5 Ways An Autistic Consultant Can Benefit Your Business and Your Bottom Line
Whether you’ve hired autistic staff, plan to offer opportunities for autistic employees in the future, or suspect you have a few undisclosed neurodivergent employees on your team right now, hiring an autistic consultant can help reduce misunderstandings while increasing productivity and employee retention.
Here are 5 ways an autistic advisor can help your business and its employees:
- Lived Experience
While there are many articles and books available about the autistic neurotype and communication style, many of those works have been penned by neurotypical (non-autistic) individuals who have gained their insights through research on neurodivergence, but they are not neurodivergent themselves.
Being educated in how autistic people think and communicate can only take a non-autistic person so far in their ability to understand, translate, and explain an autistic person’s intentions and meaning in everyday social and professional situations.
Autistic people have lived experience as a result of navigating the world daily through this particular lens of neurodivergence. We have intimate, firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to interact with our supervisors and co-workers and have it often not pan out the way we expected.
Difficult as those experiences were, they’ve shaped many of us into advocates, experts, and ‘translators’ who can unravel the mystery and confusion of cross-neurotype communication and help everyone get back on the same page again.
- Personalized Advice
Internet research can give you an overview of how your autistic employees might think, socialize, and process information. However, it can’t offer the specifics you need to understand your unique professional situation.
When you retain an autistic consultant, you’ll get personalized advice and recommendations regarding the individuals you currently employ instead of generic advice that might not apply.
Hiring an autistic consultant also offers some much-needed flexibility! Talk with your consultant one-on-one, bring your autistic employee(s) in for a session with you and your consultant, or get a small team together to learn more about neurodivergence and actionable steps you can take together to be more inclusive and accessible.
- Improved Communication
Good communication is the cornerstone of any relationship, including professional relationships. Without the ability to connect, everything else falls apart. Arguments disrupt the day, projects hit a brick wall, and absenteeism and turnover rates skyrocket.
If inter-neurotype communication challenges are not addressed in an accessible way for both autistic and non-autistic workers, the potential for misunderstandings and hurt feelings to devolve into a toxic work environment is very high.
And once this happens, it can take much longer to rebuild trust and cooperation.
An autistic consultant can act as both a translator and a mediator who helps both parties better understand each other’s intentions and learning styles (which can diffuse arguments before they begin).
- Increased Productivity
Autistic and non-autistic learning styles often don’t match up, leaving neurotypical trainers and autistic learners confused and frustrated on both sides.
For example, autistic people often take what is said to us literally, and if that’s not how the instructions were meant, a month-long project may need to be redone from scratch once the communication error is discovered.
However, when autistic staff and neurotypical employees are aware of the differences in each other’s learning styles and can accommodate them, projects run more smoothly, and everything gets done right the first time, thus increasing productivity!
- Employee Retention
When employees, whether autistic or non-autistic, feel confused, uncertain, and uncomfortable in their work environment, they’re not likely to stick around, and if they do, they won’t be able to work to their full potential.
If miscommunication between employees of different neurotypes is causing friction, an autistic advisor can help mitigate the tension by providing the information and tools necessary for accessibility on both sides.
The Takeaway
Autistic and non-autistic people can work together effectively, but only if they understand how people of the opposite neurotype learn and communicate. Retaining an autistic consultant for your business can help get this process started, so you and all of your employees can enjoy a long and fruitful professional relationship for years to come!
Interested in booking me for a business consultation? Click here to fill out my pre-consultation questionnaire. I look forward to helping you and your autistic employees enjoy a more effective and productive working relationship!
