In the first episode for Spectra-cast I spend some time discussing the Dandelion Program at DXC Technology with the Dandelion Program Executive Michael Fieldhouse.

If you'd like to learn more about the program at DXC you can visit the Dandelion Program site.

The Dandelion program provides employment for autistic individuals in a structured and supported environment.

To see the materials that have been put together in conjunction with Cornell University you can check out their site.

Also, check out Uptimize for their autism focused training materials.

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Interview Transcript:

Chris

Welcome to the show. Today I'll be joined by Michael Fieldhouse, who's the Dandelion Programme executive at DXC Technology. And in my discussion with Michael today we go through the experiences of DXA technology in their efforts to increase diversity and inclusion within their own organisation and how they've gone with that. Michael shares, some really great insights and lessons that they've learned along the way. So let's jump into the conversation with Michael.

Michael

Okay, maybe I can ramble upon a bit and then kind of restart. So yes, I am we know so we started the programme started the Dandelion Programme. It was originally started back by Hewlett Packard. You know, obviously DXC is now a, a merger from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services and Computer Science Corporate, CSC. And so we started the programme almost five years ago. We did about a year's worth of due diligence before starting the programme.

But how the initial kind of concept came up I had I have two close friends who've got autistic kids, one higher functioning, and one lower functioning. I don't like the word functioning because I think it's more about needs because I really learned a lot more about from from the lower functioning individual.

So really it was a bit of an epiphany about talent when I actually interacted with him. So it was one one big night one dinner night we had done all the kids around and his name's Andrew he typically runs around and this time he landed at my, I've got a big urn, which has got fish in it, and Japanese stones around it. He ran up to the urn and basically started dropping pebbles into it.

I started realising I'm going to fish these out later. And it's going to be quite interesting, you know, and it's going to be nice and cold doing it. But as kind of being an ex scientist it was kind of quite interesting I was quite curious is actually seem too regular. So he's actually dropping them at times, it was actually perfect intervals between every stone. And the did that for two hours. There was a lot of stones in that urn!

But what I learned that night was really about, obviously attention to detail and repetitive tasks. But well, I think the biggest learning was actually seeing talent. And I think that's the idea that we kind of, we look at people's too many people's weaknesses or disabilities rather than people's abilities. So it was my big epiphany. That's where you know, we kind of started came up with a concept. So we did a bit of a global search on had anyone employed people with autism before? And what are the challenges and we went through a whole bunch of due diligence.

What kind of came out there was no, unfortunately was no evidence based research around it and no documented kind of learnings. There was something out of Virginia called Project SEARCH, we had a look at. It was really about High School transitions. But we still had difficulty finding what the. But after talking to people, we did a lot of co-design, co-thinking, I think more than anything else. With a lot of the autism community groups, with the Austism CRC.

We had, you know, we had Amaze, we had a whole bunch of people come in and we said we thinking about starting a programme. Now, what are the challenges and what we heard from overseas, you know, was that the challenges were not just in getting the employment it was actually the sustainment.

So with the things that, the issue was that after kind of suddenly, after about six months to, you know, to nine months, two thirds of people that actually did get employment, would actually leave employment. And now when there was no real data, but what we could gather from people from some of the surveys we did was co workers didn't know how to really weren't trained. Didn't Understand.

The environmental setups where that, you know, lighting and stuff that was okay. But I think what one of the big parts was actually the individuals not able to self advocate enough. So that became issues obviously, "I need more work to do", for example, which is a classic one, you know. "I finished, I finished my work in the first hour, and I'm playing my phone for the next seven hours". And I haven't actually learned how to kind of self advocate for more work. Or, you know, "talking with my co worker, I'm having difficulties", so there's a whole bunch of those executive functioning skills that really came into play.

So when we kind of learned when we were doing this, we kind of started pulling together we, you know, we collaborated with a whole bunch of universities, which we've done over the last kind of five years. So we have collaboration with Cornell University, Latrobe University, The OTARC, which is the Olga Tennyson Research Centre, they've got the longitudinal research study underneath the programme. So that was one one of the things we wanted to do as we kind of did the programme, we wanted to make sure we had a study underneath that so we can understand now what are the things were working well, what things weren't working well. We wanted to leave that behind.

So even if we didn't succeed, we would at least have some footprint for people to say, well, maybe we can think of something better than we did.

We've published quite a number of detailed reports on the programme. So I'll give you a little snapshot of that. But the key kind of parts when we started developing the programme, it was a bit of an epiphany that when we started building out we needed a bit more of a programmatic approach to help people on the spectrum. The difference is that not just to have a job but have a career.

To have a career and a job are two different things and you know, have a career you can actually navigate the actual organisations, market dynamics, you know, and there's a whole bunch of things. We have all struggle with all our lives being autistic or non autistic. We all struggle with actually having careers if that makes sense.

So we all have that struggle, some people seem to navigate through that fantastically, some of us kind of end up being a bit like spaghetti. It kind of goes around, it goes this way it goes that way. So it's not linear. I think one of the things that people that are neurotypical, which is, you know, that they have the executive functioning skills and all those social skills to actually talk to people and find out a lot more about what goes on. So that is the some of the big differences.

So what we wanted to do is build a programme that had sustainable employment. So that's the whole social purpose behind the programme, sustainable employment. So one of the things we wanted to measure ourselves on was retention. We also wanted to measure ourselves on quality of life. So are the individuals satisfied in their jobs? That was critical, job satisfaction. Also quality of life, meaning did they feel like they had the appropriate level of support where they actually fit. The other was we measured independence. They wanted to become independent.

We now have a 92% retention rate. We have great job satisfaction scores, and quality of life is good as well. The only thing we found through that is that depression, anxiety levels don't change. Even when they get employed, which is a big learning for all of us in the programme. Even the researchers believe in this whole big idea that when you get employment, you know, your quality, life improves, and therefore, all the mental health aspects improve.

We found some of that actually doesn't change. But we do see other things change, being suicidal ideation. So you know, we see that will actually improve because people on the spectrum have a nine times higher tendency towards suicidal ideation. So we did see that. And that was really driven from and having social inclusion, social friendships.

Chris

So even though, some of those underlying mental health challenges may exist and not necessarily get better, their ability potentially to manage that themselves had improved?

Michael

Had improved, yes, exactly right. That was quite a very interesting for us. And this was a real longitudinal study. We're not just talking about a year here we're talking about three or four years of longitudinal study. And what we are now thinking about with that is that we need to be better at, and this is probably generally in just not all in work environment, better actually understanding mental health. For ourselves, but also managers. I think this is a real insight into a slice of our population that has more comorbidities in mental health. So they've got 80% around comorbidities. But this is a great way for us to actually reflect on do we really have a healthy work environment if that makes sense.

Chris

It's quite topical at the moment.

Michael

It's topical and it's also saying mental health is different in everyone. For example mental health is very different in particularly teenagers, to young adults and different in female to men. And in different times in life. So we we take up too much of this overarching view of mental health and say here it is, but it's all very different.

Men are more focused on addiction. Women are more focused on depression. So there's all these elements that we are starting to learn about. But this was a great way to better understand our population. Which is actually going to change the way we look at our workforce as well. So we've now got a programme to build specific mental health applications, around autism, for the managers and also the actual individuals. So the key part there is the manager has embedded techniques to ask better questions. It also has knowledge and, and individuals can have some tools to help better self regulate and build that resilience.

Chris

You mentioned a really interesting stat just before and I was wondering if we could delve into it around that retention rate. And how does that compare to the general employee population?

Michael

We kind of benchmark it against a graduate programme. We look at our Dandelion Programme and we try and benchmark it to our graduate programme. Because we like to compare to compare things. And, and I think the part of it, we tried to say, if we ran a programme, how we compare it. And we compare against the effectively a graduate programme. So some of the stats out of graduate programmes is effectively after three years, you've got about a 70 to 80% retention rate, after three or four years. So you're getting a better retention rate. People like productivity and, I don't like matching productivity one person against another person. We're all different at different times. But we've seen generally, around 30 to 48%, better productivity.

Chris

I know one of the things that a lot of people kind of struggle with, with things like this is that balance between there's business need and business demand, and then there's the desire around corporate social responsibility, type angle. So we all, people want to do good things and do the right thing. But at the end of the day, there's a there's a business as well. How did you juggle that at DXC?

Michael

I think overall, how do justify it to ourselves. Obviously, we've seen great retention rates. So that's, been very, very helpful. You know, if you think about it from a corporate IP perspective that has a real cost when people leave. So we've retention rates, also, finding talent, where we can't we can't fill roles. Especially in cyber security, which is a weakness, something like 15 to 18,000 job roles vacancy in Australia alone. You know, so cyber security we've got, the other one is we've seen better productivity, and we've measured that so we've got some really good kind of you know, why we expanded. We're probably about 80 people at the moment in our programme across Australia. We are probably one of the one of the largest in the world and we probably be hopefully by the close to near 100 by the end of the year.

And that gives you a kind of an idea that we're, you know, this is you know, we're not seeing this is just a not to be flippant, but was not a token effort. We want to make a difference. And also, by putting evidence based research behind it, it gives allows other organisations to learn from what we're doing. We've open sourced, the Dandelion Programme, which is now had over 200 organisations across 67 countries which download the material, think something like over 1900 downloads of the material. And then we've also one thing we've also been been very big at is trying to automate a lot of our learnings into tools.

So we use an e-learning package. Now Google uses Microsoft so we shared all of our material with a company called Uptimize, which is an e-training package. That is a package focused very much on managers and co workers and building their skills up. And that's a key thing, is actually building up the other parts, not just obviously people on the spectrum, but also focusing on the managers and getting them better skilled. And actually, a lot of people are empathetic, but they just don't know how to go about it.

Chris

That's, one thing I think I've come across quite a bit. Is that there's a desire, and I think there's an understanding that it makes sense as well. And it's not just a good thing to do, but just not sure how to start and what does it mean.

Michael

Can I have the right conversation? And I like the words using meltdown, but that's the kind of things people see because I see that obviously in kids. And they think that kind of translates to, adulthood and that's kind of very different. And as we all know, we all grow up. And I think that's kind of it's some of those things that kind of, we have to pull things back.

We actually have a few tools, we also use a couple of tools out of Israel, that are used by the Israeli Defence Forces. So they're one of the oldest programmes on the globe. Which we've learned a lot from them as well. So and the, the key part, we've got an assessment tool, which actually gives us an idea about job fit, and how their autism fits in within the work environment.

It's used by the Israeli Defence Forces and we also use a, a tool that's actually a work performance questionnaire tool. So one of the things we found is a difficulty was really about managers having and this is when you talk about sustainability, you know, managers really having an open blunt conversation about performance. People don't do it at the best of times. It's probably one of the worst experiences everyone has, is doing performance management. You turn up and if you can't sometimes self advocate, for a lot of these things about having a performance management discussions is also about self advocating.

If you don't, self advocate and have self confidence, you are really on the back foot already. So we actually use the tool, which is fantastic tool, which is a very, very blunt discussion tool. The manager does it and it is a 360 tool, that actually is a really good way of getting the gaps. Because one of the things we used to see, in performance management, the autistic person would do is put himself as two and the manager put him at five.

Now, there's always kind of these things where, you're really showing that the manager thinks you're really doing a great job, cutting the code or doing these activities that are really good, but the self confidence is quite low. So this this tool brings it up a bit and in this tool that we do is even ask them simple questions, which actually helps a manager and an individual for example, did you turn up to work on time and you might find that a bit offensive. But that's actually a really good question for an autistic person who has a very structured routine.

But it also helps out the manager to find out if something is slipping in routine. So "I'm not having a very good sleep", "I'm not sleeping", "I travel in", so therefore you can actually pick a lot of the other issues going on underneath. And that's a very good way of actually telling and our managers have learned a lot from that. That's what we want, actually at the end of day we are all humans and it's all about a people based business. That you want to be asked "did you have trouble sleeping?", "I've had trouble sleeping". And then you can actually ask questions, "are you having caffeine late at night?", "oh yeah, still having caffeine late at night", so then it's "now you might want to stop that."

Chris

Simple thing. And have you found that using the whether it's the job fit assessment tool and the work performance one, have you used them outside of your autistic work force at all?

Michael

Not yet. I mean, we're planning to. What we're trying to do is actually make them into a web front end. So we've got a little bit of development. So when we bought built the tools, obviously, they're not quite for scalable use yet. It's very much more that they were built for fit for purpose. We tried them, we actually had to, obviously do some validation of the tools as well.

Chris

Did you think that they would be broadly applicable and not over specific?

Michael

Yeah. And they're very, very, very much more specific in industry in probably about 4-5 areas it focus' on and very, very specific. I think it'll be very good, I've looked at it, for managers who probably, and team leaders, they probably don't also don't have the confidence in having a discussion. And if you think about your experiences and advantages depending on the manager, that depends on the confidence and experience they have.

Chris

Sort of like levelling of the playing field, a little bit for both.

Michael

For both. And we've seen for managers I've had, you know, for me, it's like I've had some ones have worked for me, some of them are great, have been great managers. And as they've got older, the variety of questions they can ask, the experiences they can bring, does make a difference.

Chris

Are they things that you would be open to sharing thoughts around how others could create a similar approach?

Michael

Happy to do that. I mean, we're happy sharing a lot of our material. We've put a lot of our stuff on the Cornell website. So we distribute a lot of that. And we now providing a lot more material to the Autism CRC as well. So that helps kind of what we're trying to do is to get dissemination of a lot of our things to other employers.

Chris

I'll make sure I'll get some links from you. So people can find it.

Michael

Yeah, it would be helpful.

And it's getting people to kind of use it, you know, eventually that, you know, people that in organisations that actually haven't self disclosed and maybe having a hard time is actually, you know, they can use some of these tools and maybe suggest it to their HR or their managers to say, Well, here's, if we want to build a better inclusive workplace. Here's some of the tools you can use. I think it does help those, you know, we have people would, I mean, probably maybe have been disadvantage because work environments haven't been that inclusive, but now they can actually do it. And that's what we're hoping to as well.

It's not just Just about us developing something and helping to build this part of our programme or better, you know, inclusive pathway. But it's actually also about having people that we know that are actually, you know, organisation. And they haven't disclosed, baseline that, but the organisation gets better for just a temporary example.

We've been revisiting our EAP programme, which is Employee Assistance Programme, and making sure that when you have psychologists on there, which you can have access, but they have psychologists, they actually have some of them have an autism bent. Which is important.

Chris

Yeah, absolutely.

Michael

So you actually, are changing the fabric of the organisation, and I thought, why some fabric because, you know, you got many different strands of humanity in it. Rather than it's just I don't like the word culture because it's just, culture is about the tone. But also do you have the organisational processes. A bit like the EAP programme, does it represent inclusivity? And for example, does it have any indigenous counsellors on there? If you had, you know, and that's all questions that not many people really think about the Employee Assistance programme.

Chris

I suspect not. It's not something I would have necessarily jumped to straightaway, that's for sure.

Yeah, I take your point, it's pretty important. People are going to reach out to those sorts of avenues they're going to have, potentially, and I think a lot of the challenges that I've seen with people is it's not work, per se. It's always seems to be the intersect between work and their personal life. That seems to be the challenge so it's the blend of what's going on at home as much as it is what's going on at work, creates challenges for them. I think often those things can be very unique to the individual's actual circumstances. Having internal processes and avenues to go to that can be empathetic and understanding of their particular issues or concerns. It's going to only help.

Michael

You're absolutely right. And I think that's what we've learned is that this is where these performance management tools are kind of, we've learned a lot is actually asking some, it's usually those things that happen outside of work that fall into work. And as not able to self regulate that or know sometimes it's okay, but also, it's so say helping the individual to actually understand, you know, how to get the appropriate support in the workplace, but also how to sometimes navigate you know, the, you know, sometimes have complex support systems, you know, outside of work.

I think that's the hard part is and what we've been trying to help out is you know, people you know, making sure that if they've got their NDIS plan is active. You know, and I think and just saying things like, you know, do you actually actually have support? What support do you have? We have open those discussions with them. So they can actually understand that they need maybe seeing a psychologist or they might want to see a speech therapist. All those things. Yes, we have a little later in the programme, we also ensuring that they start building those relationships outside the programme to ensure that they have independence.

So we can move to move people through the programme. And that's the goal of it is moving more people through the programme, to actually over the three years to build up the evidence we build up we go through their technical skills, we build up the executive functioning skills, life skills, like nutrition, financial management, we build up the skills to focusing on their career. We want more people through the programme.

So that's kind of what we ended up doing is actually them having this career, they're independent, they actually are, you know, they can advocate for themselves. Which we focus on self advocacy, self dependence or independence. So we focus a lot on that to ensure that you know, we're not going to be around forever, but we also want them to have career movement. So maybe where they're starting in testing for example, they might want to say, Well, I want to don't want to be in testing, I want to do something else. And that's, that's what we want to help you want to want them to self actualize.

Chris

This has been really interesting Michael and just noted we're pretty much on time. I want to say thanks very much for what you've been able to share today. Even if we have had a couple of technical issues, bound to the happen at some point and I'll get some links from you to share so people can if they are interested in seeing some of that material that we've discussed and and some of the sites like Uptimize and the like. We'll make sure people know where to go for that. If there was one thing, one piece of advice you could give to an employer who was interested in doing something and was at the start of the journey, what might that be?

Michael

I think doing some manager awareness training for the organisation makes makes a big, big change. I think just focusing on the managers and the co workers, giving them an understanding of what it is. And I mostly want to give people a go. And that's my view. But giving the managers and the co workers a little bit of training, which they can, you know, we've got it can be available on our website, they can download the material makes a big difference or go talk to the autism community groups that will actually help take away some of those initial risks and probably people that also dispel some myths as well.

Chris

Well, thanks a lot Michael. I really appreciate it. and hope to chat soon.