Your team has a new engineer starting on Monday. In the welcome thread, your manager mentions that she is deaf, lip reads well in good light and prefers to communicate in writing when she can. You look at your calendar. Daily stand up on a video call. Planning on a call. Most decisions made in quick calls that nobody writes up. You realise you have no idea how she is going to follow any of it.
The first and most important step is simple. Ask her. Not in a group, and not with a long list of assumptions, but a short private message. What works best for you in meetings? Is there anything we do that makes it harder? People who are deaf have usually spent years working out what helps them, and what helps one person can be different for another.
Then look at the habits, because many of them will need to change. Turn on live captions in every call, and check they are actually working. Keep cameras on when you are speaking, face the light, and do not cover your mouth or eat while you talk. Say your name before you speak in a large meeting, so it is clear who to look at. And stop talking over each other. That one rule helps everyone, but it matters enormously to someone following a conversation by watching faces.
Move more of the work into writing. Share an agenda before the meeting and a short summary after it, with the decisions and who owns them. If something was settled in a quick call, post the outcome in the team channel. A written stand up, for at least some days of the week, may suit the whole team better than you expect.
Plan the informal moments too. Social chat in a noisy pub or a busy kitchen can be the hardest part of all. Suggest a quieter place sometimes, and include her in the written side conversations where so much of team life happens.
Expect to get some of it wrong at first. If she points something out, thank her and fix it, without making a show of apologising. The aim is not a perfect policy. It is a team where she never has to fight to follow what is going on.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)