Being the kind of peer autistic colleagues stay for

Retention is downstream of belonging, and belonging is downstream of daily peer signals. Here is what those signals look like, concretely, on a Tuesday afternoon.

Most exit interviews from autistic professionals don't say 'my manager was bad'. They say some version of 'I was exhausted from working around this team'. The team-around (the peer dynamics, the meeting norms, the channel culture) is what shapes whether someone stays.

Specific, small things peers can do, in roughly increasing order of effort:

• Respond to plain questions plainly. If a colleague Slacks 'do we need this by Tuesday or can it wait until Thursday?' the answer is 'Tuesday' or 'Thursday'. Not 'whenever works'.
• Default to public channels. A back-channel DM about a decision is the team's most expensive habit. Move decisions into shared channels where everyone can see them.
• Don't read silence as agreement. If you've made a decision in a meeting and the room went quiet, the room did not agree. The room got out-talked. Ask each person, in writing, what they think.
• Co-sign written norms. When your manager publishes meeting agenda norms, follow them. When your project lead asks for written status updates, write them. Norms aren't policy. They're practice.
• Name contributions specifically. 'Thanks team!' is not recognition. 'Casey caught the regression in the deploy script that would have rolled out broken: saving us an outage' is recognition.
• Be the colleague who writes things down. Meeting notes, decision logs, project briefs. Be the person whose docs other people use. This is gift work to the entire team, and it is especially generous on a neurodiverse team.
• Use the same evaluative standard for all peers. If you praise one colleague for being 'great with stakeholders' and characterize another's stakeholder work as 'a bit dry', ask yourself whether the dry one's stakeholders actually had a worse experience — or whether your peer review is style-coded.

None of this is hard. All of it is unglamorous. That's the point. Peer-level belonging is built in Tuesday-afternoon increments, not at the annual retreat.