A message lands at 4:52 on a Thursday. Hey, can you take a look at this when you get a sec? There’s a link, no context and a smiley face. You open the document and read it twice. Look at it for what? Typos, the numbers, the whole argument? Is a sec tonight, or Monday, or was it urgent and the smiley was there to soften it? You draft a reply and delete it three times, and by the time you close the laptop the message has taken more of your evening than the work will.
Workplace communication gets harder when you’re autistic because so much of it runs on implication. Neurotypical colleagues often leave the important part unsaid: the deadline inside “when you get a chance”, the criticism inside “interesting approach”, the request inside “it would be great if someone could…”. You tend to answer the words that were said, so the hidden layer gets missed or has to be decoded at real cost. Researchers describe this as a two-way mismatch, the double empathy problem, which means the strain sits between two communication styles and on both sides of the conversation. The practical fix is usually small. Ask for the missing piece, plainly and early, and confirm it in writing.
What the research shows
- In a UK survey of 181 autistic adults, 84% rated workplace adjustments as very or extremely important, yet more than a third of those who asked for adjustments did not have them put in place successfully, and 31% felt unable to discuss their needs at work at all. Davies et al. (2022)1
- Information passed between autistic people was kept as accurately as between non-autistic people, and broke down faster in mixed autistic and non-autistic chains, where rapport was also rated lower. Crompton et al. (2020)2
- Non-autistic observers formed less favourable first impressions of autistic people within seconds and were less willing to interact with them, and the gap disappeared when they judged only a transcript of what was said. Sasson et al. (2017)3
- Autistic adults described camouflaging, including rehearsing conversations and copying other people’s social behaviour, and named exhaustion as one of its main consequences. Hull et al. (2017)4
Why working with neurotypical colleagues takes so much energy
The work itself is often the easy part. You can hold a complicated problem in your head for hours, spot the flaw in a process before anyone else does, and finish a task properly once you know what the task is. What drains you is the layer wrapped around the work. The hints, the decisions made in the corridor, the tone you’re supposed to read in a two-word message.
Neurotypical communication at work leans heavily on implication. People soften requests so they don’t sound bossy, wrap criticism in praise so it doesn’t sting, and keep deadlines loose so they seem relaxed. Very little of that is meant as a trap. It’s a set of social habits that keeps things smooth between people who share the same decoder.
You might not share it. Your instinct is to take words at face value, a trait often described as literal thinking, and when the meaning sits underneath the words you have to dig for it. You do that digging all day, quietly, on top of your actual job.
Crompton and colleagues found information passed cleanly between autistic people and broke down faster in mixed groups. Researchers call this the double empathy problem. Your colleagues find you hard to read too. They just aren’t usually the ones paying for the gap.
Each habit below comes with what it usually means and a calm response you can use. The responses are small. Each one asks the other person, kindly, for the piece they left out.
Vague instructions: “Can you take a look at this?”
Have a look at this. Can you tidy it up a bit? Just make it pop a bit more. The task arrives with a verb and nothing else, no finish line, no deadline, no sense of how much effort it deserves.
What it usually means. The person has a rough picture of what they want and assumes you’ll fill in the blanks the way they would. Sometimes they haven’t decided yet themselves. To them, a loose brief feels respectful, a way of leaving room for your judgement.
What it costs you. You either guess and risk doing the wrong job, or you ask and worry you look slow. Both options take energy, and the guessing can quietly eat a whole afternoon.
What to say. Ask for the finish line.
“Happy to do it. So I get it right, what would done look like for you, and when do you need it?”
If they say whatever you think, turn their vagueness into your plan and send it back in writing.
“Great. I’ll check the figures and tighten the summary, and have it back to you by Wednesday. Let me know if you meant something different.”
A clarifying question takes ten seconds. Redoing a task takes a day. Managers who have watched someone guess wrong tend to welcome the question.
Unwritten priorities: “Whenever you get a chance”
No rush. Whenever you get a chance. This one’s a nice-to-have. Then, two days later, a message asking how it’s going. Or the opposite, where everything is urgent and so nothing is.
What it usually means. In a lot of workplaces, priority travels through tone, through who is asking, and through how often something gets mentioned. No rush is frequently politeness, a way of saying I don’t want to seem demanding. The real order of things lives in a manager’s head, and they assume everyone can sense it.
What it costs you. Ranking tasks without the information you need is hard work for an autistic brain, and it leans on the same executive function you need for the work itself. Get it wrong and you look unreliable, even though you did exactly what you were told.
What to say. Make the ranking visible.
“I’ve got the report, the client deck and the tracker on at the moment. Which would you like first?”
“When you say no rush, is end of the week okay, or can it go into next week?”
If this happens a lot, send a short list of your tasks every Monday and ask your manager to put them in order. It takes them a minute and saves you a week of guessing.
Small talk as a performance metric
How was your weekend. The kitchen at ten. Friday drinks. The first five minutes of every meeting, before anyone mentions why you’re there. Then, months later, feedback that you could be more visible, or build stronger relationships, or be more of a team player.
What it usually means. For many neurotypical colleagues, chat is how trust gets built. They feel they know someone through the small exchanges, and people tend to back the colleagues they feel they know. It’s informal, it’s real, and it often shapes who gets the interesting projects.
What it costs you. Every exchange means reading the moment, picking a line, setting your face and timing your exit. One is nothing. A dozen a day adds up to a tax for walking past people, which is a big part of why small talk leaves you so flat by mid-afternoon.
What to say. Choose your dose on purpose and spend it where it counts. A reliable greeting and a reliable exit line save you inventing one each time. Turning up to the first half hour of drinks still counts as being there. And one specific question about something a colleague told you last week often does more for the relationship than an hour of general chat.
When you need to opt out, keep it warm and short.
“I’m going to head off, I’m pretty wiped by Friday. Have a good weekend.”
That’s enough. Plenty of people are thinking about leaving by then too.
Feedback that arrives sideways
Interesting approach. Maybe consider. This is great, just a few small thoughts. Or nothing at all, and then you hear the feedback went to your manager instead of you.
What it usually means. Softening is a courtesy in neurotypical communication. People cushion criticism to protect the relationship and to avoid seeming harsh. The catch is that maybe consider can mean please change this, and a few small thoughts can mean this needs a rewrite.
What it costs you. Either you miss the real message and repeat the thing they wanted changed, or you catch the hint and spend the evening replaying it, trying to work out how bad it actually was.
What to say. Ask for the instruction hiding inside the comment.
“Thanks for this. So I act on it properly, is that a change you’d like me to make now, or something to keep in mind for next time?”
“If you could only change one thing in this, what would it be?”
With a manager you see often, it can help to name your preference once.
“I take feedback best when it’s direct. You can just tell me what to change. It helps me more than softening does.”
You might worry that sounds blunt. Said calmly, it usually reads as someone who wants to do good work.
Meetings with no agenda
An invite called Catch up, or Quick sync, with no description. A meeting that wanders for forty minutes and makes its real decision in the last five, when everyone is tired and half out the door.
What it usually means. For plenty of people, a meeting is a place to think out loud together. They don’t need to prepare, and an agenda can feel stiff or formal to them. A catch-up is often relationship maintenance more than business.
What it costs you. You can’t prepare for a meeting you can’t see. The not knowing sits with you until it starts, and if your processing takes a little longer, your best answer turns up at nine o’clock that night, long after anyone asked.
What to say. Ask for the topic, lightly, as if it’s for their benefit as much as yours.
“Looking forward to it. Is there anything you’d like me to look at or bring along beforehand?”
Afterwards, write down what you heard.
“Thanks for today. Just confirming what I took from it. I’m drafting the proposal by Friday and you’re checking the budget. Let me know if I missed anything.”
That second message protects you from decisions that drift. It also tends to make you the person who keeps things on track, which colleagues notice and value.
The “quick call”
Got five minutes for a quick call? The Teams ring that arrives with no warning. The five minutes that turn into twenty-five, with three decisions made out loud and nothing written down.
What it usually means. Talking is faster than typing for a lot of people, and a call feels warmer. It avoids the risk of tone being misread in text. Often they want to think something through out loud, and they’ve picked you as their sounding board, which is a compliment, even when it doesn’t feel like one.
What it costs you. No time to prepare, no time to process, and no record afterwards. If phone calls already feel impossible, an unplanned one at work can knock out the next hour.
What to say. Move the call to a time you can manage, and get the outcome in writing.
“Sure. Can we do 2:30? I’m just finishing something.”
“Can you send me a line on what it’s about, so I have the right things open?”
And once it’s over:
“Thanks for the call. Confirming that I’ll update the forecast by Thursday and you’re checking the numbers with finance. Shout if I’ve got that wrong.”
Twenty minutes of notice is usually enough to turn a call from an ambush into a conversation.
Hints instead of asks
It’d be great if someone could update the tracker. Is anyone across the client thing? I wonder if we should move the launch. Each one sounds like a thought. Each one is often a request.
What it usually means. An indirect request is a polite request. It leaves room for someone to volunteer and avoids sounding like an order. Often it’s aimed at a particular person, who is expected to recognise themselves in it.
What it costs you. You miss the hint and look unhelpful. Or you notice it, can’t tell whether it’s meant for you, and spend the meeting deciding whether to speak.
What to say. Turn the hint into a question with a name attached.
“Did you mean me for the tracker? Happy to do it if so.”
With a manager who hints a lot, say it once and plainly.
“If you ever want me to do something, just ask me straight out. I’ll never mind, and I’d hate to miss it.”
What all that translating costs you
Any single one of these is small. A vague message, a hint, a call that runs over. On a good day you could handle any of them. What wears you down is the stack. Eight hours of decoding on top of the job, every day, while also managing your face, your voice and your timing so nobody notices the effort.
That effort has a name. Masking at work is the work of appearing to understand the unwritten layer without ever asking about it. Hull and colleagues found autistic adults named exhaustion as one of the main costs of camouflaging, and you probably know that tiredness well.
It tends to show up somewhere other than work. You get home with nothing left. Weekends go on recovery. You feel overwhelmed by things that used to be manageable, and you start to wonder why a job you’re good at feels so hard, and whether the problem is you. If that tiredness has started to feel permanent, it’s worth reading about autistic burnout from work.
It helps to name what’s happening accurately. You’re doing two jobs. One is the job in your contract. The other is translation, and it never appears in a position description or a performance review. Once you can see the second job, you can start making it smaller. You ask for the missing piece instead of guessing. You put things in writing. And over time you think harder about which kinds of work suit the way you communicate, and which ones will always charge you the full translation tax.
The Autistic Advantage If the translating is what wears you down, this workbook and its online tools help you find income that fits the way you work. One module is about working with non-autistic people, with scripts for moments like these and a simple way to set out your working style for a new manager.
Explaining your working style without a big conversation
You can ask for clearer communication without telling anyone you’re autistic. A few plain lines about how you work best, sent to a new manager or added to your profile, do a lot of quiet work. They read as professionalism, and they save you asking for the same thing in every meeting.
Keep each line about what helps you do good work. For example:
“I do my best work with written instructions and a clear deadline.”
“I prefer a message to a call, and I’ll always reply the same day.”
“Direct feedback helps me most. Just tell me what to change.”
If you do decide to disclose, you can ask for these things as formal adjustments, and disclosing autism at work is worth thinking through first. In Davies and colleagues’ study, two in three of the autistic adults who asked for adjustments asked for changes to how their workplace communicated and worked socially, things like more explicit communication and advance notice of changes. Our guide to autism workplace accommodations covers how to ask.
Working out what you need in the first place can be the hardest part, especially if you’ve spent years adapting to whatever was in front of you.
“I find it difficult to pinpoint what adjustments or support I might need.”
Autistic adult, research participant, Davies et al. (2022)
If that’s you, start with the habits above. Notice which ones cost you the most this week. Those are your first lines.
Assuming good intent, in both directions
Your neurotypical colleagues are mostly using the communication style they were taught, the one that has always worked for them. When they hint, soften or ring without warning, they’re usually trying to be kind, quick or friendly. Knowing that can take some of the sting out of it.
The same generosity belongs to you. When you ask what done looks like, or move a call to 2:30, or confirm a conversation in writing, you’re doing the same thing they are, using the communication that works for you so the work goes well. Asking for the missing piece makes you easier to work with over time, because you get it right the first time.
Some colleagues will meet you halfway quickly. If one of them wants to understand you better, our guide to working with autistic coworkers is written for them. And if you’re weighing up whether your current role can ever fit, the Autism & Work hub and the career and income finder are good places to start.
Key points
- Neurotypical workplace communication leans on implication, so deadlines, criticism and requests are often left unsaid.
- The double empathy problem means the mismatch runs both ways, and the strain sits between two communication styles.
- Vague instructions, unwritten priorities, sideways feedback, agenda-free meetings, quick calls and hints each have a usual meaning and a short, calm response.
- Asking for the finish line, the order of tasks or the instruction inside a comment usually takes seconds and saves days.
- Confirming calls and meetings in writing protects you from decisions that drift and gives you a record.
- A few plain lines about your working style can ask for clearer communication without requiring you to disclose.
How do I communicate with neurotypical coworkers when I’m autistic?
Start by asking for the piece of information they’ve left out, plainly and early. When a task arrives without a finish line, ask what done looks like and when they need it. When feedback is softened, ask whether it’s a change to make now or something to keep in mind. After calls and meetings, send a short written summary of what you heard. These habits fill in the unspoken layer without asking you to guess or to perform. They also work well with neurotypical colleagues, because they read as care and attention to detail. A handful of reliable questions and the habit of putting things in writing will cover most situations.
Why are neurotypical people so indirect at work?
Indirectness is usually a form of politeness. Softening a request makes it sound less like an order, cushioning criticism protects the relationship, and keeping deadlines loose makes someone seem relaxed and trusting. Neurotypical colleagues tend to share the same unspoken code, so the hidden meaning lands for them without much effort. When you take words at face value, the same habits leave you decoding all day. Research on the double empathy problem suggests this is a mismatch between communication styles, with misunderstanding running in both directions. Knowing the indirectness is usually meant kindly can take some of the sting out of it, even while you ask for the plain version.
How do I ask my manager for clearer instructions?
Frame it around doing good work. Something like “I do my best work with a clear outcome and a deadline, so I might check those with you when a task comes in” sets the expectation once, so you don’t have to justify each question later. Then, in the moment, ask short specific questions. What would done look like? What’s the deadline? Which of these should come first? If the answer is still vague, write back your own plan and invite corrections. Managers usually prefer this to fixing a misunderstanding later. If you’ve disclosed, clearer written instructions can also be requested as a formal workplace adjustment.
Do I have to tell my manager I’m autistic to ask for clearer communication?
No. You can ask for written instructions, agendas, clear deadlines and direct feedback as working preferences, without mentioning autism at all. Plenty of people state preferences like these, and they tend to read as professional and organised. Disclosure becomes more relevant if you need formal adjustments, legal protection, or changes your manager can’t make informally. In a UK study by Davies and colleagues, 31% of autistic adults said they felt unable to discuss their needs at work, and the authors argued that disclosure shouldn’t be required to get support. Whether and when to disclose is your call. Starting with simple preferences lets you see how your manager responds before you decide.
How do I get out of small talk at work without seeming rude?
Keep a warm, short exit line and use the same one every time. “Good to see you, I’d better get back to it” or “I’ll let you get on” closes the conversation kindly without needing a reason. Pair the words with a small movement, picking up your cup or turning toward your desk, so your body says the same thing. For social events, turning up for the first part and leaving early still counts as being there. If you want to build relationships with less chat, a specific question about something a colleague mentioned earlier tends to mean more to them than general conversation, and it costs you far less energy.
How should I respond to vague feedback at work?
Thank them, then ask for the instruction inside the comment. “So I act on this properly, is that a change you’d like me to make now, or something for next time?” works for most softened feedback. If there are several vague comments, ask which one matters most. Avoid guessing, because guessing wrong can look like you ignored the feedback. Over time, tell the people who review your work that direct feedback helps you most. Many colleagues soften feedback because they think it’s kinder, and they’re often relieved to be told they can be plain with you. Writing down what you agreed to change gives you both a clear record.
Is it unprofessional to ask for a meeting agenda?
Asking for an agenda is a normal, professional request, especially when it’s phrased around preparation. “Is there anything you’d like me to look at before we meet?” sounds engaged and keen, because it is. Many people never send agendas simply because nobody asks, and some appreciate the prompt to work out the meeting’s purpose. If an agenda never comes, ask for the topic in one line, or for any questions in advance so you have time to think. After the meeting, a short summary of decisions and actions is valued in most workplaces. It gives you processing time and protects everyone from misremembering what was agreed.
Why am I so exhausted after work when the work isn’t hard?
Because the job isn’t the only thing you’re doing. Alongside the work, you’re decoding hints, guessing priorities, managing small talk, reading tone in messages and handling unplanned calls, often while monitoring your own face and voice so nobody notices the effort. Autistic adults in camouflaging research name exhaustion as one of its main costs. Each piece is small, and together they can fill a day. If you’re spending evenings and weekends recovering, that’s worth taking seriously. Reducing the translation load, by asking for clarity and putting things in writing, often helps more than trying to push on regardless.
How do I stop missing hints at work?
Catching every hint is unlikely, for anyone. A more reliable approach is to treat certain phrases as possible requests and check. “It would be great if someone could”, “is anyone across” and “I wonder if we should” are common ways of asking without asking. When you hear one, a quick “did you mean me for that?” settles it without guessing. With a manager who hints a lot, tell them once that you’d always rather be asked directly. Most people are happy to adjust when they know it helps, and it removes a layer of worry from every meeting.
If you’ve lived this.
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