How employers can enable neuro-inclusion without alienating neuro-typical staff

In an earlier article, the widening gap between how effectively tech employers believe they support their neurodivergent employees and individuals’ lived experience came into focus. A key point here, according to a study by vocational education and apprenticeship provider City & Guilds, is that growing levels of awareness are not enough to create true inclusion if they fail to be matched with systemic change:

Policies, training and intent are no longer enough on their own. What matters now is how work is designed, managed and experienced day-to-day…While understanding of neurodiversity has improved, capability and consistency lag. Too often, inclusion depends on individual managers, informal workarounds or siloed processes, resulting in uneven and unreliable support.

The upshot, the report says, is that:

• Even in organizations described as supportive, only two in five neurodivergent employees experience good, ongoing help, with onboarding proving a particularly important part of the puzzle
• Support is often front-loaded and then fades away, with fewer than two in five neurodivergent employees receiving sustained support. This implies a lack of planned, longer-term support pathways, which includes follow-up reviews
• Nearly a quarter of people only received limited guidance or informal help, such as a one-off conversation or adjustment. But for many, this is not enough to prevent later performance and wellbeing issues
• About one in eight workers receive no support at all, even after asking for help or disclosing their diagnosis
• Better, ongoing support seems more readily available for certain groups, such as managers, white employees, and people who are higher paid or have been at an organization for a long time. For those in frontline and lower status roles, younger and older workers, and some minority groups, support is more likely to be inconsistent or non-existent. This scenario points to structural, rather than individual, issues
• Rather than there being a clear, repeatable process for providing adjustments, access is heavily dependent on individual managers or HR professionals.

So, what can employers do about this unsatisfactory situation?

Fixing processes, not people

Grant Harris is a Neuroinclusive Performance Strategist and Speaker at GTH Consulting LLC. He believes it is important to focus on fixing “the process, not people, as this is a “systemic issue”:

You need to look at processes, such as recruitment, onboarding, and performance management and scrutinize them through a human performance-centred lens. It’s about how you set things up for all kinds of minds to perform at their best. So, if you’re thinking about recruitment, look at how job descriptions are written and ask if people are likely to see themselves in the messaging. It builds brand trust in how you show up.

But to re-vamp processes effectively, Harris warns, it is imperative to include neurodiverse people in doing so:

A common mantra in the neurodiverse community is ‘nothing about us without us’. So, ask people their opinion and give them a place and space at the table. It’s simple, but not always easy. But if you involve the people you’re trying to serve, things will be that much better.

To “remove friction” at the individual level, it is also vital for line managers and leaders to ask their employees open questions in order to understand how to best support them. These might include ‘how do you work best?’ and ‘when are you at your most energized and productive?’. As Harris points out:

Those simple questions can open the door for discussion without the need for disclosure as they don’t require it. Many people are afraid to disclose, but they’d be happy to say, ‘this is how I show up, and I work best under these conditions’. So, asking more questions can open an aperture. By meeting someone halfway, you reduce friction and move into a flow state, and if you do it regularly, it becomes part of the culture.

Ultimately though, Harris believes the secret to success is engaging in “universal design”, where the underlying principle is ‘if one brain thrives, everyone’s do”:

Universal design is about how to show up for all cultural and performance norms rather than the faulty approach of trying to personalize existing systems. So, it’s about the tree existing for everyone but each individual picking the type of fruit they need. It’s also about moving from friction to flow. A large part of where systems fail, for example, is in communication as it’s often not clear, concise, or consistent. So, messages should be in plain language, with no corporate jargon. Communications should have a standard cadence and come in consistent but multiple formats that are digestible to accommodate the different ways people synthesize information. This kind of approach isn’t just for neurodivergent people. It’s about better communications for everyone.

Ensuring everyone works from the same playbook

Sara Lobkovich, Founder of OKR coaching and strategy consultancy the Red Currant Collective and Author of ‘You Are a Strategist’, agrees. Another useful consideration in this context, she believes, is to take an “operational scaffolding” approach. This means that “everyone is working from the same playbook”:

It’s about creating an operational system that makes information more accessible to everyone to help fill in the heuristic gaps that disproportionately affect neurodivergent people. These are the instructions that neuro-typical people can guess at or have the confidence to take a stab at and get feedback on. But many neurodiverse people don’t work that way and so may be paralyzed by a blank page or be less likely to give something a go.

The problem, Lobkovich points out, is that:

There are many assumptions made about what people know, so it helps to write practices down. You can’t document everything but you can clarify the important parts. This could include writing a one-page organizational strategy that shows the company’s vision, focus, and important commitments, mandatory goals etc. It also takes very little work to write down what’s expected at a company, team and individual level rather than have people spend cognitive capability trying to understand.

Other useful tactics here also include giving employees formulas, visual images of workflows, frameworks, and step-by-step instructions to help fill in the gaps. A further consideration is making an explicit distinction between “mandatory goals” and “stretch learning goals”, Lobkovich says:It creates a workplace where there’s clarity on whether you need to be correct or curious. This is especially important in tech, where there’s a lot of use of plans and committed goals, but there are also areas where you need to have the psychological safety to be curious so as to enable innovation.

What can help too is if line managers make what are known in the US as ‘adjustments’ - or ‘accommodations’ in the UK - rather than the focus simply on fulfilling legally mandated requirements. Harris explains:

Adjustments [in the US sense] are informal and can be introduced faster and more effectively than an extended accommodation process. This places a burden on employees to ask their employer for support, but many aren’t sure what they need and find it difficult to ask due to the bias and stigma they could face. But an adjustment could be as simple as appreciating that an 8am standup meeting isn’t good for everyone’s circadian rhythms, so pushing it back half an hour. Also, the tech sector tends to be camera-heavy, which can contribute to people burning out. So, it could help if they’re allowed to keep their camera off in big, company-wide meetings but on during team meetings, for example.

My take

It is clear that while may tech companies may have been patting themselves on the back about how neuro-inclusive they are, the lived experience of neurodivergent employees is not living up to the hype. If employers are serious about tackling structural exclusion though, the concept of universal design is definitely worth considering. It offers considerable benefits over simply making legal accommodations (US) and policy changes, which clearly are not working either consistently or effectively.