More people than ever are being diagnosed with autism, ADHD or other neurotypes – and more are recognising themselves in that description mid-career. This rising awareness has caused shifts in expectations from employees, resulting in a 95% increase in employment tribunals citing neurodivergent conditions over five years.1 It is not just avoiding legal risk that is driving the need for change. Repeated studies have highlighted the potential that organisations miss when different ways of thinking are not represented in the workplace.
But whose job is it to create the required change? The honest answer is that it is everyone’s, at every level, and that’s exactly why so many neuroinclusion efforts stall. A brilliant policy means nothing if a line manager doesn’t know how to use it. A trained, confident manager can still be undone by a team culture that mocks ‘over-sharing’ in meetings. And an employee who’s expected to self-advocate their way through a system with no scaffolding underneath them will burn out doing the organisation’s job for it. Neuroinclusion has to be built into four layers at once: the organisation, the team, the manager and the individual. It isn’t a single initiative you can tick off and file away – it’s a stack and every layer depends on the one below it.
1. Organisational level: the scaffolding
This is the foundation – policies, processes and physical environment – and it’s where most organisations start, and where most stop.
Recruitment: this is often the first and most damaging filter. Standardised, high-pressure interviews reward fast verbal recall and eye contact, rather than the ability to do the job. Simple changes – sharing interview questions in advance, offering alternative ways to demonstrate skills, being explicit about what’s being assessed – widen the pool without disadvantaging anyone else.
Reasonable adjustments: these need to be a proactive, structured and iterative process, rather than a one-off, undocumented informal chat. A workplace needs an assessment or adjustments passport that travels with the employee, rather than being reinvented every time they change manager, and that protects both parties.
Physical and sensory environment: this matters more than most estates teams realise – lighting, noise, hot-desking, open-plan meeting culture. None of this needs to be expensive; quiet zones, flexibility over desk choice and genuine hybrid working options go a long way.
Training and data: one recent survey found 35% of managers lack confidence in making neurodiversity-related adjustments, and more than one-third of professionals cited a lack of staff awareness as the single biggest barrier to better support.2 Policies without training, and training without any way of checking it is landing, is the gap tribunals are increasingly finding.
2. Team level: the everyday rituals
Culture is created by small, repeated things: how a stand-up meeting runs, whether an agenda goes out in advance, whether disagreement is voiced or buried. This is the layer that’s hardest to write a policy for, and arguably the one that matters most.
Teams that get this right tend to have built in a few unglamorous habits: written agendas and pre-reads as standard (not as a special favour), multiple channels for the same information (so someone who processes better in writing than in a fast-moving meeting isn’t disadvantaged), and clarity over ambiguity in how work gets allocated and reviewed. They also build structured ways of handling conflict, because direct communication styles, sensory overwhelm in tense conversations, or difficulty reading unspoken social cues can get mislabelled as ‘attitude’ or ‘not a team player’, when they are nothing of the sort. These practices don’t just help neurodivergent individuals; they support the entire team.
“JPMorgan Chase found neurodiverse teams in its Autism at Work programme were 48% faster and 92% more productive
than comparable teams”3
3. Manager/leader level: the daily interface
If the organisation builds the scaffolding, the manager is who the employee actually experiences day to day – and it’s here that good intentions most often collapse under lack of confidence or training. For example, more than one-third of managers have received no neurodiversity-related training at all.4 Alongside neurodiversity training and awareness, foundational managerial skills – such as creating psychological safety, building trust and rapport – are critical.
Recent research found that, alongside flexible working policies, psychological safety – the belief within a team that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks – was the number one determinant of wellbeing, career satisfaction and retention among neurodivergent individuals.5 That is primarily created or destroyed by leadership actions. For example, a manager can build it by inviting dissenting opinions in meetings, modelling openness about their working style and mistakes, and responding constructively to feedback.
4. Individual level: agency, not obligation
The final layer is the individual employee, who needs to be empowered to make the changes they need while balancing the needs of their team.
Job crafting can make a meaningful difference here: employees reshaping the tasks, relationships and mindset around their role so it plays to their strengths – reordering how they tackle a task list, choosing to run parallel written threads alongside verbal meetings, or reframing repetitive admin as ‘keeping the team compliant’ rather than drudgery.6
“CIPD research into UK organisations already running neuroinclusive practices found 63% reported a positive impact on employee wellbeing and 43% a positive impact on performance”7
Simple changes
Neuroinclusion can only be truly embedded where every part of the organisation is living and breathing it. While organisations have come a long way, many have still to catch up with the increased level of awareness that the past few years have brought. The employers pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the glossiest policy statement, but the ones that have created the strongest culture that allows people to be accepted, supported and empowered to do their best work.
Culture lives in the crevices and the details. What one small change could you make that might shift your culture to one in which everyone thrives?
Liv Blaney, MA Meng, MSC, PCC, QAVS is a leadership and neurodiversity coach and training facilitator. She is also the author of Neuroinclusion: A guide for managers and leaders. Liv is lead a workshop on ‘Everyday neuroinclusive leadership’ during Leadership Live 2026.
References
1 Irwin Mitchell analysis of HM Courts & Tribunals Service data, February 2026: ‘Employment tribunal cases linked to neurodiversity almost double in five years’.
2 Vinciworks survey 2026: see bit.ly/EA26VC
4 City & Guilds research, cited in Thrive Law, ‘The rise in employment tribunal claims: what every employer needs to understand right now’ (March 2026).
5 Neurodiversity in BusinessResearch Report 2023
6 Job crafting framework (task, relationship, cognitive crafting) as applied to neurodivergent employees, Specialisterne Canada, ‘The great win-win: supporting neurodivergent employees in job crafting’
