Making Life Easier for your Dyslexic Employee

Tessa Halliwell and Judith Shaw

You may have noticed that you have an employee who:

• Shows promise but avoids taking part in any training
• Is very capable in some areas but struggles in situations like giving a presentation, writing a report or taking minutes in a meeting.
• Has extremes of ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’ so that one day they can do their job really well and another day may appear not to know or remember anything.
• Can get very nervous, especially if they feel they are being watched.

This employee may well be dyslexic, with both the gifts and the difficulties of dyslexia.

What follows is a 4 point plan for making life easier for your dyslexic employee.

1.                  Understand the issues

2.                  Talk to the employee

3.                  Consider the possibilities

4.                  Make a plan

Understand the issues.  Dyslexic people are not stupid.  They have special talents which they bring to their working life.  An employer with no dyslexic staff may be losing out on the benefits that these key assets can bring to an organisation. These can include a skill in seeing the whole picture. This often makes them excellent problem solvers and good at fixing things.  They may have very effective people skills, visual and design skills or an uncanny ability with computers.

However, as well as the well known difficulties with reading, spelling and writing, they may have trouble staying on task, time-keeping and organisational skills. 

They have often had a very difficult time in school as it is stacked against dyslexics.  Dyslexics are ‘real world’ thinkers who use mainly pictures and concepts instead of thinking with words.  As learning in school is supposed to take place mostly by listening to the words of a teacher or reading words on a page, it is easy to see why this can be difficult.  Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Churchill and Richard Branson were all considered ‘dummies’ at school.  School teaching is rarely adapted to the dyslexic learner.

Failure or very limited success at school can often lead to low self-esteem and mean that the dyslexic can be deeply stressed when approaching tasks which are challenging.  This in its turn leads to more difficulties with the tasks.

In fact, the very talent of being able to see things from lots of points of view is the cause of the difficulties they face: their ability to mentally combine imaginary and real world images in a creative or intuitive way.  This talent can play havoc with reading and writing, but it is highly useful for the arts, engineering, sports, strategy, salesmanship and invention.

Talk to the employee.  Your employee has, no doubt, taken what steps they can to deal with any issues they have at work, but it may be helpful to offer them some further support and understanding.

·        They may know they are dyslexic but have been too afraid to admit it for fear of losing their job. Once they realise that you as an employer intend to be supportive, they may well be willing to talk about their difficulties freely.  This will be useful for planning how to help with any areas that are getting in the way of them doing the job well.

·        They may have always wondered what was ‘wrong’ with them.  If you think that someone is dyslexic, talk about it and, if they are willing, suggest that they have an assessment done to give them further information.  It is often a great relief for people to realise they are dyslexic, not ‘stupid’ as they may well have been told they were at school.

Consider the possibilities.  There are a number of aspects to the sort of help that will be useful for a dyslexic person in the work-place.  This will vary from person to person so the first rule is to listen to the employee about their difficulties and what they feel might help.  The employee themselves will have a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses.  They will also know how they work best and what situations at work are the hardest for them.

Help in the work-place for people who are dyslexic or have difficulties with attention comes in two forms and most employees will benefit from both approaches.

·        A wide-ranging programme that gets to the roots of the employee’s difficulties and will improve their skills so they are able to perform better in the normal environment.

·        Some adaptations in the work-place that will help the dyslexic person to do their job more effectively.

Programme

A programme that will make a great deal of difference to your employee’s ability to function in the work-place is a Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme. 

This one-to-one programme is individually tailored to the needs of the employee and has a high success rate.  It uses the dyslexic’s talents of visualisation and imagination to help with the areas that are difficult to them, whether that is reading, writing, maths, attention difficulties, organisational skills or timekeeping.  It is usually delivered in a 30 hour, one-to-one format, though the programme for dyscalculia, that aspect of dyslexia that manifests as difficulty with numbers and arithmetic, can frequently take a little longer, after which the employee will have the self-management tools to continue to develop their skills in a positive way.

Adaptations

If, for some reason, it is impossible to arrange for your employee to have the Davis programme, which will deal with the roots of their difficulties, here are some possible adaptations in the work-place that will help to some degree:

• Having documents printed on coloured paper – this reduces glare for some dyslexics and makes reading easier
• Using larger print
• Flexitime
• Appropriate computer software that helps with reading, for example, Read On or text read which will read out text if necessary, or the Oxford reading pen.
• Spellcheckers
• Help from someone in the office or outside to check through written work for grammar or spelling errors, or to check that figures have been written down correctly and worked out in the right sequence
• Help to set up systems that will work for the employee – for example, setting up a good way of keeping track of work to do and scheduling

Make a plan, carry it out and review its success on a frequent regular basis.  Both you and the employee will know what aspects have worked best and which are no longer needed.

This paper gives a brief outline of how to help your dyslexic employee.  Please contact us if you would like further help with training to understand dyslexia and its causes or to arrange a dyslexic assessment to see if a Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme would be helpful to your employee.