Your First Day on a New Job (And You're Freaking Out)

In today's episode, we're going to talk about the first day on a brand new job.

Now, you've either felt this experience yourself or you're going to at some point in your career.

You're going to go into a brand new environment, brand new people, new computers, new environment, new office, new setup, new everything.

And you are going to be inundated with information from every corner.

You've got in-person meetings, you've got

emails, you've got Slack or Teams messages, you've got people coming up to you, you've got things that you're carrying around with you because you don't know where to put your stuff

down yet.

It is a overwhelming sensory hell and you are maybe just barely treading water or maybe you're even drowning.

This is the neurodivergent Virgin experience for new jobs.

I felt this and I'm sure that you felt it too.

I don't want lie and say that it gets easier over time because everybody's experience of a new job is very different from person to person, from job to job.

Some jobs are easier.

Some companies have their onboarding process really put together to make the new hire experience a really positive, easy, and seamless one.

Other companies, you might be the first person as part of an onboarding experience and you are just being thrown into the mix and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.

Maybe it's your first job and you have no basis for comparison, and maybe you've been through two, three, four, 50 jobs, and this is just another job for you.

No matter who you are, one thing remains the same across all people who are neurodivergent, and that is the need and the sense of comfort that you get when things

make sense, when you have organized the information around you, whether it's the information about your environment, about your emotions, about people, about structured

things that are in front of you, there is a need, a human understanding that you need to be able to make sense of the mess in front of you.

And that process looks a little bit differently from person to person.

For somebody who is autistic, that way that they process information might vary from how it works for somebody who has ADHD, from somebody who's dyslexic, or somebody who has

epilepsy.

For somebody who's autistic or has epilepsy, they may say, this part of the office has really bright lights or really sharp smells.

Maybe it's near a kitchen or a dining hall or something.

So I am going to try to avoid walking by that part of the office unless I have to.

If you have dyslexia, it's possible that you've been given a bunch of emails and documents to read as part of your first day, and it's going to take you a very long time to read

them and actually get the information that you need to go about the rest of your day, like a schedule, calendar events, documentation about your desk, and things like that.

The single most important thing that you can do as a neurodivergent person is ask yourself, what do I think is going to be the most stressful thing that I might encounter

on my first day?

And what can I try to do in advance of that to come over it?

Now, you might not know what that stressful thing is until it actually affects you or you get confronted with it.

You might not know that that smelly kitchen or the loud kitchen is actually bothersome to you until you walk by it.

And then you say, okay, I can't walk by this kitchen for

one reason or another.

Or, okay, I see that I have a bunch of emails in my inbox right now and I need to set aside a couple hours to catch up on all of them.

you might not know that these things are going to be problematic until they become problematic.

And that's just the first day.

There's not a whole lot that you'll be able to do on that first day until you are faced with these things.

At the same time, you might be confronted with things in advance that let you think ahead and try to react to those things before they actually occur.

For instance, if you do get a bunch of emails and you know you need time to read them or need those emails delivered to you or read to you in a different way, asking for that in

advance and for other sorts of onboarding documentation to be sent to you as a voice memo over a call or in person or something like that.

If that's how you know your brain is going to work and what would reduce that anxiety and stress on your first day, you have a responsibility and a need to yourself to ask for

that.

If the worst thing that can happen is nothing, it's worth asking.

I'm gonna say that a lot on this podcast.

If you don't ask for something, you are not going to get it.

People around you, as amazing and kind as they can be, are often not mind readers.

And unless they have sort of understanding or awareness to watch out for you or look after you, not in a way that is infantilizing, but in a way that is genuine and means to support

you, they're not going to know to help you, to ask if you're okay.

They might just assume that something is going on, but you want to deal with it yourself and they might just leave you alone.

But if you do need help and you do need support of other people or need some adjustment or change to your first day, it's appropriate to ask for it because it's your first day at

this big company and you're going to need all the help you can get to figure out what are those stressful things, what's at the top of that mountain, and then work your way down to

less and less stressful things.

I don't want to promise you that every single stressful event is going to go away with the flick of your hands or the tap of a magic wand, but you do have a responsibility to

yourself to ask around you for help from people who are leading onboarding, from people around you, to help you with things if there are things that you need help with.

Those things can be really simple and straightforward.

Maybe you're sitting under a really bright light and it's hurting your eyes or it's hurting your brain.

It can be as simple as just saying, hey, can I swap seats with you so I'm not sitting under this light?

They don't have to know that you're neurodivergent.

They may just assume that the light are bothering you for any number of reasons.

And a reasonable person would swap seats with you and think nothing of it.

You're not being a burden.

You're looking out for yourself.

and you need to take care of yourself.

Not to the point that you are being selfish or hurting other people, but that you are taking care of yourself and can focus on the meeting that's happening or the job that's

ahead of you.

If it is your first day and it's in person, maybe you're going to be in a big conference room with 50, 60, 100 people or so.

Who knows how big that room is going to be.

And maybe you need to manage the noise that is coming into your brain.

Maybe you want to sit in the back so it's a little bit quieter.

On the opposite side, maybe you need to sit in the front to read somebody's lips or have a better understanding of their body language, their emotion to see what they're saying.

And you sit in the front.

Or maybe you have an interpreter or somebody else who's there to help you in that front row.

Whatever it is, I'm not going to sit here and say, you should do exactly this thing and you should be doing this other thing.

You need to reflect on what's going to work for you or what you think is going to work and put it into practice.

You might not know what that thing is until you experiment.

Maybe you would try sitting in the back of the room and now you can't hear them at the front of the room at all.

You can't see them on the opposite end.

Maybe you sit in the front and it's too loud, or there's a bright light in the front row that you can't seem to get away from.

Whatever it is, you might try something that might not work.

Maybe it will work.

But if you don't give it a try, it's not going to happen.

You're going to stay in that stressful situation.

And in a worst case scenario, where you make something more stressful by going to the front, to the back, to the side, or something else, you have a focal point for, maybe the

situation

I can't make it completely can we limit or mitigate the stress that is happening to a point where I can least tolerate it to an extent?

Let's say this is virtual right now.

A lot of these things are virtual There is a return to office, but not everybody's in the office and not every new first day onboarding is in person just yet.

Let's say you're on a call, a Zoom call, a Google Meet call, whatever you want to call it, and you're in a virtual meeting room of hundreds of other people.

You might still be stressed out.

You might not want to turn your camera on.

You might not want to leave your mic open.

There are things that you can do on a virtual call that will still make you feel less stressed out and allow you to be more present in the moment for whatever's going on.

Working from home, it's a lot easier for you to manage your environment.

Do you have a comfortable chair?

Is the lighting okay?

Is your desk setup okay?

Do you need these sort of fidget devices?

What do you need in your physical space to make sure that your first day in this virtual environment is going to go successfully?

Do you have water or coffee or tea or whatever you need to eat or drink in the morning?

Now let's say that a meeting is over and you are left to your own devices until the next meeting and you are asking yourself, what am I going to do next?

It is that indecision, decision paralysis where you could be doing so many things you don't even know where to start.

And that's okay.

That's a scary feeling to feel.

And I have felt that dozens of times.

It's the, my gosh, I could be doing so many things right now, but I don't know what to pick.

I am going to do none of them and I'm going to

dawdle and do something else.

That's a valid feeling to feel.

I have felt that before.

And you are absolutely not alone.

If you get out of that meeting and you have 20 unread emails, five action items, people sending you Slacks and Teams, messages, welcome to the company, you are like, where do I

even start?

If you're working at a tech company, the odds are pretty good that they have an onboarding plan for you and it's in an email somewhere.

Or you're at that meeting just came out of and they're going to say, when you're done with this meeting, do this thing.

Maybe it's log into your email to see if you can get into it correctly.

Maybe you don't have to go through those 20 emails just to see, can you see them or not?

Can you log into Slack or Teams or whatever it is and actually see people's messages?

Are you in the right channels?

If not, how do you get into them?

If your onboarding is in person, you might even be meeting people from your team on this first day, or in a couple of days after that.

Every company is different as far as when you actually meet your team members in person.

The point of all of that is that within your first day or so, you should be getting some sort of communication from your manager.

Maybe they see you in person and say hello.

Maybe it's a Slack message or a Teams message or an email or a phone call, or any number of different things.

Your manager in those first couple of days, in the first month, the first 90 days, they are there for you.

It is their job to be there for you and make sure that you're onboarding your first 90 days beyond, are super successful, are low stress for you, low anxiety, and that you have

what you need.

to be successful and be at ease and feel really well equipped to take on the rest of the things that you're going to do.

You might be saying to yourself, but Shea I'm so worried about asking my manager a bazillion, jillion questions since my first day or two.

It is your responsibility as a new person at a company to ask a lot of questions.

You are not psychic, either.

You are not going to know the answer to certain things.

And sure, there's probably documentation sites out there.

There's Google Docs.

There's Slack threads There's a million different things that you could spend the time looking into to

answer those questions for yourself, but you don't know they exist.

And maybe there are onboarding materials that talk about those things.

Maybe they say, if you have questions, look at our knowledge base, Wiki, Google Drive, to answer those sorts of questions.

And they might say, if you have a question about benefits, insurance, 401k, go to this site.

If you have questions about your work laptop, a work phone,

your desk, go to this page.

Your onboarding process should cover that.

And if it doesn't, if you still have questions, ask your manager or ask the onboarding team itself.

Almost every tech company these days has employees whose sole business, whose sole job responsibility is onboarding, bringing more people onto the company and ensuring that they

know where to go, they have the tools they need to be successful and have the right mental state of mind, that right happiness, be able to go forth and do the jobs they were hired

to do.

If you have one question, two questions, 20 questions, those are the people that you are more than appropriate to ask those questions to.

It is their job, to answer those questions for you.

And there will be no question too big or too small.

They might not know the answer to every question instantaneously.

They may also defer questions to your manager, to another team, to a different support ticket channel.

But they are going to be

your best point of contact if your manager isn't around, if you haven't met them yet, if they haven't reached out to you.

The onboarding team is going to be the best team, to help you with this.

A week or two, and sometimes your first month, is going to be chock full of lots of events that have been scheduled for you that you should, or at least are strongly recommended to

attend to answer a lot of those questions up front.

How do I set up my 401k?

How do I determine benefits elections from my medical insurance?

How do I figure out all this reimbursement for travel if I came in person?

A lot of times, the onboarding team will also have general open office hours where anybody can come in and ask any question.

That's a more appropriate place for you to ask questions that maybe don't fit neatly into different buckets for events that have already been scheduled.

You may also be wondering, is the onboarding team HR?

If I talk to them about my neurodiversity, are they going to then tell everybody else that I'm neurodivergent?

the onboarding team is not going to go telling everybody that you're neurodivergent.

It doesn't work that way.

And that is a private thing that you may or may not choose to tell them.

If you choose to say to your onboarding team, hey, onboarding team, I have...

autism and I struggle in very loud environments.

Is it okay if I sit in this part of the room so it's a little bit easier for me to see you and understand you and not worry about the lights or the sounds?

They may say, sure, here's a seat for you right here.

Or they might say, we want to be able to help you, we can't, but here's an alternative.

Now let's say you are past your first couple of onboarding meetings and it's just you and your manager.

This is your first one-on-one meeting with just the two of you and that's it.

The subject of self-disclosure is an entirely separate topic that could go for hours and hours and hours and I will have a couple episodes on that whole idea.

For the purposes of this episode, it is entirely up to you if you think that self-disclosing neurodiversity is in the best interests of you, the person who's

neurodivergent, and your manager, the person whose job it is to help you and support you.

If you have been going over the past couple of days or the current day and you are immediately having some red flags go off to say, I need to have some sort of adjustment to

this, I need to have conversation about this, or something is going on that you need an outlet for support for, then it is worth considering telling them.

you have to come prepared with what does that mean to the manager, to the team?

What should they expect?

What kind of support do you need?

What might be different about the way that you interact with the team or the manager because of this?

And overall, what sort of support do you need from your manager and from your team to really be able to be successful?

you might not know the answer to that question on day one.

You might not know the answer to that question on week one or month one or heck, year one.

The answer to that question really varies and that depends on how you go about doing your job.

Recognizing things that maybe don't work, that you don't know are problematic until weeks or months into your time there that you're like, this is kind of problematic.

Maybe I should talk to somebody about this or this setup, this thing really helped me do my work better.

I want to hold on to this and make it a permanent part of how I do my work, how I do my job.

If you know on day one or week one, whenever your first meeting with your manager is, that there is something that you really need help with, you need to communicate, you need

support in, it's worth discussing it with them to build that communication and the foundation for what could come from that.

You may not necessarily know how to communicate this to your manager.

You might not know who else to turn to within your company.

You just joined, you're pretty new, and don't know where to start.

This is where the idea of an ERG, a BRG, or a group, or a club about disability or neurodiversity come into play.

An ERG is an employee resource group.

Different companies call it different things.

Sometimes it's a business resource group.

There's lots of different acronyms for it, but they all represent the same idea.

It is a group of people who come together based off of a shared identity and a shared purpose.

Lots of companies have ERGs for people of color, for women, members of the LGBTQ community, military veterans, Disability is often a space within which an ERG tends to

form itself around.

And even bigger companies might have an ERG for disability and one for neurodiversity.

Every company is different.

So I don't know what it's going to look like for every single company out there.

Many companies have an ERG on at least disability, which can include neurodiversity under the umbrella, but not always.

Maybe they don't have an ERG.

Maybe they have a Slack channel, an email list, a newsletter, an internal group, It is almost certain that big companies will have some shared space, some community forum within

which you can find peer mentorship, support, friendship,

camaraderie for whatever it is that's going on that you need to communicate.

Some of these ERGs or groups might also have mentorship systems, buddy systems.

You might get a chance to talk with somebody else from a different part of the company who's been exactly where you have been in your position, in your shoes, and can help you

think around all of the problems that you're having because they did just that maybe nine or 10 months ago.

So it's all pretty recent and fresh for them.

finding people within my community, within my company,

that have gone through similar things as I and can relate and empathize with them, that gives me the greatest sense of security and comfort within the organization.

And most of the companies that I've been at have had some sort of community on disability within which I could meet other people, talk to them, share experiences, and all under

privacy and not worry about they're going to stay anything to anybody else.

They're there to help you.

They're there to support you.

And they, as much as you, want you to feel like you belong with this new company and really feel like you can figure this out and you've got it under control.

On the subject of mentorship programs, lots of companies will also have onboarding buddies or new hire mentors just for you.

They might be something that you are automatically enrolled in, whether you want to or not.

They might be something that you have to opt into and you have to specify you want to be a part of.

And there might also be additional separate programs on top of the onboarding program that you can get involved in depending on when you join, depending on the ERGs.

and depending on other factors.

If you are the type of person who wants to ask people, real people who work at the company, questions.

Those sorts of programs are the best ways to have questions answered in a way that doesn't go through the onboarding team, doesn't go for your manager, doesn't go for HR.

They're just there to answer your questions.

And those questions can be simple, like, how do I set this up on my computer?

How do I set up a code editor or an email client?

They can be more complex, like, how do you think about...

getting promoted or how do you think about moving within the company to a different team?

Every mentorship program is a little bit different.

They operate differently, they have different guidelines, different lengths, different reading frequencies, but those mentorship programs are about you, the mentee.

You get as much out of them as you put into it as you make time for them.

If those are the sorts of things that really help you feel in control and feel more stable, then go after them.

It's not for everybody, but in my opinion, I found that being able to talk to

real people at the company who don't necessarily work within HR but instead work on part of the product or part of the actual company.

They really give me a lot of insight into the day to day, especially if they're in a similar position to me, like a software engineer.

As you're going through your first day, your first week, remember to take breaks.

If you're working from home, make sure you go for a walk outside, play with your pets, walk the dog, give your cats some pets or feed your lizards, whatever it is, make sure you

have a chance to unplug for a little bit and relax.

You're going to be getting through a lot of meetings, a lot of the things during the day and it's okay to take a break.

It's okay to sign off for 30 minutes and just

relax and take a deep breath.

Make sure you're drinking water, coffee, eating, whatever is going to give you energy and keep that level up as you're taking a lot of information, a lot of new things in.

If you're thinking to yourself, Shea, this is a lot of information to throw at me.

Where do I even begin with processing all these things?

Don't worry, it is a lot.

And I'm not going to sit here and say it's not a lot or it's no big deal because this can be a big deal.

Maybe this is your first job.

Maybe you've made a career change.

Maybe so many other things.

There's so many maybes, so many variations where you have the ability to take on more stress than you have to.

But what I'm going to say is be kind to yourself.

Be proud of yourself.

You worked very hard to get to this point.

Maybe you've had tens or hundreds of thousands of interviews and you have now made it to the first day of your new job.

That's something to be proud of.

Take a moment to reflect and realize that you've made it to this point in time.

Whether you've helped you work very hard for it, you didn't work hard for it, or you just want something to be proud of.

The first day and the first week are going to seem like a lot.

And they are a lot.

They're going to have a lot of things thrown at you.

And the more time that passes, the more you'll start to fall into routines.

You'll figure out where things are in the office that you'd like to do.

Or you'll find those Slack or Teams channels with people who engage in the same interests or have a similar background to you.

If you work from home, maybe you have found a channel for people who are in your area or in your state to do meetups in or do

co-working sessions if you like doing that.

Maybe you did end up telling your manager that you were autistic to avoid having your desk situated somewhere where it's very noisy or very bright or has something else going on

that distracts you.

No matter what your first day or your first week look like, there's going to be a lot of things that happen.

You're in control of a lot of it.

And the biggest thing you can do to yourself is to be kind, take things as they come, and ask for help.

What's going through your brain might be very different or very similar to the person sitting to the right of you, sitting to the left of you, who's next to you in the gallery

of Zoom videos that are going on.

And it's okay to ask for help.

It's okay to say, I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you.

Can you repeat that?

Or to send an email or a Slack to clarify a question.

the first couple days are about you and getting you really up to speed.

So ask for what you need.