“The feedback I am getting is that Sara works fast, delivers high quality and that she blends into the team well”, says Steffen Scheer who works as a team manager at Vattenfall IT. Unicus’ consultant Sara works with system documentation, tasks that require precision and structure and align well with the Asperger advantage.

Steffen Scheer manages a team at Vattenfall IT that is responsible for the integrations of different systems that connects the company across functions and countries. His team is made up of integration developers who write code, and DevOps engineers with focus on maintenance and operation as well as taking care of the underlying systems.

– Our team communicates with people from different countries and cultures within the company and that is something that I personally find very rewarding, says Steffen.  

When Steffen’s manager presented the opportunity to have a consultant from Unicus join his team, he decided to explore if it could be beneficial to them.

– Unicus’ consultants have IT-skills that we demand, and there was no risk in trying, so I thought it was a great opportunity. Our team needs to create sustainable integrations that remain stable over time, and diversity has a positive impact on quality. It provides us with wider perspective of both challenges and solutions.

Vattenfall has a company culture that is characterized by openness. They believe that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones, and that a key to leverage the power of diversity is to make everybody feel included. Steffen believes that you contribute to the culture every time you do anything, whether you do it consciously or not.

A fully remote onboarding process

Unicus’ consultant Sara started her assignment at Vattenfall just as the pandemic became a fact in our lives, and she was one of the first to experience a fully remote onboarding process. During a regular onboarding she would have worked in close physical proximity to her closest colleague Benny, who is also her work buddy, but instead they established a working relationship via digital tools. Sara was also introduced to the rest of the team in an online meeting.

Steffen was careful to prepare Sara before the meeting, and not to put her on the spot by asking questions she had not been prepared for. He has also tried to create an environment where Sara could integrate socially with the team at her own pace, and where she was introduced to one task at a time, allowing her to focus during the learning process.

– I am not sure if my strategy was necessary for success, but Sara has blended into the team well, I have seen that she has grown more comfortable over time, and she really delivers on the job.  

Sara was brought onboard to assist with the documentation of the integrations. Work which involves piecing together information from different sources, and that has a complexity that requires precision and structure.

– The feedback I keep getting is that Sara makes an important contribution to the team, that she works very fast and that anyone else would have needed more time to perform a particular task. I think other teams also can benefit from the chance to collaborate with Unicus and experience as great a match as we have.