Budget 2024 > Latest > Commentary
Ms Carrie Tan: Beyond income, work raises confidence, self-esteem, provides identity, structure and purpose to one’s life. It can also provide persons with special needs with a community of support at the workplace. Persons with special needs are physically and neurologically diverse. They are not a monolithic group of helpless or disabled care recipients. The framing of persons with special needs labels them as needy. The framing of neurodiversity as a problem labels people who have them as problematic. It is time to change that. Instead of being fixated on their limitations, we can shift our lenses to focus instead on their unique strengths. They are examples of successful employers who have observed their productivity to be often higher than normal employees.
UOB is one such company, reaping the inclusion reward since they started the initiative in 2013. They saw decreased turnover rate from 50% to 5%, and an improvement in productivity of 101% in their ScanHub department that utilises the methodical focus of persons with autism for repetitive tasks.
We need to adopt a strength-based approach by seeing divergence as an asset and not a problem. The culture of acceptance and awareness from co-workers, as well as the parents’ or caregivers’ mindsets, is essential for employment to be successful and sustained. We need to change the mindset of the whole of society and not just employers. We can just as easily see persons with special needs as specially able or specially gifted if we start focusing on their strengths.
GCHK, UK’s national security and intelligence agency, promotes itself as a neurodiverse employer to attract applicants such as persons with dyslexia, whom they find to have good visual awareness and better at spotting visual patterns that other people miss. Gran Estación, a mall in Colombia, has persons with special needs making up roughly half of their 120-strong workforce. People in wheelchairs are hired as security guards as they have better visibility at pocket height and are also able to move faster on a chase than people on foot.
We can improve public awareness of what neurodiversity is and start to recognise the supernormal attributes that specially abled persons have if we only saw them as such. For example, autism, currently classified as a disability, is also known as a neurodiverse condition, amongst others such as obsessive compulsive disorder, dyslexia and ADHD. What great leaps might we make in the future if we started to approach and excavate the special gifts of these children? More than 5,500 since 2018 per year are found to have autism and this number is increasing.
If we adopt the approach much like Professor X in the Marvel series to nurture them, such as the X-Men, and hone their special abilities for good, it is the limitation of society’s imagination and resourcefulness that renders them as disabled. Let us bust the stigma of neurodiversity and the myths that employing them require more supervision, are costly to hire or that they are unsuitable for skilled jobs.
I suggest that the Government invest in a “kick-ass” public communications campaign that takes a strengths-based and gift-based approach to the portrayal of these talents in our midst. I urge MSF to set a goal to leapfrog employment success by shifting this lens of special needs to specially abled for our friends in this community.
Watch the speech here.