Neurodiversity awareness and guidance for workplace and careers have proliferated since the pandemic and it is getting quite confusing. We seem to have fallen into a pattern where all roads lead to some sort of tick list or “toolkit” and resulting in extra demands on managers and human resources with seemingly few benefits for neurodivergent employees (and potential employees).
Research from Birkbeck, University of London in 2024 surveyed 1400 neurodivergent employees, employers and neurotypical colleagues and reported an increase in neurodiversity policies but a decrease in wellbeing from the 2023 survey. In some areas we’ve swung from one extreme to the other – from over-policing communication styles to thinking that a reasonable adjustment means allowing people to rudely shout in meetings. Unless we start naming and exploring the specific difficulties employers have in implementing neuroinclusive practices we will default to the status quo of the neuronormative workplace. It is possible to slow walk inclusion – some awareness training, a company event, an employee resource group with no budget or influence. The box can be ticked without any real change.
Over the past decades that this has been my specialism, I have seen the employer appetites for neuro-inclusion evolve in stages.
A Timeline Of Neurodiversity At Work
1990s – 2017: Not interested, don’t care. There was a time when no one knew the word neurodiversity, when it was only explored as a concept in online forums. It was not something we talked about in terms of disability, let alone talent.
2016ish – 2020: Interested but tentative. Employers became curious about the potential of neurodivergent people, but application was limited. The technology industry were promoting their Autism at Work programs as strategic wins to recruit an in-demand skill, however participation was small and the results often didn’t match the marketing claims.
2020 – now: the Neurodiversity Gold Rush. Employers reported an enthusiastic understanding of the potential of neuroinclusion but expressed a lot of confusion about how to make it work. The superpower narrative suggested that neurodivergent people were magical work fairies who could do difficult tasks faster than anyone else. Awareness training proliferated but we retained dependency on expensive diagnosis as a route to change. Remote work became common, which actually hasn’t turned out to be ideal from a wellbeing, communication and talent management perspective.
Next: A backlash? Misinformation has proliferated and the conversation has become quite adversarial. Managers are seen as the de facto bad guys who “should do more”, neurodivergent employees are positioned as needy and helpless, and colleagues are confused by what they see as injustice in distribution of scarce resources. A lack of clinicians mean that people are self-diagnosing via social media without gaining insight into alternative explanations and self-led solutions for difficulties.
Chasing High Performance
The point of Neurodiversity at Work was to open up workplaces to higher participation and thriving. It was a critique on conventions which needed to change such as placing irrelevant requirements into job design, such as team influencing skills for data analysts, or high levels of spelling and grammar in an era of technological adaptation. It was about ambition, not dependency.
Accessibility and productivity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, productivity is the result of accessibility. Organizational Psychology has repeatedly shown, over a hundred years, that good performance is the naturally occurring result of strong employee engagement and human-centred ergonomics. We’ve dangled a carrot of high performance from an untapped talented workforce but failed to provide managers and HR practitioners with the substantive changes needed to enact the promise. Instead, neuro-inclusion manifests like an increasing set of demands with no shift in the structure of work. This is not sustainable and it is not accessible.
The adaptations that neurodivergent people need will improve work for all. All of us benefit from considering how we concentrate and working from conducive environments. The practical employer-focused roadmaps provided Dr Praslova and Lyric Rivera in their books, The Canary Code and Workplace Neurodiversity Rising spell this out. Many of us benefit from technology to support grammar and spelling. Better specified job descriptions without meaningless corporate-speak make all our lives easier. Human-centred design of balanced teams is accessible for all. Work sample testing has always been a better predictor of job success than interviews and no one needs extra time when the method of assessment matches the skills needed for the role.
Accessibility is the route to human potential not a barrier in the way. We’ve still got Aces in our deck. Neurodiversity as a tick list may be an overplayed hand, but the true message of the movement is very much underplayed so far.