Team building

If you’re autistic, people can be exhausting, but your job may well be all about people and managing a team dynamic. We all know that team building is an essential activity – awaydays, trips out for a drink or a work social all help a group of people understand each other better and trust each other more. The result is a team that works seamlessly together and is more productive. But the very activities that can work well for many neurotypical people who want to bond by socialising can be very excluding things for autistic staff members. And that includes when the autistic person is the manager or leader of the group.

The problem with social situations is that you have to concentrate so hard since the conversation may go in any direction. There’s no predictable structure like there would be in a meeting with an agenda – and you may well be in a venue where there’s a lot of background noise, and you can’t pick out one voice from another. (That’s a common autistic issue btw – to struggle to hear one voice among many. Merely one of the ways in which going down the pub can be an absolute nightmare.) Even in normal circumstances, if you’re autistic speaking “people” isn’t your native language – it’s a second language that requires concentration. Being somewhere loud with a big group of people is the autistic equivalent of four-dimensional chess, and at the end of a working day you probably just don’t have the energy for it.

So if you’re in a team that does all its bonding after work down the pub, any autistic team members are going to feel excluded. They might avoid going along – and be made to feel stand-offish or left out. Or they might go with the group and end up with a throbbing headache, overwhelming exhaustion and a fear they’ve humiliated themselves and failed at “people” yet again. Of course this is by no means only an autistic problem – those with caring responsibilities, long commutes, who don’t drink, or who have a range of physical disabilities might feel equally left out. So what’s the alternative?

In my autistic experience, a workplace quiz is a great way to bring people together and be inclusive to autistic people. It can happen in the workplace and in working hours to avoid leaving out those who have to get home early. The structure of a quiz makes things much easier for an autistic person – you join a team and so have a fixed smallish group of people to interact with, rather than the whole huge group. You have a structure to your evening in terms of rounds of the quiz – so you know roughly how long everything will take and when you’ll be able to get away. And you have a structure to your conversation in that the quiz team discusses the answers to the questions. Clearly quizzes aren’t the only answer to team bonding and there’s absolutely no reason why those who want to go to the pub shouldn’t do so.

But it can make a huge difference to an autistic colleague to have team bonding made achievable for them. Being forced into an environment where you’re not comfortable and you know you can’t function is never going to make you feel warm and bonded with the team. Forcing autistic people to “join in” with group socialising that’s not inclusive to them is likely to just give us the message that we’re in a team where we’re tolerated rather than welcomed.