ADHD or just personal preference?

You can ask what you want.

ask for the moon on a stick if you want.

in theory businesses have to make reasonable adjustments and while some businesses are great others are less so.

in practice it tends to come down to how valuable you are as an employee or how inclusive they are trying to be.

but yes not doing phone calls is a common reasonable adjustment request for all sorts of reasons. And it gets granted quite a lot.

someone with situational mutism for example who sometimes cannot speak due to stress would probably get granted it.

Situational mutism overlaps with autism but not all autistic people have situational mutism and not all people who have situational mutism are autistic.

https://reframingautism.org.au/all-about-situational-mutism-a-guide-for-allies/

The point is, your manager has a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for a disabled employee, but they also have a legal duty to protect you, as an employee, from undue work-related stress.

You can't dictate what adjustments should or shouldn't be made for your colleague, not least because you aren't party to their medical details or what recommendations may have been made by occupational health etc.

What you can talk about, with appropriate knowledge and conviction, is the impact that current working practices are having on your own health and wellbeing. It isn't about making things personal or assigning blame. It is about advocating for yourself and for what you need in the workplace to function at your best.

If you frame the issue in terms of the impact on you and your stress levels, then your manager will need to consider that carefully and assess whether changes need to be made in order to tackle the aspects of your job which are impacting on your wellbeing. If you go in with the focus on your colleague being treated differently, then they might just shrug it off as being a case of you not understanding why reasonable adjustments need to be made.

That’s not ADHD, that’s a dick

Op says this person says they have adhd.

ie she does not really believe they have adhd and they have not shared any other conditions with her.

management often face a difficult situation if they have a disabled member of staff. Sometimes the disabled person is happy to share all their medical details with the team (or they are visibly in a wheelchair/don’t respond at all to speech and carry a card saying they are deaf/etc) but often people are not happy to share what can after all be sensitive medical information with their team.

it’s then difficult for the manager as often the colleagues will ask questions along the lines of why does she not have to do work out of hours when I do?

and sonetimes that answer is well, because she’s in a wheelchair and that event is up three flights of stairs with no lift etc. it’s also common for disabled people to have issues with fatigue particularly if there is an illness and ongoing pain involved so fixed days or fixed shifts are a common reasonable adjustment (which also tends to cause problems as most people on a rotating shift pattern would also prefer a fixed shift).

ultimately if the person in question has requested these reasonable adjustments/or occupational health has recommended them and they’ve been accepted by HR and management then it would be very foolish of the line manager to get rid of them as it would open the firm up to tribunal.

op, from your perspective some of this looks like unfairness (them not answering short notice requests) and some of it is very much personal preference (email vs phone call, trellis vs excel).

within a business it’s normal for the business to decide what software is used - this isn’t something that a member of staff would decide. Equally, there’s probably policies on eg communicating with customers whether internal or external.

It's not about what I can see or what I can't see. I'm trying to help you to present your case in a way that a manager is more likely to respond to.

And in any case, the question of cause and effect is open to interpretation. If the rest of you and your team are overloaded with last minute requests or covering for events etc, then you can argue that the person who is excluded from this due to reasonable adjustments is the cause of the problem, but you could equally argue that management has failed to put appropriate and sufficient resources in place to meet the needs of the service. There is not only one way of looking at these things, and forcing your colleague to do the work in a way that causes them to struggle is unlikely to be the only possible solution.

If you genuinely want the impact on you to be addressed, then I highly recommend that you frame the issue in terms of the things which you personally are finding difficult.

If you just want to whinge about the perception that it isn't fair, then go ahead, but be aware that it won't look very professional and it probably won't result in any solutions being found.

Pain in the arse.

Well obviously I know someone who is hard of hearing could do that or any illnesses of the like, I'm not dense.

But I didn't know you could ask it as a requirement just because you find it stressful!

We have to use teams primarily in our job but I wouldn't be able to get out of taking calls.

Sounds more like PITA syndrome than ADHD and they are in the wrong job if they can't/won't do it.

Yes?

think about the range of disabilities there are. A deaf person is not going to be able to effectively communicate using a telephone. There are various services that try to work around this but email/teams/instant messenger is an obvious solution.

equally, many people who have had strokes or similar struggle to speak clearly but can type no problem.

i myself only have intermittent speech these days and I communicate more often in writing.

of course a standard reasonable adjustment is using email/teams/instant messenger.

Where has @SummerStrolls demanded access to colleagues private medical information?
also she doesn’t seem to want to force this person to work like her, just to do what they are paid for.

@SummerStrolls you and the rest of your colleagues should follow suit, work to rule and absolutely not pick up their slack! It’s your managers responsibility to establish how to distribute the workload, so that if they don’t want to do x and expect others to do it, what will they pick up instead.

I agree completely. It's ok to get adjustments to help do the job but not avoid. That's ridiculous. You are there to work, not dictate.

I agree with you.

I was just thinking all of these things sound really plausible for ASD. Possibly moreso if it's a combination of both ASD and ADHD.

They're not at all flexible with their working days, so it's often me or my colleagues who cover for events outside of usual hours.

If this was on the job description and they agreed to the contract, then it’s completely unfair that they get out of it simply by saying they have ADHD.

It seems that they cannot do this job and so they need to find another one.

It’s not discrimination.
There are many jobs that require good eye sight or not having had laser eye surgery etc.
You cannot be a firefighter if you’re in a wheelchair etc.

There are reasonable adjustments but then there is just not being able to do the job.

Seriously, you can ask not to use phone but email instead?

I have to answer calls at my desk, not that we get a lot. My colleague answers ones to their desk. And I work NHS.

Why did anyone apply for this job if they find the specs too much? To the op.

I wouldn't get away with any of this at work 🤣🤣🤣 I have reasonable adjustments to do my job, not avoid doing tasks! And I certainly do not put work onto other people.

If I didn't do any of those things, I would not be in a job!

I use excel for reports for my work.

Is this post even real? How would they still be in a job if they can't do it?

I’m disabled (not adhd)

I provided my manager and have on file at HR my diagnoses plus reports from my consultant.

I was referred to an occupational health service (doctors who deal with health in working circumstances) who recommended various reasonable adjustments for me.

you will find that if you ask for medical details for your colleague you will not be entitled to see them (gdpr) nor will you be permitted to see the occupational health report.

adjustments such as email rather than phone calls etc are fairly common.

it isn’t always possible for each team member to do a fair share of every single task the team does and employers are usually happy to do small adjustments.

i doubt you will get anywhere trying to force your colleague to work exactly like you do.

if you are having issues with workload/timings etc you need to raise it with your manager - who will know what occupational health have said for your colleague

I imagine the difficulty they face with phone calls and last minute assignments is slow processing and lack of short term memory.

It might be that stopping their work to send you a file throws them off and it takes them a long time to get back into what they were doing.

I understand your frustration though.

My partner has ADHD - getting him to do any paperwork or use a laptop is nearly impossible. He hates phone calls although he hates texting more. It takes him longer to process written information and verbal is harder. He needs strict routine and structure otherwise he just gets distracted and nothing is done. Last minute changes stress him a lot. It is irritating but yes I can see this being ADHD on the more severe end.

Why do you have to do the work they refuse to do at the detriment of your own workload? Tell your manager you don’t have the capacity to do it?

And yes “reasonable adjustments” have to be reasonable - not just whatever the individual wants because it suits them…..