260 Embracing Autism in the Workplace With Tara May (Encore)

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Team T-R-A-I-T dot com. Welcome to the Manage Smarter Podcast with hosts C. Lee Smith and Audrey Strong. We're glad you're here for discussions on new ways to manage smarter, hire, develop and retain talent, improve results and propel team performance to new heights.

This is the Manage Smarter Podcast. Our leader today and our guest, fantastically. She talks about neurodivergence and autistic employees in the workplace, and she is a leader in this space. I mean, a real dynamo.

Yeah, and we recently had on the show Dr. Matthew Zekreski, and we talked about neurodiversity. But we didn't really hone in on autism particular. And today's guest has really done a bang-up job as far as giving opportunities to folks on the spectrum, and it's really paid off for her.

So I can't wait to hear more. Me too. Welcome to Manage Smarter, everyone. My name is Audrey Strong.

I'm the Senior Vice President of Communications here at SalesFuel. And I'm Celie Smith. I'm the CEO and founder of SalesFuel. So welcome to our microphones, Tara May, the CEO of Aspirotech and International Neurodiversity Advocate.

Aspirotech is a revolutionary tech company, and she'll explain why. With a mission of meaningful employment for autistic team members, May is an expert in cultural transformation and fostering innovation. She's had some massive, huge clients. And her philosophy is the company should focus on the ROI of kindness.

And those that want to fail fast and innovate really need to take a look and embrace psychological safety in the workplace. Tara, thank you for coming today. This is going to be an excellent discussion of autism and employees in the workplace. Thank you for having me.

So your company, what is it, 90% or more are autistic professionals? 93% of our team are autistic adults. Okay. And then what does the company do?

It's a software testing company, correct? Yes. So we were founded 15 years ago as a software testing company in our foundation, but we've grown into a wide variety of tech services. We do data services, including major cloud migrations.

We do AI and large language model building. We do accessibility testing. And then manual and automated software QA is still one of our most important business lines. Go ahead, Lee.

Yeah, outside of the social impact of what you're doing, which is really great. I'm curious about those who are autistic. What do they bring to the table then that is unique and really awesome then that helps them succeed in your line of business? That's such a great question.

And one I'm going to answer broadly and then more specifically. So just broadly, right? Autistic people are like any other humans with individual strengths and weaknesses in each of them. At our organization, we believe autistic people don't just belong in entry-level positions or single departments.

We have autistic representation from people who walk in the door all the way up to 50% of our executive leadership team is on the spectrum. And we have autistic representation on our board of directors and throughout every management level of our organization. So it's really not just niched into one area. That said, some autistic people have some skill sets that are incredible pairs for what we do.

For example, the ability to spot anomalies or focus on a huge data set and understand differences or move it over and do things that require a level of focus that sometimes neurotypical people don't have is a great pair for some of our team members, right? So I'm always trying to avoid stereotypes. Even positive stereotypes can be harmful. But that ability to hone in, spot anomalies and focus in on incredibly large and complex data sets is something that's really a well paired model for tech tech services.

Is it something that they have in common with folks with ADHD like me, for example, because we have attended we have the ability to hyper focus. So if we get our teeth locked into something, whatever, like, you know, we're, we're really in on it. But if not, not, is it similar? No, I love that you said that.

I actually I heard one person say they really shouldn call it attention deficit when it really sometimes an overabundance of attention It just very specific on what it on right And autism and ADHD often coexist together right There is so many people who are on the spectrum that also have ADHD so many traits that overlap. So absolutely, right? When we are able to pair a business need with something an autistic person has an incredible passion for, magic happens, productivity is insane, and we're able to see really complex problems solved in outside-the-box ways.

It's interesting. One of the questions I had was in one of your posts on your LinkedIn, her LinkedIn posts are prolific and a very, very interesting read, everybody. So connect with Tara. But you talk about with the structure of your company and how everybody's spread out through from leadership down to entry level.

You talked about career progression for autistic teams and one of your posts. And I would like to know what's different in the way you recognize opportunities and professional development for your autistic folks on staff. So a lot of our best practices are universal design, right? We're just very conscientious and cognizant about them here at Aspirotech because our entire mission is for our employees to thrive and work and life.

So that allows us the luxury of being incredibly employee-centric, whereas I feel like unfortunately And a lot of organizations, that's secondary, right? So that's one point. But the biggest difference I would say is that I spend a lot of time, as does our support team and leadership team, working on undoing the low self-esteem and confidence troubles that have been instilled in our team members from a very young age. And I think prevalently when autistic people are talked to at school and in early environments, it's all about their deficits.

It's all about what they're doing wrong and how they're not fitting in. And we're working hard to undo that every day and have our team members focus on their strengths and their potential and what they're capable of and what they bring and convincing them of that value, I often find is my hardest job. I mean, we're neurodivergent thinkers that have been placed into a rule set that was created by neurotypical people. And then they wonder why we don't fit in.

Spot on. Yeah. Spot on. And think it's a bad thing not to fit in.

You know, my favorite people are neurodivergent people. They look at all the people who have really changed the world for the better or whatever. They all think differently. And they've been accused of being crazy or whatever the case may be.

It's like, wouldn't you want to be like that? I mean, it's like, you know, everything else seems kind of boring to me. Crazy changes the world. Yeah.

So let me ask you a question on that. It's like, so thinking about your team and their unique skill sets, like, can you give me like a story or an example of where one of your clients had a problem and the unique skill set of your team then came up with a really creative solution that maybe a neurotypical team may not have come up with? So I will share a couple. One is a catch that ended up being life-saving.

So QA is about, you know, digging into all the various ways, right, that a user might use a product that the engineer maybe didn't think of right from the get-go. That's essentially our entire job, right? And one of those was a remote control that our user was clicking fast the way a person might when something isn't working, right? You might take that remote and be like, oh, this is driving me crazy and clicking fast.

And it turned out it was actually causing smoke and potentially was a fire hazard. So that sort of attention and obsession with user experience is a fantastic anecdote to exactly the kind of thing our team catches that someone else might not. Right? Pretty fantastic.

I'll give you one more example. Yeah. I use these stories all day. And I'll stop because I could brag about the team all day, but there's another example I'm going to use.

So we did a major AI project in partnership with the Transportation Security Administration. So the TSA is looking at a way for automating luggage checks. You're going through the airport. Airports get very busy.

They get backed up. It's really hard to staff those positions, but they're critical, right, for safety. So our team actually ended up going through hundreds of thousands of images to teach the AI what they were looking at in the luggage. Pretty fascinating pretty awesome work But it turned out that our team members after just a week of training could do this faster than people who had been in the neurotypical people who had been in the field a decade right?

And that it was that accurate and that fast and that productive at teaching the AI what it was looking for. So, you know, two pretty different and pretty extreme examples of how a neurodivergent mind set to work can really discover incredible things, incredible fixes, incredible problems spotting that other minds might not. It's interesting. When we were doing our show prep, Lee pulled a stat from the CDC says one in every 44, eight-year-old is believed to have autism spectrum disorder or 2.

3% of children in that age group is four times more common in boys than it is in girls, largely due to a patriarchal lack of understanding of how autism presents a minoritized gender. So does autism present itself differently in your female employees versus your males? Or is it? 100% absolutely.

Really? In what way? That's fascinating. So a few just comments on that statistic generally, right?

So the inspiration for my work, My life's dedication was my son's autism diagnosis. His first diagnosis was global developmental delay at 18 months. He finally got an autism diagnosis at five. He was delayed in it because he doesn't present like a lot of other kids.

He's sensory seeking rather than sensory averse, for example. So I had a few well-meaning experts tell me that because he loved to hug me, he probably wasn't on the spectrum. We know now that that's ridiculous, right? But it was a decade ago.

And so I use that example to share the increase in diagnoses, which we now, the CDC is even leaning toward one in 36 children of that age. It's actually us just getting better at diagnosis. The unfortunate part, and what you're asking about, Audrey, is that we're still very male-centric and we're still very white-centric on the way diagnosis presents itself because that's what we've understood. And medically, that goes into a million, like, don't get me started on how we don't understand the bipolar conditions, right?

It's widespread, but it certainly manifests itself in autism and the BIPOC community and the female community, and I'm certain every other marginalized community, the way that they present and are diagnosed is underdiagnosed and different and difficult. women for example tend to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder and personality disorders rather than being diagnosed on the spectrum in part because women are so much better at masking we are taught at an early age that we better fit in and not stand out in any way and that manifests itself in major masking for women that stretches well into their 40s, 50s in adulthood, right?

And then part of it is just timeline. When were you born? If you were born in the aughts, you have a much higher chance that you were accurately diagnosed than in the 60s and 70s. My dad is severely dyslexic, and he was born in 1960.

His first diagnosis in elementary school was that he was stupid. You're stupid. Well, that's untrue. He's the most brilliant, incredible man I know.

He's dyslexic, right? And so that shift over time has gotten better, but it still has a long, long way to go. That's interesting. I'm curious about what metrics that you use to measure the social impact of what you're doing.

Obviously, you use the typical business metrics. Are you profitable? And what's the customer satisfaction, customer retention and everything like that? Sure, you do that.

But what metrics are you using to measure social impact? So we actually I'm glad you use that word impact because that's exactly what we think about. Right. We think about an impact dashboard.

And for us, that's a few things. Right. It's how many people are we able to employ? How many partnerships are we able to establish?

In addition to employment, we have an academy that we put autistic students through for free to graduate them with job readiness and tech skills, both soft and hard, to go into employment. And we try to graduate as many students as we can per year. This program started three years ago when we started with 10 graduates. Now we're up to 30 per year.

Next year, we hope to have between 60 and 100. So we're always thinking about ways of widening our impact. But the truth is, we are putting a tiny, tiny dent in the massive problem that is under an unemployment for autistic people And we see it when things like the economy struggles neurodivergent people are the first ones to lose their jobs And we see the uptick and the need go up immediately So in addition to who we can employ we always trying to think about training and education for all employers to be more inclusive to their neurodivergent communities.

And we're finally seeing a demand for that really over the past year or so, I would say neurodiversity ERGs are having a moment in time. That's a very, very new discussion. How about the startup community? The startup community, I would say, is largely led by neurodivergent people.

So I feel like they're more active and vocal about all of it. And have an awareness of it just baked in already. Baked in. And often entrepreneurship, gosh, that's a hard word to say, comes from not fitting into someone else's business culture, right?

40% of entrepreneurs are non-traditional thinkers. So not a surprise, I mean, because they identify problems that other people miss, and then they come up with solutions to those problems that other people may not think of. So therefore, entrepreneurship is a fascinating and fantastic way for them to go. Right.

It's probably a study in neurodiversity. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, Lee and I have very different brains.

We laugh about it all the time. Situations happen all the time where he's neurodiverse and I'm linear. And he'll say, well, why didn't you just do this? And I'll go, oh, my God, I didn't even think of that.

But it also probably makes you wear compliments to each other. Oh, yeah, we totally are. Yeah. Yeah, we're like ham and cheese, peanut butter and jelly.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but I mean, I'm always amazed that I just, you know, just do the hand on the head slap. Like, I just, why didn't I do that? that.

Well, Audrey would look at me like I have three heads and go, what the hell are you talking about? We got a couple minutes left. Lee, you want to take the final question, then we want you to go ahead and promote, Tara, what you have going on. I'll always take a moment for that.

I know. You know, so the final question has really got to be, what advice would you give to CEOs and those in company leadership then that really are looking to create a more inclusive and neurodivergent workforce in their company? What do they need to do? Here's what I would say.

First, consider how important it is to your growth, your transformation, and your revenue. I'm a CEO. I know how stretched thin we are and how much we need to prioritize and strategize from a high level. And so thinking about neurodiversity might not even be top of mind to most CEOs.

Here's why it should be. Understanding what your teams need to be successful, to innovate, thrive, and transform your organization is your most important KPI this year, right? Every idea you have, every strategy you want to execute cannot be done unless your team buys in. Understanding how their brains work and how to be inclusive of each and every one of those team members is going to translate for you into retention, into growth, and into transformation and innovation.

Pay attention to it, even if you've never heard the word before. And if you're committed to DEI, right, you have to be committed to neurodiversity as well. And disability generally is often one of the forgotten components of DE&I. Encapsulating that into your commitment and including neurodiversity broadly is a really critical piece of the puzzle.

Right. Aspirotech.org is your website. How would you like people to reach out to you if they'd like to speak with you, Tara?

Go to the website. That's a great place to start. There's a contact form. But also email me directly.

I respond to every single autistic person who is looking for employment, whether we can offer it or not. I point you in the right direction. I have a huge international network. I sit on the board of NeuroWorks and HAPI.

I will help every autistic person who reaches out to me and every organization who might want to partner with us so that we can show you how awesome our team members are and what great services we provide at a nonprofit cost. I have to slip that in. We would love to take your call. And what is your, you said your email address.

What is your email address? I'm so I'm Tara.May. It's as easy as it sounds.

Wow. And I'm sure they will pop it right under here for you, but Tara.May. I'll put it in the show notes.

Thank you so much. This has been a great discussion. Thanks, Tara. Thank you so much for having me.

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