Autism-inspired communication at work: practical ways to make messages clearer and more actionable
Published on 4 April 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Business communication works best when people understand what you’re communicating and act as you intended. Autism-inspired best practices help you reduce ambiguity, improve clarity, and build inclusive, actionable messages.
We want our business communications to have outcomes. I don’t believe anyone tries to communicate poorly, but it is easy to leave information open to interpretation, unintentionally wasting employees’ ideas and efforts by allowing misunderstandings to flourish. Unchecked, the resulting frustration can lead to declining people- and business-performance that is characteristic of an unengaged culture.
When communication isn’t intentionally designed to be neuro-inclusive, the same pattern appears predictably: people interpret messages differently, hesitate to ask questions, and make reasonable assumptions that later turn out to be wrong. The visible cost is rework, delays, and frustration. The hidden cost is quieter: people stop volunteering ideas, stop taking ownership, and start playing safe because the effort of “getting it wrong” feels too high.
Adopting autism-inspired best practice is an effective, sustainable approach to making your communication more actionable, impactful, and inclusive. It is not only autists who benefit, but also non-native speakers who face similar challenges and, arguably, your entire organization. This piece shares some tips and illustrates the transformative potential of neurodivergence-inspired actions to improve engagement throughout your organization.
➡️ If you'd like a practical set of tips you can use right now to start making your communication clearer and more predictable, download my free guide to autism-inspired micro-inclusions.
Three key takeaways
Autistic brains are specialized for focused, detailed activity and new information that you communicate needs to travel through relatively many connections to be processed, understood, and acted on. All extra information requires extra effort to filter to your core message. We can all help by slowing down and pausing, reducing meaningless noise, and being aware of and explaining idioms, metaphors, and social context. A useful guideline is always to ask recipients of your communication to paraphrase back what they have heard and understood, to ensure you can together work to common understanding.
These same challenges are faced by people who are not speaking their native language: in 2013, this described 80% English speakers, a proportion that was growing (see reference at the end). The ways in which we can facilitate understanding of non-native speakers are very similar to those inspired by autists’ needs. This is just one example of how embedding neuro-inspired actions in your organizational culture can improve your working environment and ability of team members to contribute value.
This awareness and efforts to improve our communication habits should be made by everyone, including autists and non-native speakers who will themselves regularly be the communicators. Effective communication needs engagement from the broadcaster who has responsibility to improve their intelligibility, as well as from the recipient who has responsibility to assume best intent and to ask for clarity as needed, regardless of their national background and cognitive preferences.
Business communication is most successful when people understand you in the way that you intend to be understood, and then take appropriate action. This can be a minefield for autistic employees, who tend to need extra processing time, to be literal, and to struggle with social context. Let’s take a look at some autism-ispired tips to improve your communication in these areas, and consider how significantly they overlap with those helpful to non-native speakers.
⭐ Tip 1: build in time for processing
Most people speak quickly, especially when they are enthusiastic. When you’re listening, it can be hard work to follow, especially when sounds that are not meaningful are mixed in such as background noise, or fillers such as “Hmm,” (to pass time while thinking about what to say next), “Like,” “Actually,” or, “You know…”.
The neurons in autists’ brain are shorter and more densely packed than those in neurotypical brains, and most strongly connected to other neurons close by (see end for reference); that tends to make autists highly skilled at focused, detailed work, but means that fillers and noise add work to filter to the core message, reducing the capacity available for comprehension and contribution.
If you have tried to follow a communication in a language that you can speak reasonably, but not to native level, you’ll understand. Using myself as an example: English is my native language, and I have been speaking Dutch since I moved to The Netherlands in 2001. My Dutch is very good, but when native speakers get enthusiastic, it becomes more difficult for me to hear where one word ends and the next begins. In a noisy environment, I get tired very quickly, and I am almost always behind where the discussion is in real time so I struggle to contribute.
We help autists and non-native speakers by slowing down and adding pauses. We can practise leaving space for responses even though silence can feel uncomfortable, and not immediately repeat ourselves if a response takes a few seconds to emerge; if we do need to repeat something, we should use similar words to reduce the need for additional processing. We should select quiet locations and reduce our use of fillers.
⭐ Tip 2: anticipate misunderstandings
Autists tend to understand communications literally which is often not how they are intended. I sometimes experience a similar problem in Dutch conversation when I can understand the words but not extract the meaning, so this challenge reaches far beyond autists to the many others who are not on your wavelength.
“Not on your wavelength” is a good example of non-literal communication. It’s an everyday idiom whose component words mean something different from what I want to convey, which is someone whose ideas, opinions, or behaviors are out of alignment with mine. I could easily clarify the phrase by sharing this explanation either instead of, or after, using the expression. Jokes, sarcasm, and metaphor also fall into this category. They are all linguistically complex, relying on assumed shared understanding and implicit context.
Imprecision represents another invitation to misunderstanding. Expressions of time are often vague in English, such as, “We’ll do that in a while,” or, “Let’s circle back to that at a later date” (double difficulty: idiom and imprecision in one short sentence), but they are easy to correct when we are conscious about it.
Sometimes, though, imprecision sneaks in unnoticed , as in these Dutch-English examples.
The Dutch “als” means both “if” and “when”. It can be a shock to hear a Dutch friend say, “Let’s discuss it on Saturday if I see you,” when you have just made plans.
I thought for a long time that “a couple” was unambiguous, meaning “two”, but the Dutch “een paar” means both “a couple” and “a few”. Sometimes the meaning is clear from the context, sometimes not.
Some conversations seemed strange, before I understood why, because subsequent comments didn’t make sense based on my (incorrect) understanding. Eventually I asked about the disconnects and both parties learned something. If you sense something like this, it’s best to check whether everyone shares the same understanding.
The last example I’ll share is that English is complex, with the same words having various meanings depending on context, and on the prepositions they are combined with. The book “Is that clear? Effective communication in a neurodiverse world” by Zanne Gaynor, Kathryn Alevizos and Joe Butler, shares multiple meanings of the word “letting”.
I’m letting…
… my house. (renting)
… up on running so often. (stopping)
… my team have an extra day off. (allowing)
… you out of the car here. (dropping you off)
… my friend know that I’ll be late. (informing)
… you off cutting the grass. (excusing you from)
… on that I’m having a party this weekend. (revealing)
… down my family because I can’t join this weekend. (disappointing)
Obviously, it will take time for someone “not on your wavelength” to select the one you mean, during which they have less attention available for your message. It’s no accident that Gaynor and Alevizos’ book is derived from their earlier “Is that clear? Effective communication in a multilingual world” because these challenges are shared between autists and non-native speakers, such that much of the earlier text is reused in their later book.
What can you do?
Build your awareness of where misunderstanding may creep in and be vigilant about the need to clarify. I don’t believe it is possible for people to eliminate every nuance, and I don’t think it is desirable either; authenticity is part of effective communication and creating an engaging culture. I also experience that many people enjoy exchanging idioms as a way to learn about other cultures. But try to be conscious about your use of this kind of language and explain it if you do use it. Five minutes of extra effort now can save hours of wasted work in the future.
This vigilance should not be a one-way-street. Autistic employees and non-native speakers also have a responsibility to do their best to understand communications, to ask for clarification if needed, and to validate that their understanding is correct. Plus, when they are doing the broadcasting, all of these tips apply to them just as much as they do to anyone else.
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⭐ Tip 3: social context is unreliable
Social context comes in two varieties.
Non-verbal communication: body language, such as facial expressions, posture, and gestures.
Paraverbal language: this includes our pace and tone of voice, and the emphasis we place on words.
The use and meaning of social context differ between cultures. I nod my head up and down to indicate agreement, but agreement in Bulgarian culture is indicated by the side-to-side head shake that I would use to mean “no.” Indians also indicate “no” in this way, but their similar, beautiful pendulum-variant means “harmony” or “yes”.
Social signals are a confusing distraction for autists, and they are also open to cross-cultural misunderstanding. At best, they disguise the meaning of what you’re trying to convey because they represent more information to process, and, at worst, they can leave major gaps in understanding if you’re relying on them to convey part of your meaning.
How can you improve this situation? Again, be aware of it. Autists and non-native speakers often prefer communication to be written as well as verbally delivered so they have the time and space they need to fully digest it. And double check for common understanding by asking the communication recipients to paraphrase their understanding back to you.
What’s stopping you?
I am not suggesting that we communicate in this way in every part of our lives. I enjoy the richness of the English language, the nuances and the word plays. I love reading and appreciate the ability of authors to conjure images in my head that I can fine-tune in my own way. But there are situations when this is not productive, and not equitable, and one of those situations is in our working environments. We are all accountable for build our skills in using clearer and more direct language in our working environments, regardless of how we choose to communicate outside them.
I have focused on the needs of autists and non-native speakers in this article, but in reality these steps improve the effectiveness of your communication for your whole organization. Consider someone who is busy, who is concerned about a family member, who is about to go to an important call with a customer, and so on: these employees are not necessarily autistic or non-native speakers but they are almost certainly not fully focused, and will appreciate all of your autism-inspired efforts at improving clarity.
It takes effort to be conscious of our patterns of our communication, and to change habits we have built up over a lifetime. I don’t think that anyone learns to talk in the way I am describing. But your effort is worth it to improve your employees’ connection to your mission and opportunities to contribute their value to your outcomes.
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Let’s consider together where your team’s communication style is leaking impact, and how you can transform this into better outcomes.
References
4 out of every 5 of the quarter of the world that speaks English are non-native English speakers: The British Council (2013) The English Effect: The impact of English, what it’s worth to the UK and why it matters to the world.
Autistic brain neurones are shorter and connected to physically close neighbors: Emily Casanova and Manuel Casanova (2010) Autism and dyslexia: A spectrum of cognitive styles as defined by minicolumnar morphometry, Medical Hypotheses 74, pp.59-62.
