Steve  0:08  
The HRHappyHour network is proudly sponsored by Workhuman. The role of HR is changing fast, and the leaders who move beyond administration into true business leadership will have the edge. Workhuman lives where that shift becomes real. Four transforming days in Orlando, built around the challenges HR leaders are facing now with 65 plus standout speakers, you'll get practical, research backed insights you can use immediately, honest conversations with leaders under the same pressure, and a human first experience designed to energize not exhaust. It's why 93% of past attendees left inspired, and why you need to be there this April 27 through 30th. Register now at workhumanlive.com, and use code HRHappyHour before March 31 to save 20%, that's HRHappyHour all one word. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to the At Work in America podcast, the longest running and top downloaded HR podcast. Great to have you with us, whether you're a longtime listener or just tuning in. We're grateful to have you join us. Trish, how are you? Great to see you.

Trish  1:16  
I'm good. I am happy to be in the same state as you at this moment, even though we're not in the same office, we're not what, 30 minutes apart, so I'm looking forward to seeing you this week.

Steve  1:27  
Absolutely, it's great. We've got a lot going on, stuff we're doing at H3. We got to go see one of our great clients before this week's over. I think the last trip of the year. Boy, it's been a crazy I can't believe the year is almost over, though it's shocking.

Trish  1:40  
I know it all the travel from all of the different tech events has certainly just sped things up, I think. And you're right, we love doing it, but it is nice that that's sort of winding down, and we'll get, you know, a lot of time to talk about strategy, which I'm really excited about today's episode, because that's what we're talking about. We're talking about business strategies that you can really use your heart and your head together to make some really big changes in your business in the coming year.

Steve  2:07  
Yeah, I'm so glad we were able to do this show. We have not done sort of a normal At Work in America in a little while. We've been so heavily focused on technology and what's happening with AI and what's happening at all the industry events going on. We're sort of back to where we really want it to be. Today's show is about neurodiversity, kindness in the workplace. Our guest is going to be Tara May from Aspiritech, who you may not know, but once you listen to Tara and hear her story and their story, it's a company you're going to want to know better. So stay tuned for that. Let's go. We'll welcome Tara and get on with the show. 

Steve  2:45  
We are excited to welcome our guest today. It's Tara May. She's the CEO of Aspiritech. It's a non profit tech services company with 95% autistic employees. Tara is a champion of neurodiversity in the workplace. She's an expert in cultural transformation and fostering innovation, and her philosophy is that companies should focus on the ROI of kindness, and those that want to fail fast and innovate must embrace psychological safety in the workplace. Tara, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. How are you?

Tara May  3:16  
I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Steve  3:18  
It's our pleasure. It's a great we love talking about this topic. Trish and I have explored neurodiversity from, oh, a number of angles over the years, from researchers to technology companies that support neurodiverse employees to even folks who compete in the Special Olympics in getting into their story. So we love this topic. What Tara sort of brought you to neurodiversity as really a career at this point?

Tara May  3:47  
Yeah, it's a great question. So I had actually never heard the word neurodiversity, nor did I have much understanding of autism until my son was diagnosed as autistic at about the age of five. So I really think of him as my introduction to neurodiversity. And you know, when you're a mom and your child needs something, you dive in, right? That's what moms do. And so I started to learn this entirely new concept to me, I started to understand the language. Proprioception was a word I had never heard before, right? I didn't understand stimming or any of these things, but as I began to research and understand what he needed to be successful, I started to actually see neurodiversity all around me, and the metaphor I often use is sort of like watching the night sky light up one star at a time. I saw it first with my son, right? But then I started to see neurodiversity in the people I loved around me and my friends, in my family, in my other children, in myself and understanding what it looks like, you know, when each of our brains work differently, and then, most of all, in the workplace. So I was leading, at the time, a team of several hundred adults, and it started really striking me to think about, when we think about management, leadership, there are so many factors we consider. Why would we not consider the brain in the workplace and the way we learn and socialize? And so I really became passionate about understanding and embracing neurodiversity in the workplace, and eventually, Aspiritech found me. I worked with a headhunter who was working to find a replacement for the amazing founders as they were coming into their 70s, okay, and technology was my my paying career, neurodiversity was my passion, so I got to combine the two.

Trish  5:54  
I love that story because we hear often we're told to find your passion and pursue that. And it seems that, especially in this area of neurodiversity that Steve and I have been covering for, gosh, almost 10 years, that seems to be a theme, people have found that they have passion about both identification of different neuro diversities, but then realizing there isn't a lot of support in the wider community or the workplace, right? So your story is actually, unfortunately, very common in terms of, you know, there are more and more people just kind of these one off situations. When you joined Aspiritech, what was the ratio at that point? In terms of, were the employees already primarily on the spectrum? Or is that something that you've increased in your time there?

Tara May  6:47  
So that was the mission of the organization. Oh, wait, beginning right. So 93% of our team members are autistic, and I really came in to not only continue to see that mission, but to open it up and expand it. So I'll give you an example. Our foundation was quality assurance, and the founders in their research found that quality assurance was an amazing match for many autistic team members, but I think what they really created and what they really built was an environment where autistic people can be successful at whatever career and passion they want to follow. So we opened up, right? We started leaning into more technology services, because that was obviously a natural extension of what we were doing. So accessibility testing, web development, data services, but then also creative services. We have a lot of amazing artists. We had an art fair where 15 people on our team exhibited just last night. We've seen autistic people move into sales and marketing, into HR, into IT and facilities. So we really took this, this concept, and said Aspiritech is so much bigger than that, and the Autistic community is capable of absolutely anything that they're passionate about given the right supportive environment.

Steve  8:18  
Yeah, Tara, that's the I'm sorry. Trish, yeah. Tara, that's the message I'm hearing when you describe all the different areas of Aspiritech has ventured out into, and how you've expanded opportunity and access. It's you're not pendant holding folks to say, Oh, they're really good at this one thing or these two things, and therefore we must only do those.

Tara May  8:38  
Absolutely. And I, I think the fundamental premise there, right? Is that it's it's not about the specific job, it's about the supportive environment, right? And I think you and and I both know that workplaces are often built for the masses, right, where as many people as possible can come in and be successful, but really thinking about, how do you build it for the individuals and support them being humans? 24 hours a day, nine to five is a change we're just starting to make at organizations, right? And it's really exciting to think about, for me at Aspiritech leading that charge, thinking specifically sure about neurodiversity and neuro inclusion, but really thinking about, how do we build workplaces so that everyone can reach their fullest potential? And I think that's a really exciting discussion to have.

Trish  9:41  
Well, it is because when you make those changes to the organization, to the work space or to the work process, you're actually helping all employees, regardless if they are. I mean, it is a spectrum, right? And when you kind of talk about finding that one little star at a time and noticing once you're aware of what the indicators are, there are probably far more undiagnosed people on the spectrum in our workplaces, right? I looked before the show, just because I hadn't looked it up in a while, and so on the CDC, they were saying that this was as of 2017 so very dated information. It was over five and a half million people that were diagnosed adults in the workforce, that number, you know, has to be so much higher of undiagnosed. And maybe people who aren't finding out until their own child, right, is diagnosed, and then they think like, oh, maybe I have right. But when you think about whether it's sensory overload that needs to be considered, or maybe different noise reduction techniques that you might put into place in your workplace that would benefit everyone, right? What are you liking when you're when you're looking at it that way?

Tara May  10:53  
What you are describing is so resonant and is absolutely a story I hear every day, and I would say even over the past two or three years, I've seen an emergence of neurodiversity ERGs that I had never seen before, and you're spot on in what you describe, right? We are as a society getting much better at diagnosis. A great example. My dad is very severely dyslexic. Well, in 1965 when he entered kindergarten, his first diagnosis from a teacher was the teacher coming to his mom, my grandmother, and saying he's stupid. Oh, well, that's not a helpful diagnosis. It's completely incorrect, right? And when he was older and learned that he was dyslexic and got some supports to learn how to read properly, he's an intelligent man. He's my life role model. But that's what diagnosis often looked like 40 years ago, right? So we're much better at diagnosis now. We see better diagnosis in children. We see better support systems in the education world, and I think it's just taking a little longer for employment to catch up. But when you talk about many teenagers now who understand their neurodiversity, who understand their diagnosis, coming into first college and university and then the workforce, there is going to be a surge in demand for workplaces to understand how to serve that properly. And I think, why not start today? Right? If we already know that so many people are neuro divergent, one in 20, why can't we prepare workplaces today? And like you noted, so many of the things we can do are universal design for everyone, right? If you can think about sensory friendliness in your office environment, if you can think about communication styles and how to give out information so that all sorts of brains can process it, if you start to think about mental health in the workplace, which affects even more of us, including neurotypical people, those things can absolutely benefit everyone and make organizations more successful.

Trish  13:12  
I agree, one of the things as you were talking I was thinking that a way that the workforce is changing is now we're focusing more on skills versus a job description, and I'm just sort of reflecting on what you're talking about. And I feel like since we're now focusing more on the skill, we actually can really appreciate skills that people who are neuro divergent are bringing into the workforce, right? And I wonder, will that even help us seek out people that we know have these skills, versus in the past, and not that, not that long ago, in the past, even, even maybe some places currently, if you are you know, say you're on the spectrum, maybe you can't interview in the same way, right? You might not mean it maintain eye contact, but you could do every other skill and more of a certain job. I feel like we're just now starting to hear whether it's at a conferences or, you know, just a podcast like this. We're trying to make that a more mainstream thought. How are you maybe with people outside your organization? Are you doing things as Aspiritech and going out and sort of educating other employers or other groups?

Tara May  14:27  
That's something we're incredibly passionate about. And really it was part of that realization that what, what our core competency is, is creating a workplace where neurodivergent people can thrive, and we're only ever going to be able to hire so many people, right? There's always going to be a cap. We're always going to have only as many people as the revenue can support, because we do operate like a business. So when we thought about, okay, how do we expand our mission? How do we put a dent in this 80% under employment, unemployment for autistic adults, it's to help other workplaces be more inclusive and understand how neurodivergent team members can seamlessly fit into their organization with so very little effort. And you gave a fantastic example there Trish about the interview process. I actually just spoke at a CEO Round Table of manufacturing CEOs, and we were talking about the traditional interview skills, and I had one of them stand up show me how they would walk into a room if they were going to do an interview. And of course, they stood up and made eye contact, and they were explaining all of this to me, right? I'm making eye contact with you. I'm coming in, I'm shaking your hand. I am making small talk with you and discussing, you know, our day and the weather. And I said, Okay, now, what does any of that have to do with the cyber security expert that you're trying to hire? Right? And he was, that's a very good point, right? I said, Yes, you know, heads down, cyber security coding work in a Python language is a very different skill set from the sale of walking into an interview, right? And so it was just one point, but I think it really clicked and resonates when you think about the skill sets to hire versus the skill sets to do the job.

Steve  16:24  
Yeah, and that, Tara, that's a great lesson that you could apply really, in any kind of hiring situation or interviewing situation, right? And we fall into that trap so often, right? Of evaluating folks on these non important or unimportant traits or characteristics, or they don't know some secret code of you know how to, you know, march into the room a certain way, and things like that, and or whatever the you know, maybe you're not up to date on the latest, you know, sports story or what's happening in pop culture. So you're, you know, and we, we we ding people for not being, you know, aware of stuff like that. It's crazy. Yeah, it's a great.

Tara May  17:06  
Even women face that, right? I mean, at a certain executive level, I stopped interviewing with any other women, you know, stop being in a room with any other women often. And so sometimes you're, like, struggling to relate to the conversation, right? I don't play golf. I don't know what you're talking about. I really don't care who won Sunday night football, but you're faking it, right? And we see that so often.

Trish  17:33  
I have a question. You mentioned as women, right? We do fake that sometimes, right? We fake that we understand what's going on, or we just kind of gloss over it and change the subject. When someone is on the spectrum, again, Steve and I have done many shows with, for example, like the Frist Center for Autism, which is at Vanderbilt University, right? And so when you're thinking about people who are known to be on the spectrum, it's often that them masking to try and fit in is far more exhausting than just being accepted the way that they present. Right? Have you, or I'm imagining you have but have you at Aspiritech considered that in the way of the overall culture in terms of how you interact day to day or hour to hour with people who are all at some point on the spectrum is, are there cultural norms that maybe those of us that don't hire that way should be thinking about or building into the way that we're communicating with our employees?

Tara May  18:35  
So for us, we are lucky enough to have autistic people at every level in our organization that are completely comfortable unmasking, right? And and that's something special. And I heard it. I did a listening tour when I started at Aspiritech and spoke to every single employee to understand what they loved about the culture, what we needed to change about the culture right sort of starting point as a CEO, and one of the things I heard resoundingly was I feel like I fit in here. I can be exactly who I am here, often for the first time in my life, and I wish actually that it was an autistic person speaking instead of me, because I cannot adequately describe to you what that must feel like for those team members. But I know it's very emotional, and we talk about it a lot in our autism advocacy groups and the different ERGs that we have at Aspiritech, but I think we all can relate to not feeling like you fit in somewhere, and how difficult that can be. And I believe we all deserve a workplace where you can be exactly who you are, right, authentically, genuinely, vulnerably human. And we all do know how hard it is when we have to hide a piece of ourselves. And I think for autistic people, that's so rooted in trauma, because from an early age, they're being taught that they are coming at life from a deficit that they're not good enough in school, sometimes at home, even from the people they love. What I have found at Aspiritech is that the most difficult part of leading this organization is re instilling confidence in people where self esteem has been stripped away for decades.

Steve  20:40  
Tara, that's a fascinating way to think about it, right? And we heard some of this Trish over the years. We talked to, I'm thinking about the show we did with our friends from Special Olympics, and they, but they were, I don't want to call them kids. They were younger folks, and they, yeah, they were their 20s, but they both were, they both were working in different roles, right? And they both talk specifically about that right, being accepted, being part of a group, and which is one of the reasons why Special Olympics was so important to them, right? They were finally in a place where they didn't have to apologize for who they were or try to hide who they were, right? And it's really important now, Tara, you mentioned 93% of the employees there, including all levels of the organization, right, are autistic I and so you can kind of, you know, it's the culture there and it works. I'd love for you to maybe offer up a couple of ideas or just thoughts approaches for organizations, your typical organization, especially smaller businesses, right? Not. So maybe don't have super amounts of resources and budgets, etc, etc, but just what are a couple things you recommend when you're sitting around with the CEOs at the manufacturer's round table? What are a couple things you tell them, hey, think about this as you're approaching things in the workplace, and how that might benefit some of these folks who are neurodivergent.

Tara May  22:00  
Yeah. So I'll share a few really sort of concrete, small, actionable items, and then a couple bigger picture ones. One, for example, there's anything you can do to think about both noise levels, interruption levels and light levels in a space, right? So many people, autistic or not, are much more sensitive to those environmental factors and have a difficult time working than you will ever realize, right? So even simply asking your employees, is the lighting at the right level? Is there some natural light you can let the room? You know? Is there a sound or echo chamber that you can minimize, or can you give people quiet spaces to work if you have an open office environment, for example, I hate the open environment even before I started talking about neurodiversity, I was like, who thinks this is, like, where we do our best work, but those sorts of things, if you can think about that office environment, that's really wonderful. Also giving people headphones can be a huge one, neurotypical people as well. Yeah, the second thing I like to think about, and my Aspiritech team actually taught me this is communication styles. So after my first all hands at Aspiritech, someone came up to me and said, you know, we have some people who really like auditory learning, other people who really like visual learning, other people who do well with bullet points and verbiage, and other people who like the recordings so that they can either speed it up or slow it down. Slow it down if your processing speed is slower, speed it up if, if you're ADHD, a lot of ADHD people can't handle listening for 40 minutes to one singular topic. And thought to myself, well, first, absolutely, I can right easiest accommodation in the workplace to provide the communication in multiple formats. But I also wondered, why did I not think of this when I was leading 1000 people? Of course, among those 1000 people, there were auditory learners and visual learners and things like that. So just thinking about your communication style can actually go a really long way. And then the last one I'll share is a little bit more nebulous, but just the idea of psychological safety in the workplace, I think is really important. When we talk about skill sets in 2024 and 2025 we are asking people to constantly be learning, constantly be innovating, and to be moving at the pace of digital and AI. Well, when you are doing that, people are going to make mistakes. Neurotypical people and neurodivergent people, we're going to screw up, and we're going to need to be comfortable failing fast, and an environment where it is okay to make a mistake is critically important for your organization and will benefit both neurodivergent and neurotypical people alike.

Trish  24:59  
I think those are such great tips. And as you alluded to, many of those things don't cost money, right? It's just changing the way that you are operating in your business. When you were talking there at the end, it was thing I was thinking about, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. Steve is as well. When we started into the workforce, I mean, there was such a huge stigma of not just talking if you were on the spectrum, or even knowing if you were, but just mental health in general. I wonder what your opinion is in terms of, sort of the, you know, I have twins that just turned 21. It is very common for them to talk about anything like, like, if you know, if they need texture of something differently, if they need a sound differently, if they need, you know, AirPods in all the time just to reduce the noise. It's very common in that generation. So how do you see sort of the incoming workers, and are they helping impact that even faster than maybe people who are in their 50s working in the work environments?

Tara May  26:05  
Oh, absolutely they are. I 100% and I have teenagers in and out of of my house, and their expectations around inclusion of all kinds are much higher than mine were a generation ago, which good for them, right? And their expectations around in mental health supports, sensory supports, all of this are so much higher, and in part, it's because they have language for it. We didn't, I didn't have any language for the incredibly anxiety riddled teenager, I was right, but they do, and so now we know better, and we can do better. And I'm so glad to see them pushing it along, demanding more from life than what we had, and making the world a better place one generation at a time. And I truly believe that the education system has made a lot of changes to be more embracing of neurodiversity and sensory issues, and it is time for the workplace to follow.

Trish  27:11  
We need to catch up, because I think that also, you know, 10, 20, even 30 years ago, if you had any sort of difference, you were usually removed from the classroom, right? And but yet, then we expect people to come into the workforce and be all together, so it only makes sense that we make sure that we are not singling people out for any differences, right? That we're actually trying to learn from it and include them in the workplace, because it's going to make for a richer, more productive workplace, right?

Tara May  27:44  
There will be a return on investment for business owners. We already know that if you are more inclusive in your organization to all kinds of people, you will see a better profit, and I truly believe that's because people transform organizations, not by dictates, but by culture. It will pay off.

Steve  28:06  
Yeah, you mentioned ROI Tara. And the last thing I wanted to make sure we asked you, because it was in your bio, and it's in our notes too, is this idea of the ROI of kindness. I mean, I've heard of ROI I've also heard of kindness. I have not heard really, the two concepts linked together very often, and certainly in a business environment. I'd love for you to talk for a minute or two about that, like, why specifically you like to talk about that and think about that.

Tara May  28:32  
And I purposefully juxtapose those two words that put you in two very different spaces, right? We think of return on investment as a hard business term. You are thinking about your P and L, you are thinking about the numbers, and we think about kindness. You're thinking generally about a more humane approach, empathy, the way that we relate to each other as people. And I think a lot of people view those as two disparate issues, and I am here to say that they absolutely are intrinsically linked to each other. And just by way of example, my career prior to Aspiritech was coming in to transform media companies from print companies to thriving digitally forward companies. That's what I did. I would walk in and do that. Well to do that, you have to convince very large group of peoples who are very dedicated to their career to change. I truly believe you achieve that sort of cultural transformation successfully by empowering people, by building them up, by giving them the resources and the tools they need to be successful, not by mandating dictates at them. It doesn't work that way, and so I believe true, profound innovation and cultural transformation comes from understanding humans on a deep level and treating them with kindness.

Trish  30:01  
I love that. I think that just summarizes it so nicely. It is important for so many reasons, and I love that you've given us sort of the softer, more human, heartfelt reasons. But also, yeah, it does make a difference in how successful an organization can be. And I think you're you're not doing the best for your organization, if you're not thinking about these things every single day.

Steve  30:24  
Yeah, I want to quickly, before we let you go Tara, quickly ask an Aspiritech question, which is, this, is one of the services your teams provide, like sort of testing and quality assurance of software, or is it only kind of hardware products?

Tara May  30:39  
It's software. It's almost all software products. Yes.

Steve  30:42  
I'm glad you said that, because Trish, you know, as well as I do, we have a ton of people in the HR software business who listen to this show, right, and will share it and listen to it. If you're one of those executives in the HR software business, I won't start naming company names, but you need these kind of services, QA, accessibility, data services, all of it. Check out our friends at Aspiritech, right? We'll put the web. Yeah, absolutely. Why not? Right? They need this stuff anyway. Software's got to be tested, right and checked and accessibility in the human resources, technology space is a huge deal. And maybe you have some of these clients already Tara, I don't want to presuppose that you don't, but I just think it's a great opportunity for a lot of people who do listen to the show, who are in our industry, in that HR industry, in the HR software industry, to if you're not familiar with Aspiritech, you should go check them out. And, you know, maybe get strike up a conversation with Tara and her team to see if there's a fit there.

Trish  31:38  
Yeah. Also, I'm sorry, the we want to promote your podcast, right? I saw On the Verge, there are several episodes out there. I listened to two of them. I think if anyone is looking to how you can better include neuro diversity in your strategy of your business, check out the podcast, because I think you're going to hear from many different people on just how you can do that.

Steve  32:04  
Yeah, this has been an awesome conversation. And Tara, I want to thank you. We will send folks to aspiritech.org, anywhere else, any other resources, any events going on, anything you want to just shout out for folks who have listened to the show, maybe want to either connect with you or Aspiritech or learn more about any of these topics.

Tara May  32:23  
I think you did a beautiful job with the plugs. We do great tech services and Creative Services. Visit our website, check out our podcast and sign up for our newsletter, where you'll get all the latest and greatest updates.

Steve  32:36  
Awesome. Well, Tara, it has been wonderful to meet you. I love the conversation. I'm all in. I love the mission at Aspiritech, and, you know, much success, and we hope that, yeah, we hope you've enjoyed spending a little bit of time with us today.

Tara May  32:50  
Thank you for having me.

Steve  32:52  
Awesome. Well, thank you, Trish, fantastic stuff. I love this topic. I'm glad we were able to talk about it again this year.

Trish  32:59  
I am too, and I love that we're able to cover it from so to so many different angles. Because, you know, we've done the shows on the hiring, done the shows on college students. We're doing a little bit more in the actual workplace, and so this just really gives you sort of that high level view of what you can do. But then, Tara, thank you so much for all of the examples, because I think that's what we really want. We want listeners to be able to walk away from the show and say, these are things I can actually start doing in my business today. So I appreciate that.

Steve  33:29  
So good, great, great stuff. All right. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. My name is Steve Boese, thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time, and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai