As companies race to recruit the best talent amid a nationwide labor shortage, employers should take a hard look at groups they may be inadvertently alienating — particularly
Over the next decade, approximately a million autistic teens will enter adulthood, yet nearly half of 25-year-olds with autism have never held a paying job, according to Autism Speaks. In total, it’s estimated that 85% of those with autism are unemployed. These unemployment rates outdo those with learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities or speech-language impairments.
But autistic people have a variety of skills and attributes that make them well poised to join the workforce now, especially as automation technology and robotics enter the labor landscape, says David Friedman, founder and CEO of Autonomy Works.
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“Automation is going to focus primarily on generalizable skills, which are things that need to be done a lot of times and can, to a large extent, be done by lots of people,” says Friedman. “But not everything is going to be automated, and what gets left will be well-suited to people with autism.”
Friedman’s company employs people with autism to provide business services like transaction processing, quality assurance and data management for other organizations. These repetitive, processing tasks can help some autistic employees utilize their attention to detail and understanding of structure in a productive and beneficial way.
Employee Benefit News spoke with Friedman to further delve into Autonomy Works and how autistic talent will be key to the future of work.
What inspired you to create Autonomy Works?
I have a son with autism who is now 26 years old. When kids with autism turn 14, there's a process of what they call transition planning, which is when we try to understand what the kids can do after high school. My son is super talented. He’s really good with numbers, puzzles and figures. But he wasn't likely to succeed in college. He just doesn't have the executive functioning skills or the social skills for that kind of environment, but he's still so good at so many things.
So my wife and I thought, “there’s got to be a job.” We looked and the sad truth is there are no jobs. So many people with autism are unemployed. Most of the ones that are employed are working in low-skill jobs where they're stocking shelves or cleaning tables. They’re unable to tap into their skills and talents.
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Then I realized that in my career, I had seen problems where we hire people right out of college, we’d give them these repetitive, processing tasks and in six months they wouldn’t want to do it anymore. I realized that all the reasons that people didn't like those tasks — such as the high attention to detail, the repetitiveness, how structured it was — were areas where my son and lots of other people with autism excelled.
As employers turn to automation for many of these tasks, how does autistic talent fit into this new technology?
We started back in 2013, and initially did a lot of digital marketing work and now provide services in the finance and data areas. Our clients outsource work to us and we send it back. However, a lot of companies started automating the tasks that we did. So, we started to investigate what was happening in that space through our partnership with software company UiPath because we wanted to peacefully co-exist with automation and robots.
Here’s what we realized: while automation does take away a lot of tasks, it gives us something back. This tech can support our team and make us more effective, while also providing us with another opportunity. Robots need people. They need people to help them learn, they need people to monitor things that they struggle with and they need people to feed them better data.
So now having expertise in processing, being able to maintain attention for sustained periods of time and the ability to work within a rule-based and process-based system are going to be this smaller set of skills that will be required to live in partnership with the robots doing this work. It’s my hope that this is a good opportunity for people who are autistic. We have already started training our people to develop and build robots, so they have this capability for not only our company but our clients.
How can employers and managers support autistic talent in the workplace?
I do think it's important that anytime you're talking about autism to reinforce that it’s a spectrum and different people need different levels of support. Some people think of autism and visualize this smart, quirky guy or maybe go back and think of their next-door neighbor whose autism is non-verbal. But people have to understand that these are individuals and you have to get to know them as individuals — just like you should for everybody.
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There’s nothing magical about managing people with autism. You have to be a clear communicator and know your talent. At its core, autism is a communications disorder. The important thing is to think about is how you communicate information. In general, companies do not do a super effective job of communicating to people what’s expected of them and giving them feedback.
Even the interview process is terribly designed for people with autism. At Autonomy Works, we don’t interview people. When you think about it, interviewing is sort of an artificial construct. You don’t do that in your everyday life. Instead, we rely much more on actually having people do work and we compare their work against people who've been here before, so we have a quantitative analysis of how they're doing. That's what we base our hiring on — not how they might say good morning.
What is your advice to employers looking to recruit autistic talent?
Employers need to have a program where they are consciously thinking about who they’re recruiting. You have to consciously think about how people are onboarded. You have to have managers with good communication skills.
But what I think they'll find at the end of it and what we find is an incredibly talented and loyal workforce. Our turnover is in the single digits. We've been out of the office for a year and a half, and people are clamoring to get back in the office. We are not having the great resignation.
So, maybe there’s more time and cost upfront when trying to structure the recruitment, onboarding and even communication process. But it pays off time and time again by the talent and commitment of these individuals.
