Being a “Top Company to Work For” Through Employee Experience Management
At Uptimize, we think a lot about how to optimize what you could call Employee Experience management. How do we, as workplace neurodiversity experts, ensure we practice what we preach when it comes to our own work and team?
We were thrilled, in summer 2024, to be ranked in the Top 10 (#2!) on TechNational’s best places to work list for the year. You can read more about this here: https://thetechnational.com/top-100-companies-to-work-for/
The award summary reads as follows:
Uptimize enhances team performance for tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM by leveraging diverse talents. As a leader in the “Neurodiversity at Work” movement, Uptimize unlocks unique skills of all thinkers, including neurodivergent individuals like autistic, ADHD, or dyslexic individuals.
With a highly neurodiverse team of their own, Uptimize supports all employees in understanding their work preferences and provides flexibility with unlimited paid time off and flexible scheduling.
It’s a good chance, then, to explore the last paragraph here – something we get asked a lot about by our customers. “What do you do, at Uptimize, with your teams, to leverage neurodiversity and ensure optimal performance?”
Let’s expand on the summary above, and dig in and focus on a few key aspects of team building and Employee Experience management that we consciously take seriously as we build and support the Uptimize team:
1 – Building a highly neurodiverse team. Perhaps we’re cheating here – we were founded by someone with a TBI, and our mission naturally attracts neurodivergent talent passionate about seeing greater neuroinclusion in the world. But we also take care to recruit neuroinclusively, including in how we assess and interview talent, and this helps too.
2 – Total Flexibility. When I wrote my book, “A Hidden Force” (find it here – https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Force-Unlocking-Potential-Neurodiversity/dp/1639080457) the one word I couldn’t avoid repeating again and again was ‘flexibility’. People are wired differently, and as a result we all work differently. Clearly, the 9-5 ‘straitjacket’ doesn’t work for everybody – and the more flexibility you can offer in terms of when, how and where people work, the better output they’re likely to produce. We also offer flexibility in time off, including unlimited PTO and total flexibility on time off needed during core working hours as and when life gets in the way.
3- The ‘Idea Meritocracy’. This term is borrowed from the great Ray Dalio, in his book Principles – a book that doesn’t explicitly focus on neurodiversity, but in many important ways alludes to it. Dalio, a successful hedge fund manager, recognized everybody is wired differently. He also recognized the crucial importance of leveraging true ‘diversity of thought’ to drive better decisions. As such, his team practiced radical inclusion of ideas, allowing even junior people to contribute ideas in areas away from their core responsibilities. Many neurodivergent people at work, sadly, experience low psychological safety, and a lack of interest in their creative ideas (especially when these threaten to cause disruption, hassle, and/or make managers look bad). At Uptimize, we ensure everybody has a voice, always, and everybody can contribute in the way that suits them best. People feel included and valued as a result – and we create better products and services, and (as Dalio intended) make better decisions.
One ADHDer employee at Uptimize once said in disbelief during her onboarding process, “I can’t believe how much you care!”. While touching, of course, this speaks perhaps more to the lack of interest and support so many (neurodivergent, especially) employees experience in typical roles.
What would happen if your team started caring about each other like this? Would productivity go up or down? How about retention of staff…?
One thing that happened when we practiced this was to be recognized by TechNational.
And while we appreciate the kudos, we also hope soon such practices are simply the norm – and that employee experience management is always infused with the neuroinclusive tactics that make for better “EX” and stronger teams.
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Ready to explore how Uptimize can empower your teams to embrace neurodiversity? Talk to us by scheduling your discovery call here.