Had to leave work because I'm partially deaf

[GMH74]

I had a job which I hated. I've posted about it before. However I had to resign because my hearing was starting to cause problems. I had a hearing test and it showed I had significant hearing loss. I knew I had problems at the high frequencies but it was bad throughout not just at the high frequencies. My manager was complaining that people had said I wasn't minuting meetings well and I said it was because I wasn't hearing well. My manager said I wasn't allowed to use headphones in a meeting to make sure the sound was going direct to my ears. I am getting a hearing aid privately because I haven't found my NHS one useful, the sound was very disorted. My manager says there is a slight time delay if I listen through the Zoom so that is why I'm not allowed. She also didn't explain to anyone complaining about my minutes that I was struggling to hear them. The sound quality on Zoom and from the in person sound system is poor and when people have their back to me it's really hard.
I understand that I'm not well suited for the job but I asked if they could make any reasonable adjustments due to the Disability Discrimination Act. I'm funding the expensive hearing aid myself. She said no and having asked for feedback on the hearing test, her whole tone changed and she said if I didn't leave they'd start a competency procedure.
I feel really useless. I got my doctor to sign me off for a month so I didn't have to work my notice. They had previously been wanting me to work until they found someone else and not to take my holiday allocation which was owing.
I'm worried I'll never get another job. My last two jobs won't give personal references. I'm worried that's because of the circumstances. Constructive dismissal pretty much this time and I was made redundant from the previous one during Covid lockdown!
I'm a Cambridge graduate but with a 2.2 in an arts subject which is sometimes seen as a "Micky Mouse subject" and I have a very specific masters in an area which also requires a lot of unpaid voluntary work (I've done some, but needed to earn a living) and I had a big career break when my children were small and then did low paid, low skilled, term time only stuff to fit around them as wrap around childcare was prohibitively expensive.
It's not a stealth boast but I've come into some money as a relative wanted to buy me out of house in an expensive part of the country. My confidence is rock bottom and I don't know what to say about reason for leaving. I think I'll get a rubbish reference too. I'm thinking of doing some Project Management training. I need a job where my hearing is not a problem. I'm worried no one will want to take me on.
What would you do in my circumstances? It seems a waste to run through the house money, but I'm not sure my self esteem is up to a lot of rejection. Please be nice. I've basically lost my job because I'm disabled. Oh, and it was public sector.
What would you do?

For my education ( I don't manage anyone & never want to, btw)

What would the reasonable adjustments have been for OP?

How much should the company have spent on a hearing aid for OP?

How could the sound system be improved for OP -- what is possible?

What difference would it make if OP's manager told meeting attenders that OP was part deaf?

OP: why didn't they want you to wear headphones?

My experience of minutes be written up (not by me) from long, technical, intense in-person-only meetings is that there is huge scope to miss some things, very hard to get all the details right. Not unusual for the recorders to interrupt & ask for something to be clarified or to email attenders afterwards to double check what they said, how to spell specific words.

ps: give OP hated the job, what should she aim to achieve now?

My work's argument was that writing the minutes was a key component of the job so it was not reasonable to expect adjustments to be made and that I could not hear if the chairman whispered questions about procedure during the meeting (not an uncommon situation). I was not allowed headphones because of the slight time delay.
The job was basically arranging meetings, sorting agendas and papers, taking the minutes and writing them up afterwards.
That's why I didn't fight them more and resigned, because I was embarrassed about trying to do the job when I turned out to be so badly deaf. I hadn't realised my hearing was nearly so bad.
The last meeting I tried to minute before I left, I was sat at a table to the side and my colleague had to take over as I could only make out one word in 5 as half the people had their backs to me. My manager asked why I hadn't minuted it and wasn't impressed when I said I couldn't hear enough to do it. As someone said earlier, it made me think my boss should have done a disability awareness course.
I asked to be redeployed or to do the other elements of the job such as arranging meetings, collating the papers and producing the agendas and I was told no.

do you think if you were redeployed to those other job duties, that you would like the job much better? You started this thread saying how much you hated it, sounded like you hated it before the problems with your hearing became apparent. A good reference is worth fighting for, of course.

I did hate it. That is another reason I didn't fight harder to stay. The job had 14 hour days (when there were meetings) and other things which made me think they weren't nice employers. I liked and respected a few of my colleagues and didn't want to make their already crazy workloads worse by resigning. But when I was told I couldn't use the headphones it was the straw which broke the camel's back.

@GMH74

My work's argument was that writing the minutes was a key component of the job so it was not reasonable to expect adjustments to be made and that I could not hear if the chairman whispered questions about procedure during the meeting (not an uncommon situation). I was not allowed headphones because of the slight time delay. The job was basically arranging meetings, sorting agendas and papers, taking the minutes and writing them up afterwards. That's why I didn't fight them more and resigned, because I was embarrassed about trying to do the job when I turned out to be so badly deaf. I hadn't realised my hearing was nearly so bad. The last meeting I tried to minute before I left, I was sat at a table to the side and my colleague had to take over as I could only make out one word in 5 as half the people had their backs to me. My manager asked why I hadn't minuted it and wasn't impressed when I said I couldn't hear enough to do it. As someone said earlier, it made me think my boss should have done a disability awareness course. I asked to be redeployed or to do the other elements of the job such as arranging meetings, collating the papers and producing the agendas and I was told no.

Op, you are doubting yourself. Your employer should have followed the correct procedures and referred you to Occupational Health and then make arrangements as possible or redeploy you. Your employer not only discriminated against you but it appears that she/he also bullied you.

You have a very clear case for constructive dismissal
read more here www.acas.org.uk/dismissals/constructive-dismissal

Please contact ACAS asap to avoid missing your deadline for the tribunal application. CAB can also direct you to your local employment law centre.

Report the GP that was rude and ask for a different GP to discuss what has happened and how you are affected.

I wish you luck.

@lljkk

For my education ( I don't manage anyone & never want to, btw)

What would the reasonable adjustments have been for OP?

How much should the company have spent on a hearing aid for OP?

How could the sound system be improved for OP -- what is possible?

What difference would it make if OP's manager told meeting attenders that OP was part deaf?

OP: why didn't they want you to wear headphones?

My experience of minutes be written up (not by me) from long, technical, intense in-person-only meetings is that there is huge scope to miss some things, very hard to get all the details right. Not unusual for the recorders to interrupt & ask for something to be clarified or to email attenders afterwards to double check what they said, how to spell specific words.

A good employer would have set up a meeting with OP and asked her what accommodations she needed. Also researched resources via hearing loss support organisations.

A good employer is au fair with employment law and uses it to inform their set up for the good of all, not to disadvantage anyone.

Headphones would have been such a minor accommodation to provide.

Also there is really no need for drama over minute taking. Meetings can be recorded and recordings transcribed in 2mins.

I have never heard anything so ridiculous as this situation in which the OP is denied use of headphones.

I use zoom all the time to interview and fortunately I have a great employer who provides great equipment and who is always open to more ways to be supportive.

You could look to see whether there is a school for deaf children in your area? They will often advertise that they are interested in applicants with hearing loss. The setting would be "deaf friendly", they would understand why you got signed off from your last job and you could build your confidence back up. Agree with a PP that the technology is very good these days so
I hope your new hearing aids give you better access. Good luck OP.

I dislike the assumption that deaf people can only work with deaf people, as the PP has assumed.

You could have been able to take minutes if the video calls had had captions enabled, if they had booked you a stenographer to caption meetings, if they had used hearing loops or radio aid assistive technology,.

They could have gotten funding for this from Access to Work - the cost of a support worker would have been fully funded (see the access to work guidance for evidence).

The NHS provide free hearing aids so that's not a reasonable thing to request from your employer,, but the other things are.

They could have redeployed you as a reasonable adjustment.

Definitely fight back OP. You still have time to take action.

@RandomNumb3rs

The first thing to do is to get some legal advice so you can get compensation for the discrimination. They have treated you appallingly and I am so sorry you are going through this.

I suspect there may be specialist charities for hearing loss that could help also, with the discrimination, with assistance for ways back to employment, and with the knock to your self esteem.

This.

Get legal advice.

I have no words for your manager.

💐

You were constructively dismissed. Get legal advice.

Absolutely delighted you're out of there though! There will be something much better out there. I like the sound of academic publishing as a pp suggested. I'm an NHS worker, have a look on jobs.nhs.uk and your local area, look at everything. In particular consider working in research support jobs.

Please please stop thinking your degree subject is Mickey Mouse. I know what you mean, I have a Cambridge history degree which I thought didn't mean a lot but quite frankly over the years I have realised what I learned from it and there is nothing Mickey Mouse about it.

OP: I suppose you have to think carefully about whether there are other departments in same organisation you'd like to join. A good reference for next job is very valuable, but it's not clear you would want to return to this organisation.

In my work we record interviews & sometimes meetings -- transcripts take a huge amount of editing to fix afterwards (!!)  very hard to follow the natural conversation.   We've tried several transcription methods, different software, auto-transcribing, etc.

<ul><li>If 2+ people use same connection to speak, they both credited as same person speaking.  This matters hugely at hybrid meetings where obviously ,10 people can be in one room (on one connection) & 6 ppl on 4 other connections dialing in.
</li></ul>

<ul><li>A lot is automatically transcribed wrong -- "transcribe" becomes "transport" or maybe omitted completely because the software couldn't figure out the word, wrong words get written instead, jargon especially gets turned into another totally unrelated word, etc.
</li></ul>

<ul><li>You lose all inflection and tone, obviously.  
</li></ul>

<ul><li>The punctuation is minimal so meaning gets lost, pauses get lost, etc.  Think how important the placement of commas can be in written comms
</li></ul>

<ul><li>One of my colleagues uses software to dictate documents, I find a lot of typos in these to fix
</li></ul>

Anyone who has watched auto-captions during news conferences & listened at same time, knows how wrong the auto-captions can be.

You really can't rely on auto-captions or auto-transcribing very much.  OP is already doing 14 hour days.  I imagine that using auto-transcribing  would make her days longer not shorter.

For 'reason for leaving' just put 'career development'. If they ask at interview say that there wasn't enough progression in that organisation.

What I would say is, look for a job now, but use the money to cushion the gap so that you find the right job and the right organisation, don't jump at whatever turns up.

Constructive Dismissal & direct discrimination on. Speak to ACAS, they cannot do this legally. Do not let them.

@GMH74

I had a job which I hated. I've posted about it before. However I had to resign because my hearing was starting to cause problems. I had a hearing test and it showed I had significant hearing loss. I knew I had problems at the high frequencies but it was bad throughout not just at the high frequencies. My manager was complaining that people had said I wasn't minuting meetings well and I said it was because I wasn't hearing well. My manager said I wasn't allowed to use headphones in a meeting to make sure the sound was going direct to my ears. I am getting a hearing aid privately because I haven't found my NHS one useful, the sound was very disorted. My manager says there is a slight time delay if I listen through the Zoom so that is why I'm not allowed. She also didn't explain to anyone complaining about my minutes that I was struggling to hear them. The sound quality on Zoom and from the in person sound system is poor and when people have their back to me it's really hard. I understand that I'm not well suited for the job but I asked if they could make any reasonable adjustments due to the Disability Discrimination Act. I'm funding the expensive hearing aid myself. She said no and having asked for feedback on the hearing test, her whole tone changed and she said if I didn't leave they'd start a competency procedure. I feel really useless. I got my doctor to sign me off for a month so I didn't have to work my notice. They had previously been wanting me to work until they found someone else and not to take my holiday allocation which was owing. I'm worried I'll never get another job. My last two jobs won't give personal references. I'm worried that's because of the circumstances. Constructive dismissal pretty much this time and I was made redundant from the previous one during Covid lockdown! I'm a Cambridge graduate but with a 2.2 in an arts subject which is sometimes seen as a "Micky Mouse subject" and I have a very specific masters in an area which also requires a lot of unpaid voluntary work (I've done some, but needed to earn a living) and I had a big career break when my children were small and then did low paid, low skilled, term time only stuff to fit around them as wrap around childcare was prohibitively expensive. It's not a stealth boast but I've come into some money as a relative wanted to buy me out of house in an expensive part of the country. My confidence is rock bottom and I don't know what to say about reason for leaving. I think I'll get a rubbish reference too. I'm thinking of doing some Project Management training. I need a job where my hearing is not a problem. I'm worried no one will want to take me on. What would you do in my circumstances? It seems a waste to run through the house money, but I'm not sure my self esteem is up to a lot of rejection. Please be nice. I've basically lost my job because I'm disabled. Oh, and it was public sector. What would you do?

Did you look into Access to work? www.gov.uk/access-to-work If not, they will probably be able to support you moving forward. I also think that I'd speak with a disabilities adviser and find out if they have acted legally - I think that there's a case for tribunal due to disability. Acas will also be able to advise.

This is awful treatment and I would also suggest ACAS. Also, you may want to look into Access to Work for support with your hearing needs (www.gov.uk/access-to-work). As an ex audiologist, I found a lot of people found the advice really useful as they will come and assess your work situation and give specific advice on adjustments and equipment as well as helping your employer understand your needs.

@Timeforachange22

You could look to see whether there is a school for deaf children in your area? They will often advertise that they are interested in applicants with hearing loss. The setting would be "deaf friendly", they would understand why you got signed off from your last job and you could build your confidence back up. Agree with a PP that the technology is very good these days so I hope your new hearing aids give you better access. Good luck OP.

I'm sure you mean we'll but deaf people can work in so many jobs, they needn't be pigeon holed into deaf only environments.

We employ deaf baristas at work, not to suggest that the OP would want to be a barista! But if people could open their minds a bit more it would make a lot of difference to people who are so frequently shut out.