Having a diverse workforce and supporting our staff to be their best at work and flourish is a key priority. Investing in diversity of thought and lived experience benefits both patients and staff, supports retention and helps us to address the workforce challenges that our NHS faces.
Over the past two years we have run an award-winning, fully integrated, multi-partner recruitment programme focused on attracting local people from diverse backgrounds and with lived experience into roles in our West Yorkshire Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism trusts.
We ran the project in partnership with local voluntary sector organisation, Touchstone. Touchstone provides health and wellbeing services to diverse communities across Yorkshire and has specialist experience in inclusive recruitment practices. This partnership was key to the project’s success and enabled us to reach communities and diverse groups in a way that large NHS Trusts often struggle to do.
Having a diverse workforce and supporting our staff to be their best at work and flourish is a key priority. Through our work on inclusive recruitment and through feedback at different forums across the Partnership, we were hearing feedback from our neurodivergent colleagues about challenges they face in their daily work life.
There was also a lack of awareness about reasonable adjustments that can be easily implemented to support colleagues. One tool to tackle the culture change needed to support this cohort and to influence change, is reciprocal mentoring. This gives staff the opportunity to work with a more senior learning partner and share their experiences and challenges, and it gives the senior leader the opportunity to gain a better insight into how to support staff.
Nadine Rooney, Care Navigator at West Yorkshire Commissioning Hub and who is neurodiverse, shares her experience of reciprocal mentoring below.
I had not heard of reciprocal mentoring previously but after looking into it further, it would be beneficial for me and my mentor to develop more robust understanding and insights into neurodiversity in the workforce, so of course I jumped at the opportunity. There are many things I've struggled with in the past so to have a mentor work with me as any challenges arose could only be a positive.
Working with Alison, I felt like we had been specifically matched personality-wise for similar ways of working and communication styles, it was fantastic. For me as a mentee, I was able to share pieces of work, be observed giving presentations and discuss some of the challenges with keeping on top of things such as emails.
Alison was able to provide some really useful feedback in terms of equipment to use such as double screens, using the archive function on Outlook, and how my communication style / presentation pieces could make greater impact. I found my feedback extremely useful and use all approaches to great effect. I felt really listened to, and able to explore some of my challenges in detail such as how having low energy levels or attempts to multi-task, being overwhelmed impacted my work further.
These all seem like really simple things on the surface but these are often the things that elude me whereas I can really get involved with and excel at more complex pieces of work. Alison really helped me build my confidence in highlighting this point with me.
Top tips for mentees I would suggest laying it all on the table, removing the mask and exploring the challenges you come across day-to-day. As I say, the simple things that escape me would lead me to feel embarrassed and be really hard on myself, this is where the reciprocal element really comes into its own, understanding your thought processes, breaking things down into their components sort of a deep-dive into the good and the bad. It was a fantastic approach to understand how I could really embrace data analysis to the point of presenting in a national forum with no formal training but struggle in saying what I need in a 10 minute presentation.
This approach is so much more than the usual coaching style and the development aspects, both on an equal footing learning from one another, I would encourage everyone to take part whenever it is offered. I would like to say a big thank you to the Neurodiversity team for including me in such a fantastic project that has helped me enormously, and to Alison for being down to Earth, willing to learn from my experiences and taking that learning into practice. Thank you.
The reciprocal mentoring for neurodivergent colleagues evaluation report is available.
An evaluation of the work can be found here.
The evaluation provides details of some of the reasons we struggled to recruit higher numbers and explores the barriers to employment. We’ve developed a series of case studies following the journey of the people we supported throughout this project, to learn from their experiences. We want to use this learning to help us drive forward change and to challenge some of the traditional recruitment processes that deter people from applying for posts in the NHS.
Through this work on inclusive recruitment and through feedback at different forums across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, we heard feedback from our neurodivergent colleagues about challenges they face in their daily work life. There was also a lack of awareness about reasonable adjustments that can be easily implemented to support colleagues.
The law (Equality Act 2010) says that employers must make reasonable adjustments for:
Reasonable adjustments are changes an employer makes to remove or reduce a disadvantage related to someone's disability. For example:
Reasonable adjustments are specific to an individual person. They can cover any area of work.
Leeds Mind inclusive toolkit
For more than two years, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership has been working with The Boost Project at Leeds Mind, a project developed to recruit and train volunteers from diverse and maginalised backgrounds. These volunteers co-facilitated peer support groups. All of Boost volunteers have lived experience of mental health struggles.
While on the project, volunteers worked with staff from Leeds Mind to produce a toolkit for creating an inclusive environment. Information for this toolkit was contributed by the volunteers through one-to-one interviews, a survey and group discussions and developed to help organisations integrate more inclusive practices in their work.
These videos show how important adjustments are to neurodivergent people in the workplace and how managers can support staff to be the best that they can be.
