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Asperger's Syndrome Workers - Workplace Adjustments

Congratulations, your people skills were strong enough that you were hired!  Now what? 

Being able to stay employed will be dependent on your interactions with your coworkers.

Be proactive.  Make sure you know the answers to these questions:  Post Hire Questions. 

In face to face conversations, our difficulty is with the subtleties of connotation that the speaker may be trying to deliver nonverbally.  When we receive an assignment in verbal form (for example, in a meeting), before beginning the work, it helps to write down our understanding of that assignment and send it back to our lead and/or manager in email form, asking if the description is correct.  It is possible to miss out on some part of the assignment that was inferred but not explicitly spoken, and sending an email can help to clarify that.

Don't dominate the conversation.  Ask more questions to others about themselves than you answer about yourself, and pay attention.  Make sure to let others know when you admire work that they have done. 

If you see some problem at work that needs to be fixed, but it has not been assigned to you, do not work on it unless your manager or lead agrees it is something you should spend time on.

In addition to religion and politics, there are other things not to talk about at work. 
  • If something is really good in your life, don't talk about it much.  To others it sounds like bragging and may elicit jealousy which will make them want to take you down a notch.
  • Similarly, do not brag about your abilities.  Most neuro-typicals do not value honesty as much as you do.  They would prefer you to be humble.  Note:  Females may suffer more consequences for being honest about their skillset than males, because women are expected to be either less skilled or more humble.
  • Do not tell your coworkers that you love your job, they might want to prove to you that you don't.
  • Do not tell your coworkers that you hate your job, they will repeat it to your manager who may terminate you.
  • Do not talk to your lead or your manager about your emotions.  That is considered aggressive.  It implies your lead or manager is responsible for your emotions.
  • Do not talk at all about one coworker to another except in the very narrow context of what is required to do your work, for example:  work assigned and work completed.
  • Do not talk about previous employers or employment except when explicitly asked.
  • Do not talk about your payrate.
  • Do not point out another's mistakes except if you are helping that person in private.
  • When people ask you directly for your critique, suggestions, reactions to their work or the company, be very careful!  Make sure you give at least twice as much positive feedback as negative.  Giving too much negative feedback can result in you losing your job, no matter how right you are and how wrong that policy is.
  • Similarly, be careful about answering questions like:  "How do you like working here?"  Stay on the positive side of neutral.  Answer something like "Well, no place is perfect, but there are certainly a lot of things I like about working here."
Identifying a bad group dynamic is a lot easier than fixing it.  If there is one person who always seems to be obstructing progress, there may be some reason that management is unwilling to terminate that worker's employment.  Steer clear of the situation if you can.  If you can't steer clear, try to remain cordial and neutral.  If it is directly affecting your work, look for other employment.  An Aspie is ill-equipped for the role of diplomat and may become the sacrificial goat.

In social situations, people like to be invited and welcomed.  At work, being welcoming is good (except if your lead thinks you are spending too much time socializing) but invitations are a bit more problematic.  If you work in a large enough company and want to cultivate friendships, it is better to do so outside your department.  Leads and managers sometimes get nervous about intra-departmental friendships.  They worry that the bonds of friendship might change the group dynamic, they worry about cliques, about taking sides, teaming up, and reactions from the remaining friend if one of you is laid-off.  Especially when it comes to friendships at work, it is important to observe what your coworkers are doing and not to be more friendly or less friendly than they are.

Should you tell your manager that you are "on the spectrum"?  Well, that depends...  If your appearance and movements do not broadcast that there is something different about you, generally, no.  A manager or lead who is unfamiliar with Asperger's Syndrome may fear an additional challenge to his/her already crammed workload and managerial skills.  If the manager asks HR, they will generally be concerned about liabilities related to disability.  The best strategy is usually to do your best to fit in as well as possible and pretend you don't even know that there is something different about you.  The only exception to that would be if you are certain your manager already likes you and values your work and is familiar with Asperger's syndrome, in which case, you probably won't have to tell him/her, your manager will have already figured it out.

If your Asperger's traits cannot be hidden, then you should definitely talk about them early in your first in-person interview, to address what is likely to be uncomfortable for people not familiar with Asperger's.  Although Asperger's is not the same as Tourette Syndrome, it might be useful to watch the several interview scenes in the movie _Front of the Class_ available for free on Youtube.  The interview scenes begin 35 minutes into the movie and continue for about 20 minutes.  Also the Wikipedia article about onboarding is instructive. 

The "Big Five" traits listed in that Wikipedia article must be exhibited at your interview (and afterward at work as much as possible) for your potential employer to believe that you can do your job.  They are:  openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.  For the great majority of us, conscientiousness and neuroticism will not be a problem.  If we have gotten anywhere in life we have those well mastered, as well as persistence, and succeeding in spite of adversity and difficulty.  Extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are a little more challenging.

We have learned to protect ourselves against being stabbed in the back by people who are jealous of our cognitive abilities and take advantage of our lesser social abilities in order to ridicule us or make us look bad in front of people whose opinions matter to us.  The problem is that those protective behaviors make us look less extraverted, less open, and less agreeable.  Even if we are ultimately stabbed in the back and lose our job once again because one of our coworkers found a way to leverage our difficulties, we will be better off if we get the job and keep it as long as possible, and that means putting aside those protective behaviors.

In particular, knowing that we do not look in other people's eyes as frequently as neuro-typicals, will make us look less extraverted and open, so we will have to compensate in other ways.  The safest way is by working to control our voice tone to keep it welcoming and encouraging of others.  This isn't particularly easy either, but it is well worth the effort.  In particular, pay attention to where you put your inflection in sentences. 

Small talk is a challenge for most of us.  We tend to focus on the things that interest us and ignore the things we don't in a way that seems extreme to neuro-typicals.  Deepening our knowledge and understanding of what interests us is both easy and pleasurable to us.  Memorizing facts that are unrelated to our job and unrelated to our interests (for example, sports scores, unless sports is one of our interests) in order to have something to talk about with our coworkers seems like a horrible waste of mental effort and is more difficult and more lasting for us than it is for them.  Beginning a small talk conversation or soliciting personal information from someone else not only feels awkward to us, but we know from experience that somehow we seem to get it wrong.  A neuro-typical can ask "How are you?" and it is part of a normal greeting.  When we ask "How are you?" somehow we don't seem to get it right.  Our coworker might wonder why we asked.

Neuro-typicals use small talk to establish a social order and are uncomfortable when someone in their midst does not participate.  To them it might feel like you are snubbing them and then they may react in kind.  Making an effort to engage in small talk, being solicitous of your coworkers at approximately the same degree that they are with you is usually the right approach.  This means you need to at least occasionally observe others' interactions.  If you know that this is particularly difficult for you, work on it.  Find some resources (books, articles) and then practice with friends or in social meetings outside your workplace.

Aspies like to believe that work is a meritocracy.  It isn't, and our gifts of fluid thinking and our tendency to say exactly what is on our mind can get us into trouble.  When it is obvious to you that your department or company is making a costly mistake, consider the following before you mention it to anyone:
  • Someone is emotionally invested in that mistake.  It was his or her idea or his or her project.  When you communicate the problem, that person or group may mark you for revenge.  Whether that person is the company CEO, the CEO's nephew, or a coworker who has been at the company longer than you have, you are at a distinct disadvantage.
  • If the mistake that you see is outside the scope of your own job description within the company, you will be viewed as a meddling know-it-all.  You will be disliked even by people who are not invested in the project, because no one will understand why you are sticking your nose in someone else's business.  What's more, they will fear that you will also see and report their mistakes, which makes your continued employment in the company a potential liability to them.
  • If you report the error and the company continues to make the mistake anyway, remembering that you warned them and that they did not heed you will elicit feelings of resentment and inferiority.  You will not be long for that job.
  • If they do heed your warning, don't expect to be a hero.  The business world tends to value risk takers, not risk averters.  Prevention-focused work rarely gets recognized, unless that is explicitly part of your job.
So here is what to do:
  • Decide if identifying the mistake is worth risking your job over, usually it isn't.
  • First, know who is emotionally invested in doing the project the way you see the mistake.  This will help you decide who to talk to.  Sometimes you can talk with that person directly.  In an ideal world, that would work best, in the real world, maybe not.  If you are very lucky the project will have been initiated by someone who no longer works at the company.
  • Think about the impact this mistake will have on you directly.  If it has no direct impact on you, it might be best to let it go.
  • If the mistake has a direct impact on your work, or could potentially have a direct impact on your work, you probably should mention it to someone.
  • If there is a chance you could get fired for someone else's mistake, definitely talk to your boss or lead and follow it up with an email.
  • When you disclose the mistake, make sure you explain clearly exactly what the problem is so that people who don't have fluid intelligence can understand the potential future harm and why you have so evaluated it that way.  Keep the communication brief and factual and write something to indicate that maybe the problem is that you might not understand the situation completely, so that if there is more to it that you don't know, they can explain it to you.
  • There is something else that sometimes happens in a workplace:  sometimes coworkers complain among themselves about a real problem that exists but none of them have talked to the managers about it.  If they bring it to your attention and you agree with it, they may be hoping that someone else will talk to management about it.  There is a reason why none of them have done that.  They value their jobs.  If you think it should be brought to management's attention, there are two approaches you can take:
    • Ask your coworkers if they have talked to management about it, and if not, encourage your coworkers to talk to management about it.
    • Tell your coworkers that if any of them want to talk with management about it you would be willing to be backup support with facts and arguments, but that you are too new in your position to lead that discussion.
    • Absolutely do not mention this to management on your own.  If your coworkers have communicated about it to management already, then management has heard about it and has made their choice about how to proceed.  If they have not communicated it to management, then remember that your coworkers, who have more seniority than you, know this is a problem.  It is their job to handle it, not yours, unless it directly effects your work.