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My Workmate has an
Autism Spectrum
Disorderan Autism Spectrum Disorder
People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have
many features and skills that make them suitable
candidates to access the labour market.
adaptations they need.
By reading this book the reader will discover that the
great potential of these people as workers depends
largely on our ability to use it.
Its aim is to provide clues to
colleagues of people having Autism
Spectrum Disorders (ASD) so that
they may know about their specific
way of learning or acting at the
workplace and the methodological
DELETREA TEAM
«In a society that
strives to be
increasingly fair,
this is a challenge
for all.»
Innap Inserta is a collection whose aim is to provide
clues and success factors for the employability of
people with some kind of metal or development
disability, as people with indeed different abilities,
and, thus, build an Administration tuned to the needs
of society.
My co-worker has an Autism Spectrum Disorder
Innap Inserta
Innap Inserta
MY WORKMATE HAS AN AUTISM SPECTRUM D ISORDER
Unless stipulated by law, it is hereby prohibited to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate
and transform this work in any fashion without authorisation from the intellectual property
holders. Infraction upon the aforementioned rights may constitute a crime against intellectual
property rights (articles 270 and subsequent articles thereof of the Penal Code).
Rights reserved 2015, in regards to the rst edition in English, by
© INAP
Publisher:
Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (National Institute for Public Administration)
www.inap.es
ISBN: 978-84-7351-496-5 (paper format); ISBN: 978-84-7351-497-2 (electronic format)
NIPO: 635-15-068-6 (paper format); NIPO: 635-15-069-1 (electronic format)
Legal Deposit: M- 32840 - 2015
Interior image: © James Thew
Cover image: © Hakki Arslan
For this publication, chlorine-free recycled paper was used, as per the environmental criteria
of the public procurement.
My Workmate
has an Autism Spectrum
Disorder
Deletrea
team
El INAP
The Public Administration is a key part of an advanced society,
and a modern, agile and efficient Public Administration is a
determining factor if we wish to obtain a society with greater
degrees of well-being and quality of life.
The desire of INAP (National Institute for Public Administration)
(Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública) is to be a
leading institution in generating knowledge, with the goal
of stimulating organisational learning for teams in the public
sector, and thereby create a good Administration, oriented
toward the common good and in harmony with society’s
needs and expectations.
Its mission is to create transforming knowledge in the public
sector through transversal teams able to draw ideas, people
and innovative projects in hiring and training processes to
attain high-quality democracy and citizens. To this end, INAP
will draw its base on the following principles: efficacy in team
learning, being oriented toward citizens, transparency, being
exemplary, rendering accounts, independence, responsibility
and social cohesion.
The authors
The Deletrea Team is made up of a group of professionals with
ample experience in the field of Autism Spectrum Disorders
(ASD). Its director, Juan Matos, along with the rest of the team’s
founding members: Raquel Ayuda, Sandra Freire, Ana González
and María Llorente, have practised as clinical and psycho-
educational professionals in Deletrea since its foundation in
2001.
With the intention of improving the quality of life of people
with ASD and their families, Deletrea offers a wide range of
services: diagnosis, intervention, training, family counselling,
research, and awareness and dissemination about the disorder.
With this in mind, the professionals working at Deletrea have
participated in multiple conferences, postgraduate degrees
and courses, taught both in Spain and abroad. They have also
published many books about ASD, and have written articles for
numerous scientific journals and outreach publications.
The Deletrea Team’s publications include: Los niños pequeños
con Autismo. Soluciones prácticas para problemas cotidianos
(Young Children with Autism. Practical Solutions for Everyday
Problems. 2008), El síndrome de Asperger: Evaluación y
tratamiento (Asperger’s Syndrome: Evaluation and Treatment.
2012), Trastornos del Espectro Autista de Alto Funcionamiento.
Otra forma de Aprender (High-Functioning Autism Spectrum
Disorders. Another Way of Learning. 2012) and Síndrome de
Asperger: una guía dirigida a familiares, profesores y compañeros
(Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Family Members, Teachers
and Classmates. 2009).
Innap Inserta
The Public Administration must reflect the complexity, plurality
and diversity of the society it serves. This principle, which is
engraved in letters of fire on the frontispiece of the mission
of INAP (Spanish acronym, National Public Administration
Institution) as a public organisation, does not only refer to
democratic participation mechanisms for decision making, the
integration of groups in which citizens participate to defend
their interests, or the empowerment of inter-governmental
relations in complex States such as ours; it refers, particularly,
to a way of understanding the Administration’s relationship
with its environment, with society in general, with the people
it serves and caters to, on occasion in a somewhat cold, de-
humanised way. In brief, we are creating a socially responsible
Administration, to use an evidently tautological, pleonastic
expression, because either it is socially responsible or it is not.
That responsibility demands that we change our paradigm.
The Administration’s goal is to guarantee the rights and
liberties of its citizens and to maintain social cohesion and
integration, and that goal is non-transferrable: only the Public
Administration can meet it. Nobody else. And to do this
we need all the talent generated by society to work for the
common good, for the general interest. This immense task
requires new capabilities in public servants, as well as new
abilities and new attitudes, some of which were displayed
in our previous collection, Innap Innova, a brand that has
brought about a startling transformation in the way public
organisations understand their mission in this society of
8 My Workmate has an Autism Spectrum Disorder
permanent and accelerated evolution. We need all of society’s
talent to bloom, be shared and be focused on the common
good. Wherever it is, and wherever it comes from, for talent is
talent, and needs no adjectives.
A democratically advanced society, such as our own in
Spain, has assumed that its ethical and moral progress will
only be feasible if it places all of its potential at the service
of equal opportunities, the defence of fundamental rights,
the protection of the environment or the care, protection and
development of the weaker members of society. And among
the latter, we can find the huge group of people with some
sort of disability. The worst disability a society can suffer from
is not guaranteeing the equality of all of its citizens. And not
just legal equality, since in most cases it is not the disability
itself that encumbers the lives of so many people, but the
thoughts and attitudes others have towards them.
The Administration must have a crucial role in the change
of values related to the understanding, treatment, protection
and valuing of disabilities, no longer as a discriminatory factor,
but as a potential for the development of organisations and
the ethical commitment of people with their fellow men and
women. We no longer talk of disabled people, but of people
who have some form of disability, some impediment that does
not allow them to do, say, hear, see, behave, react in some
specific situations, but does not hinder them at all in others.
Approximately 10% of the Spanish population has some
type of disability. The unemployment rate for this group of
people may be as high as 40%. According to recent studies,
around two thirds of people with functional diversity who
are of working age have quit or been excluded from the
most common and normal form of economic inclusion for
My Workmate has an Autism Spectrum Disorder 9
this stage in their lives: remunerated employment
1. The INE
(Spanish acronym, National Statistics Institute), in its “Empleo
de Personas con Discapacidad 2011” (Employment of People
with Disabilities 2011) Survey, points out, among other
conclusions, that less than 5% of the working age population
has a certificate of disability (4.1%); that the activity rate of this
group is almost 40 percentage points lower than the rate for
the population with no disabilities; that, in addition to gender
and age, employment participation is highly dependant on
the type and intensity of the disability, so that people who
have disability associated with hearing loss are the most
actively employed, with an activity rate double that of those
with mental disorders, which are in turn the least active group
(54.4% compared to 25.5%). Likewise, this survey highlights
the importance of training as an integrative variable for
social and occupational integration. Due to this, activity and
employment rates increase as the training and education levels
increase, to the point of being 20 percentage points above the
average for people with disabilities and higher education.
It is precisely the achievement of social and occupational
inclusion that demands the direct intervention of the public
powers in terms of the fight against the discrimination these
people face. The Administration —and society as a whole—
cannot afford to waste all the talent these people possess, not
in economic terms, but in ethical terms.
Due to this, the INAP, as the benchmark institution for
matters of disability and public employment —we must
remember that 89.22% of people with disabilities who joined
the Administración General del Estado (General Administration
1 Colectivo Ioé (2013): “Diversidad funcional en España. Hacia la inclusión en igualdad de
las personas con discapacidades”, ”(Functional Diversity in Spain. Towards Equal Inclusion
of People with Disabilities), in Revista Española de Discapacidad, Spanish Disabilities maga-
zine), I (I): 33-46.
10 My Workmate has an Autism Spectrum Disorder
of the State) between 2003 and 2011 have done so into
organisms and hierarchies whose selection processes were
entrusted to the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública —
(INAP; National Public Administration Institute). As a generator
of transformative knowledge, the Institution has decided that
it must place all of its capabilities, all of its knowledge and all
of its innovative will at the service of the employment inclusion
of people with disabilities, both as a project in itself and as a
value that must impregnate all the organisms of the Spanish
Administration.
One result of this commitment is this Innap Inserta
collection, whose main objective is to spread information
about certain types of disabilities to the people who work
in the Administration, and provide mechanisms for a
better understanding of the problem, tools to support the
employment inclusion of people with disabilities in the work
environment, and provide knowledge to help them effectively
react, relate, serve, aid and integrate these people from their
different positions as co-workers, bosses or subordinates.
In order to do this, we continue along the intended path
of the Innap Innova collection, with the decision to create
prominently practical materials, available in pocket book
format, that enable people to approach the subject in a short
period of time, offering options to examine the issues at hand
at greater detail, and capable of generating didactic material
that can aid further educational activities.
And so the INAP, in order to fulfil its mission of creating
transformative knowledge in the public sector to benefit
society, in order to promote social cohesion and a high-quality
democracy, wants to make it known to all public employees
that these goals cannot be met until the culture of our
organisations is not impregnated of values such as those this
My Workmate has an Autism Spectrum Disorder 11
collection intends to transmit, and management strategies
and systems do not understand and integrate people with
disabilities across the board.
Companies that are applying diversity policies benefit
greatly, with the consolidation of cultural values within
their organisation, an improved company reputation, a
greater capacity to attract and retain talent, an increase
in the motivation of their personnel, a greater capacity for
innovation and creativity, or an improvement in the services
they provide. We must not forget that people are not disabled;
a disability appears or does not, depending on the activity
and circumstances. A person is not disabled; he or she has
a disability. Thus, if a disability does not limit someone,
don’t be the one to do so.
Innovation, collaborative learning, and fostering talent are
principles that inform our will to change. As public employees,
we can transform ourselves. We hope this initiative helps with
your transformation.
Manuel Arenilla Sáez
INAP Director