Non-visible Diversity: Spotlight on Dyslexia

Recently, I spoke to my cousin and Head of Product at Shell Energy, Elvin Nagamootoo for a very special episode of the ‘Why Care?’ podcast. During the episode Elvin spoke about how he was diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult, and how it was a revelatory moment for him as it explained his experiences as a kid of feeling different – particularly during school where he was labelled as a ‘disruptive child’.

Elvin’s story is far from unique, the US National Institutes of Health’s research estimates that as many as 20% of working adults have some degree of dyslexia, with it being the most common learning-related difficulty in the world. The majority of these will have not being diagnosed, or will be diagnosed with it in later life.

What is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is considered to be a learning disorder that is mostly localised to activities surrounding reading and writing, although it can also involve issues with memorising information and understanding jokes and expressions that have a different literal meaning.

Dyslexia does not cause, and is not related, to problems with intelligence or vision. Overall the brains of people with dyslexia are the same as others’, they just process information slightly differently in the language centres of their brains. This often causes the letters in words to appear jumbled, making text hard to decode at times. This makes people with dyslexia often read and write slower than their peers, as it simply requires extra effort for these activities.

So if 1 in 5 employees have Dyslexia what can I do?

You may be worried that if such a large percentage of employees could have dyslexia in your organisation, that they may be struggling and you may not be offering enough help. Luckily, there are many small things you can do to aid and support dyslexic workers in your organisation.

Ensure important documents are distributed in advance before important meetings or events.

The largest symptom of dyslexia is difficulties with reading text and thus taking longer to digest written information. This can often be a point of stress for dyslexic employees as if they are expected to read a piece of text at the exact same time as their colleagues (such as in a meeting), it can be frustrating and embarrassing if colleagues are waiting for them to finish. By distributing documents beforehand, employees with dyslexia won’t be ‘put on the spot’ and can read at their own pace.   

Give flexibility in presentation and customisation options for work-related technology.

Dyslexia-related difficulties are not universal for each person or each piece of text they read. There are many factors that can affect how people with dyslexia read text including font, font size, font colour, text spacing, background colour, colour contrast and text file format. Fonts that are too small and too uniform (with each letter being similarly designed so a lower case ‘l’ is the same shape as a lower case ‘i’ for example) are hard to read. Fonts that are less uniform can help with text readability.

Letting employees customise the size and fonts used by their devices for text, can allow employees with dyslexia adapt their devices to be best suited for their own personal legibility. If you are a larger organisation you could even have employees opt-into dyslexic friendly versions of key documents.

There are more tricks to making documents more dyslexic-friendly, such as using pictures over text where possible, this style guide for dyslexic friendly documents is a wonderful resource.

Make full use of technology.

Nowadays there are many more options for displaying data than just simple text. Dyslexics often have little trouble with understanding speech and audio, the condition is mostly to do with how their brains read text. So technology such as text-to-speech readers can be great support for dyslexic employees to simply read it for them, and they can listen and digest it far quicker than they would’ve in text form.

Similarly, if your organisation is about to distribute important information to your employees, offering an alternative to the text such as an audio or video recording could be a great help to your employees. As well as reading, writing can also be effected by dyslexia, so offering your employees the option to record meetings with their phones, or with specialist digital recording devices, could ensure the quality of their note-taking is preserved.

Finally there are numerous small tricks you can make with technology to help with dyslexia. One can be that if your organisation works in a field with lots of jargon or product names that aren’t in word processing dictionaries already, take some time to add them yourselves so employees can see immediately if anything is misspelt and get help correcting it. You can even set up Word, for example, to automatically correct your most common mistakes. So if you often type ‘teh’ instead of ‘the', Word will change it for you automatically. 

Provide appropriate working conditions.

Much like many things of this nature, there are working conditions that ease the difficulties and conditions that worsen them. Ensuring that the working areas are well lit, organised & tidy, and as free from distractions as it can be, are all ways to help dyslexic employees read and concentrate.

If their role includes a lot of reading information, or there are days where lots of reading is required, it is very beneficial to be able to offer dyslexic employees a private workspace or a quiet working environment such as a library or another quite enclosed area. It may be feasible to allocate a ‘reading day’ to employees where they can work from home that day and do all their reading and admin tasks in an environment under their control. These conditions will maximise their ability to concentrate on reading and digesting information.

How can Avenir help?

At Avenir we can help you identify and resolve any problems in your organisation to do with how neurodiverse employees are experiencing the organisation and their roles. With our Inclusion Survey, we analyse the experiences of employees and identify how different characteristics such as neurodiversity, gender, ethnicity and caring responsibilities are manifesting in your organisation.

With this full picture of your employees’ experiences, we can then offer a series of recommendations and work with you to develop a strategy that is inclusive for all, where everyone can show up at work with their full authentic selves and thrive. This includes making recommendations for how we can improve the working lives of your dyslexic employees.

Our Inclusive Leadership programme is also on hand to teach your managers and leaders on how to lead with an inclusive mindset by developing a toolbox of skills related to inclusive leadership that truly allows your leaders to grow, rather than just presenting them information.

To find out more about our services, visit the Avenir website here.

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