Let’s Talk About Tom,
Your Colleague You Haven’t Heard About.
Perspectives on today’s reality of hearing loss in the workplace, after 12 months and 150 interviews of “Toms” by @TranscenseLabs. Sign up for the mailing list
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If you’ve watched some of NBC’s The Office and HBO’s Silicon Valley, you can probably imagine your current work environment somewhere in between these two parody shows.
Workplaces are these unique-in-their-kind places where relationships are built upon odd circumstances and remnants of an often seemingly disorganized culture.
These places have their invariants. Some red-bull addicts will have immediately felt familiar with the quirkiness of the Pied Piper guys, while Steve Carrell’s fans might be accustomed to the political fights depicted in the show. In general, once you’ve worked in a number of different places, you get pretty good at noticing during your first day of work who will be the funny guy and who will be the hard-worker-who-wants-the-boss-position.
Enter Tom
But there’s one guy whose status has remarkably stayed the same over the last 40 years, and whose story is not told in these shows. He often goes unnoticed in a bigger environment; he’s even nearly invisible, and will probably stay this way until you have a personal interaction with him. I bet you’ll be scratching your head, trying to figure out why he didn’t look at you when you called him.
“Him? That is Tom, the guy with hearing problems” as some of his colleagues might say.
I’ve actually met 150 versions of “Toms” over the past 12 months, who, from all genders, ages, ethnicities and degrees of hearing loss, face the same kind of challenges at work today. Guess what? Their frustrations are beyond what you can imagine.
Here are 3 daily frustrations that you’ll help them get rid of.
#3 is by far the most important.
1. Tom will probably not make the first step. So do it, and be simple and open.
Tom is not different than you and me. But each time he communicates with someone who doesn’t know that he is deaf or hard-of-hearing, he will have to explain it, over and over again. Sometimes he will not mind it at all. Often, especially if his hearing problems are recent, that will quickly become a repeated frustration.
So save him time! If you hear about someone like Tom, don’t wait to go up to him and introduce yourself. Make sure you checked a few general tips to get the interaction right (most important being: talk normally — not too slowly, in front of the person, be flexible to the way Tom wants to communicate) and you’ll discover, I’m sure, a great person behind. Perhaps the difference of cultures will spin out a great conversation and a sound relationship at work.
2. Tom may miss important facts people take for granted. Share these with him. Yes, even gossip.
Tom will probably not attend all the social events of the company. Networking, for example, is something you may enjoy a lot, but it’s hard, very hard for people with hearing loss. A room full of people happily chatting about the latest achievements of their kids, or the week they spent in Zanzibar is actually incredibly noisy. It also often means “Help! Run from here” for people with hearing difficulties (Nothing against Zanzibar, it is actually great).
It is the same thing for dinners in restaurant, lunches in parks or after-work parties in noisy nightclubs. Basically a lot — if not most of, social situations are hard to cope with. So be mindful of this, and share with Tom some funny gossip you learned about Abby or Sean from Sales. Share with him a big update, or a funny fact when you see him in the elevator, or the cafeteria line. Actually you should try from time to time to have lunch with him, in a quiet place. Lots of Toms I met eat alone at their desk because of their situation, and it sucks. Big time!
3. Tom is gonna have a (very) difficult time attending meetings, and will probably try to avoid them.
Tom has some superpowers. Believe me, he really does.
He’s able to follow things what you said, by reading your lips.
Try this. Yes, you! Get up, put your headphones on (no, not the Beats — please!), and turn the volume up. Now, go to a colleague and say: “I’m running a small social experiment. Can you just talk to me about your day so far for a minute?” (Careful, with music on, you sound loud). Try to understand what the guy says by reading his lips.
This is what a friend of mine has read from my lips: “Mate let’s cup blue with chair. Thunder has postponed it, but the cat entered”
Doesn’t make any sense, right? Actually reading lips is really, really hard. Despite year-long trainings for that, you only can hope to get 20–30% better. What’s even worse? In English, only 30% can be distinguished with lipreading. Remember T9 for phones? Well, it’s a little bit like that, but with many, many more possibilities. Like a T144, and it’s called visemes.
So Tom is invited to a lot of meetings (especially if your company is more like The Office than Silicon Valley) and he now needs to be more than expert at reading lips. He needs a 10th dan in karate / predictive / multitasking / lipreading because he has to:
- read lips of people on each side of him, in front of him, and sometimes people he barely sees behind their laptops (karate skill)
- anticipate who will talk next — so he doesn’t miss the first few words of the answer, while desperately searching for the current speaker (predictive skill)
- keep this pace and focus as long as the meeting last, meaning that if he wants to take notes, he has to be really gifted (I mentioned superpowers, remember? this is extreme multi-tasking, for sure)
And this is only in “good conditions”, when people actually take turns, shave their facial hair, and the room is well lit.
You see the problem now? Tom is smart. He is probably going to skip the meeting instead of waisting his time and his calm. It also means he’s not going to be able to present what he’s doing, and keep up with how things are moving. This is frustrating.
Meeting notes? Yes, of course. When it’s actually done properly. Solutions for that? The traditional one is to hire an interpreter ($80/hour) or a captioner ($120/hour). For every meeting? Don’t have the budget, nope!
So… keep calm, and avoid meetings?
Well, there are two things you can do now.
- If you’re in Tom’s team, and invited to the meeting, step up and take valuable notes during the meeting on something like Google Docs. It’s hard, I won’t lie, but you should try to see if it works.
- If you’re not in his team, well, show this article to his colleagues, and help to find who would write down these notes.
Wait a minute? You’re telling me that there’s nothing we can do about it except write manually? In 2014?
OK, there is actually another solution.
Remember I told you I’ve been talking to MANY Toms over the past year? I actually also grew up in a Deaf family and, with my co-founders (one deaf, one hearing), I’ve been working on a solution for all the Toms of the world. There are a lot of them. In fact, believe the WHO or not, but there are 360M Toms.
So we developed a technology for them.
It’s called Transcense.
Transcense provides deaf and hard of hearing people the autonomy they need in their meetings. It’s mobile, it’s using state-of-the-art technologies, and it’s solving Tom’s problem.
We’re testing it in private beta right now, and you can do two things to jump among the first on our list:
- First, get on the list.
- Then, recommend this post here, so more Toms (remember, there are a lot) and their friends can benefit from it.
If you are a fan of TV shows, there’s an excellent one where you can see a version of our Tom. More exactly, Katie Leclerc, starring Daphne in Switched at Birth and it’s great. Say congrats to her because now you know how hard it must have been to get where she is now.
During our research we found also great places where Deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people work really well together, but for the sake of your time, I’ll talk about it in another article.
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