupled with a sort of high need for justice a strong sense of fairness in autistic people means that actually when they recognize somebody else is having a problem or worried or concerned they are extremely empathetic about it they just don't easily recognize that and it's a a high cognitive load on them to actually work that out. And I think the very sad bit about this is sometimes autism is sort of mixed up with things like sociopathy or psychopathy.

8:42Because in psychopathy, what you get is the opposite. You get people who can very easily do the cognitive empathy. They know exactly what other people feel like, but they don't care. And they use that to manipulate other people. So, you know, autistic people are having this problem in empathizing, But when they get it, they really get it and they really want to sort of help and engage with people. Going off on a small tangent for a second, you said then that autistic people have a desire to understand how people are thinking and feeling. I must ask, do we find a higher number of people with autism amongst the psychologist community?

9:21Absolutely. My doctoral work looked at how graduates enter the workplace, how autistic graduates, you know, struggle with that entry into the graduate workplace. It was very interesting looking at statistics in terms of where those graduates or where those students were, because there's an assumption that they will be in the STEM fields, you know, and they'll, I mean, psychology is a science, but that they'll be in that sort of hard end of the science. But actually, large proportions of the students were in places like psychology or they were studying English literature, which I found a very interesting example.

10:00And it comes from that position of reading books, wanting to understand, trying to sort of get past this initial cognitive problem that they're having in understanding other people and, you know, doing their best to sort of overcome the difficulties they're facing, living in the world that's not catering for them. So you mentioned psychopathy as being something that get lumped into autism that doesn't belong there. Are there any other things that tend to get put with autism that really don't belong there? Lots of things. I mean, I think quite often the idea that it's some form of mental illness and that's going off a little bit.

10:37I think we're having better understanding now. I can see how that happens because we do have sort of high incidence of things like depression and anxiety amongst autistic people. but that is a correlation and that is more likely to do with autistic people struggling to live in a world that isn't adapted for them, that's creating these additional conditions. It's not something that's intrinsic to autism. There's often a lot of sort of confusion around things like it's related to trauma or it's related to introversion or ADHD and there are some patterns between ADHD and autism. And there are some crossovers there that are quite interesting.

11:22But it is really important that we recognize that in terms of diagnostic categories, that one of the things is that to be diagnosed as autistic, it can't be explained by any of these other things. So it's important that you consider the wide range of things that's impacting a person's behavior before you would come back and say, this is, you know, this is the cause. And the idea of canary in the workplace for autistic people, I think it's quite an interesting one here. You know, it's partly sort of linked to this rise in people thinking that they have autism and perhaps not, you know, reaching the diagnostic threshold is that a lot of the things that impact autistic people, you know, like fluorescent lighting or ambiguity and, you know, knowing what they're meant to be doing.

12:10They impact everybody, but they impact autistic people more. And so we can think about autistic people as being that canary in the workplace, the same way you'd have a canary in a coal mine, that when we see the burnout in autistic people, it's impacting efficiency across the whole workforce. It's just impacting these people more. So any sort of adjustments we might make that are going to help them, probably going to help everybody, you know, all along the workplace there. We are hearing a lot more of people being diagnosed with autism and rates rising quite quickly. Is that accurate or are we hearing of people self-diagnosing or inaccurately being diagnosed?

12:53What's happening behind the headlines? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things going on here. Essentially, diagnosis rates are rising, but that's a fantastic thing. That's the same way, you know, when we invented telescopes, hopes we suddenly see more stars. As we improve our diagnostic criteria and our techniques that we're using, we're obviously going to diagnose more people. Increased public, you know, professional awareness is going to help with that. And things like, you know, in the UK, we had the introduction of the Autism Act in 2009, which allowed for adult diagnoses and encouraged those adult diagnoses going on.

13:31So lots more adult assessments going. So essentially, a lot of this is about making diagnosis of people that should have been diagnosed in early childhood and they're getting them much later on. But we're also much more aware of strategies that autistic people are taking to sort of hide their autism. The recognition that women in particular might be masking that and putting a lot of cognitive energy into masking or compensating and sort of burning themselves out by engaging in strategies that make themselves more palatable to what a woman should look like in the workplace and in the world more generally.

14:11Another bit to this is that there is a sort of genetic element to autism. So what we've found is that there's been a significant proportion of people who've had children diagnosed and then essentially gone, but they're no different to everybody else in this family and then going, ah, hold on, everybody else in this family, you know, maybe there's something about us all here. So then we're seeing, you know, some parents getting diagnosed as well. And how strong is that genetic component? Is it unusual to have one lone person who might be autistic in a family? Is it more common to have a variety of people neurodiverse?

14:51It's an interesting one because what you find is that neurodiverse people tend to sort of hang about together and like each other and, you know, they communicate well together. So what you might find is a pattern of people partnering with other people who are autistic or, you know, have ADHD or things like that. But there is this, you know, reasonably strong genetic component to this, particularly across, you know, when we look across siblings. If one child has autism, there's a strong probability that another within the family will as well. Or they may have another aspect of neurodiversity, often things like dyscalculia, dyslexia, ADHD, there'll be those sort of patterns there across a family.

15:38When I was, I was born in the mid 80s. So when I was at school, it was the, it was the boys that we typically diagnosed if it was something like dyslexia or autism, because they tend to be disruptive or violent or you know that types of behaviors what what does it look like in young girls are they more introverted in their in their coping strategies what does that look like women and girls are socialized from very early life to be accommodating to other people to fit in in terms of what's being asked of them more widely and to engage in behaviors that appear to be empathetic, that appear to be caring to other people.

16:21And so they might be engaging in behaviors not fully understanding why they're doing those things. What we find often comes to be the issue is during adolescence when things begin to change quite dramatically for girls and the sort of social rules are thrown into chaos and that creates a real sort of flashpoint. So girls who have managed to mask to a certain level. They've simply followed the rules. They've often excelled academically. They've done all the things that they're meant to be told. And now suddenly they come across mismatched rules. You know, yes, you're meant to be doing all of this stuff that the school tells you to do, that your parent tells you to do.

17:01But there's also a peer group that has a whole series of rules. And you might be ostracized if you don't follow those rules that are in direct competition with others. Creates a massive tension and a big cognitive load for young women. And, you know, we all know being a teenager is horrible. Not least because when you're a teenager, you have to mix with other teenagers. Everybody's in this sort of difficult part of life, but it creates this massive tension. And that's where we often see a sort of flashpoint for girls and young women in those early or mid teenage years. What we've seen in the past is sometimes aspects of autism have been misidentified.

17:43So in my doctoral research, I found that almost all of my female participants had already been diagnosed with something such as an anxiety disorder before they had an autism diagnosis. many of them had been diagnosed with an eating disorder which was not nothing to do with an eating disorder in the traditional sense it was to do with sensory sensitivity to particular types of food and so that you know desire to you know not eat a particular strong taste or texture and you know it sort of fit more neatly into our stereotype of the things that young girls might be experiencing. So often they'd have that other diagnosis first before it came around to the autism diagnosis there.

18:31This isn't just about women. There's other groups as well. You know, we know that particular minority ethnic groups might not be diagnosed as often. And that might be because of sort of ideas within a particular culture about how bad this is. There might be a stigma associated with it. It might be difficulty in sort of accessing diagnosis. We know there's a massive class difference that you're much more likely to be diagnosed if you're from a middle class family than if you're from a working class family. So lots of different groups that are being impacted by our sort of historical approach to autism and diagnosis.

19:11You mentioned there the socioeconomic difference. I'm wondering if I hear that there is a long waiting list on the NHS now for autistic screening and so people are going through private means to do that. Is it okay to do that, to get that private diagnosis? Do we need to be mindful of how it's being diagnosed, certain companies, or is it better to have a diagnosis and then get it quicker? Is there any pitfalls to going private? Well, the people who are doing the diagnosis are very well trained and paying for a diagnosis does not mean that you get a diagnosis by any means. There will be a thorough assessment there.

19:51So what I think people need to be really aware of is why they want that diagnosis. What do they think is going to happen from that diagnosis? And what might the implications be if you've sort of built some aspect of your identity around this and built some community in an autistic community, and then you don't get that diagnosis? So I think it's really important that people think about what do they think the diagnosis is going to do for them? Because good employers and, you know, good educators will make adjustments anyway. You should be saying, you know, these are the adjustments that I need in order to do my job well and not be dependent on that diagnosis there.

20:32so it shouldn't really make a difference in in that sense if it's something that in terms of sort of self-knowledge then yeah I'd say go ahead if you've got the money and we know that the the backlog on the NHS is around about six years at the moment so we have this incredible backlog yeah wow six years wow that is an incredible backlog you mentioned identity there and as you said if somebody is is getting close to an autistic community then finds out they're not does it work the other way as well particularly what you were saying about older people getting diagnosed or getting diagnosed later in life what impact does that have on identity?

21:15So for some people it's a valuable thing it's something that sort of answers some questions that they've had about themselves or helps them feel more positive about themselves but for other people that are really living with a lot of sort of stigmatizing ideas around autism that can be very difficult and I think it is important that you're aware of having that diagnosis within that wider sort of system that you're living in and what it's going to do the difference between an NHS diagnosis is that will be built in you know there will be those conversations with you first. You won't just have this diagnosis in isolation.

21:58There'll be people helping you make sense of it. Whereas if you're paying for a private diagnosis, you might literally just go with your documents and your evidence and have that diagnosis and then walk away and you're entirely on your own there. So it is important that you sort of think about what that context is for you and for other people if you go for that diagnosis. And, you know, maybe join some autistic communities, join some groups. There are plenty out there because autistic people really often don't like that sort of direct face-to-face communication. They are much more in online communities.

22:38There are those spaces to go and, you know, listen to autistic people telling their stories about diagnosis and what it means to them before you sort of make that decision for yourself. I don't suppose you've got any good podcast recommendations.

22:53Dr. Laura Dean:Do you know what I do? And coincidentally, this podcast is on the HubSpot Podcast Network. Who knew? The audio professional. We're going to come to that. This old marketing is hosted by Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio, Leanne, together. The audio destination for business professionals. where all podcasts, good podcasts live. Exactly. Joe and Robert are two of the most well-known experts in the content marketing space and they talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers.

23:22Dr. Laura Dean:Lovely. Yeah, I've actually been listening. Each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines. We like headlines. Love them. Rants from Joe and Robert on what's going on in the industry. We like that too. And this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from. It's always useful, entertaining in never more than 60 minutes. Yeah, I love the recent episode about alternatively influential. These are the micro-influencers who have real impact, but they don't have massive follower counts. Listen to This Odd Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

23:56We often hear, and I think most people listening, would be familiar with the idea that autism is part of a spectrum. Can you explain to us what that means briefly? And also I have seen some researchers question whether this is the right way to think about it. So I'm curious, what is the kind of the broad science of the spectrum and how is that currently being challenged? Yeah, so the idea of a spectrum, it has been helpful in the past, but it's no longer a terribly useful working model for us. The idea of the spectrum originally was sort of from not autistic to very autistic. and everyone was somewhere within that.

24:41This isn't really helpful because it encourages you to think about autism as one thing. And there's actually lots of different dimensions. So any individual autistic person might have differences in terms of their level of sensory sensitivities, their tolerance for eye contact, their tolerance for physical contact with other people. There's lots of different aspects within that. And so when we think about just one spectrum, we're not really thinking about the sort of complexity of autism. There are a lot of academic arguments for thinking about multiple dimensions rather than a single line here.