Open-plan office and remote work: why sensory load affects performance

Autistic Mirror (Outside view/Surroundings, role employer)

Autistic brains do not filter background noise, movement and visual stimuli in the same way as neurotypical ones. This is due to sensory gating: a mostly unconscious filtering process that dampens recurring or irrelevant stimuli before they even reach conscious attention. In many autistic people this filter works more weakly or is calibrated differently. This means: the brain continuously processes more incoming signals, including ones neurotypical colleagues do not perceive at all. From his perspective, the quiet open-plan office may be anything but quiet.

What you perceive as "not particularly loud" contains a constant bombardment for him: keyboard sounds, breathing, movement in the corner of the eye, ventilation, changing light reflections, several people talking at once, smells. Because the pre-attentive filter does not automatically filter out these stimuli, the prefrontal cortex takes over under control, that is, consciously and with measurable energy expenditure. This process runs in parallel to the actual work task and is glucose-intensive. Imagine having to work for eight hours while actively keeping your eyes open because the reflex is missing. That is the scale of the double load.

On top of this comes monotropism: autistic attention bundles deeply into one thing instead of spreading out. The open-plan office forces constant small shifts of attention through movement, noise and social signals. Every such switch is neurologically expensive, because the entire allocation of attention has to be reorganised. Being pulled out of deep focus, even when nobody is speaking to him directly, costs him a considerable part of his working memory every time.

The exhaustion in the evening is the direct result of this constant load. This is called sensory processing fatigue: the cognitive reserve available in the morning for concentration, language, social interaction and decisions is largely used up after hours in the open-plan office. The drop in performance is not a problem of motivation or will, but a signal that the working conditions are currently creating a barrier that did not exist before.

Productive adjustments concern the environment, not him: a spatially enclosed workplace or a quiet zone that can be used regularly, hearing protection or noise-cancelling as a provided work tool, control over his own field of view (back to the wall, little movement in sight), flexibility around times when the office is less busy. This question is best asked together with him; he knows best which share of the stimuli hits him hardest.

Autistic Mirror (Outside view/Surroundings, role employer)

For many autistic people, working from home means controllable sensory input. In the office, filtering background noise, flickering light, smells, movement in the field of view and social signals of every kind runs permanently and simultaneously. This does not happen automatically in the background but costs measurable capacity, because sensory gating runs less pre-attentively in autistic processing. Pre-attentive means: the thalamus normally dampens recurring stimuli before they even reach conscious processing. If this dampening is less effective, the prefrontal cortex takes over the filtering under control. That costs glucose and attention, and it runs for the entire time she is present. What colleagues do not perceive, because it is filtered for them without effort, constantly uses up capacity for her that is then no longer available for the actual work.

On top of this comes masking: in the office, automatic autistic reactions are suppressed prefrontally so that behaviour appears unremarkable from the outside. That is a dual task alongside the actual work content and mostly runs unconsciously. Colleagues see the completed tasks, not the parallel regulation work they cost.

At home, most of both loads fall away: no uncontrollable sensory input, no constant social monitoring, no pressure to mask. The capacity used up in the office for filtering and self-regulation is now available for the actual work. The same person, the same task, a different room, a clearly different result.

On the fairness question in the team: equal treatment does not mean identical conditions but equivalent participation. A ramp does not favour wheelchair users. Working from home for an autistic colleague who demonstrably works better there is an accessible working condition. The counterpart would be the question of whether the team as a whole would benefit from clearer sensory and communicative conditions, not whether one person should get less.