Time (Micro)management: Encouraging Independent Thought for Neurodiverse Employees

If you’re a manager or supervisor, you’re often evaluated on your team’s productivity. If you’re a business owner, your company’s survival depends on being productive.

That means getting the required work done to an acceptable (or better) standard in the time allotted. Take away any of those things, and productivity will drop – along with your evaluations.

So what do you do when you see a team member, who you know is working on an important project, who appears to be slacking off?

That depends on the answers to these questions.

1. Are they getting the work done on time?
2. Are they achieving satisfactory results?
3. Are they accomplishing both of these goals without disrupting anyone else’s productivity?
4. Is there a process which must be followed to ensure quality control, worker safety and/or regulatory compliance?

If the answer to the first three questions is “Yes,” but the answer to the fourth question is “No,” leave them alone.

One reason for a hands-off approach is that if the answer to that fourth question is “No,” that means you’re likely dealing with a creative or analytical worker. Their jobs require mental effort as well as physical. You can standardize a physical process, but you can’t force a standardized thought process.

This is especially true if you’re dealing with neurodiverse employees.

People with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder often excel at creativity – but that creativity tends to come in bursts. When it does, the resulting hyperfocus produces a creative “groove” that might last for several minutes – or for hours. This can look like willful procrastination.

People on the autism spectrum are more likely to excel at unbiased analysis – but they also tend to be routine-oriented, and outside time pressure can disrupt their mental routine. Repeating that outside pressure further disrupts that routine and distracts the employee.

Trust the process: Let your employees do what works for them

The second reason for letting people follow their own processes – when those processes yield effective results – is that it minimizes stress on them.

For example, “time blindness” is a common symptom of ADHD that distorts both the sense of how much time has passed and how much remains to complete a task. This can lead to struggles with deadlines, and you will have to keep an eye on progress. But if your employee has found a way to manage that symptom and hit deadlines, don’t tinker with it.

Similarly, don’t expect analytical employees to follow a set time period. The more complex the issue, the more internal questions have to be satisfactorily answered before reaching a conclusion. Don’t treat requests for more information as delaying tactics or an analytical employee being “difficult.”

Allowing people to follow their own processes empowers and demonstrates trust in them, and people who feel trusted are more likely to repay that trust and empowerment with high effort and company loyalty.

And, finally, trusting and empowering your team members to work in the way that’s most effective for them is better for your own peace of mind.

Say you manage a team of business plan reviewers, and each has a target of eight per day.  Which seems less stressful to you: Hovering over a tracking sheet all day and checking hourly progress, or reviewing results at the end of the day and only stepping in if a reviewer consistently misses the target?

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So long as your team member is hitting deadlines and performing to the desired standard, the only time you need to step in is if their process becomes a disruption.

Creative sorts often like to bounce their ideas off others – which is fine, if the other person has time. If not, that can throw off their own process, and you might need to step in and protect the time of that second employee if they’re not good at setting and defending their own time boundaries.

In the same vein, you might have to prompt an analytical employee to provide a preliminary, high-points analysis so that a project can either start on schedule or be scrapped to avoid wasting any more time on a concept that won’t work.

In the end, remember that you’re only responsible for whether a team member manages time effectively – not how they do it.  

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