A Neuro-Inclusion Policy matters because it makes an organisation’s commitment to neuro-inclusion visible. But a policy alone cannot create a neuro-inclusive workplace. What happens in practice matters, too – including the experiences of neurodivergent people who may be delivering perfectly well, while struggling with who they are expected to be at work.
I’ve just created an example Neuro-Inclusion Policy and accompanying guidance as part of The NEW E.R.A. Method®, and made them freely available for organisations to download and adapt.
So it would be slightly odd if I now told you that having a Neuro-Inclusion Policy isn’t particularly important.
It is. But it isn’t enough.
A policy tells people what an organisation intends
A good Neuro-Inclusion Policy can do some important things.
It can make an organisation’s commitment visible. It can establish principles. It can explain where people can go for support and connect neuro-inclusion with the other processes and policies that affect people’s experience of work.
It can help make clear that someone doesn’t need a diagnosis before a workplace difficulty is worth exploring.
Those things count. But there’s a danger that, once we’ve written the policy, approved it and put it somewhere people can find it, we feel as though we’ve done neuro-inclusion.
We haven’t. We’ve only written a policy.
The more important question is what happens when somebody goes to work on Monday morning.
We often look for the person who is struggling to deliver
A lot of workplace support begins when something visibly isn’t working.
Someone is missing deadlines. Their performance has changed. They’re struggling to organise their workload. They’re absent more often. Their manager has noticed a problem.
And, of course, those people may need support.
But what about the people who aren’t struggling with what they need to do?
What about the people who are struggling with who they need to be while they’re doing it?
Because I was one of them.
I wasn’t struggling to do the work
For much of my working life, nobody needed to make allowances for my ADHD in terms of what I delivered.
Nobody even knew I had ADHD – including me.
I could do the work. Often, I could do it extremely well. But perhaps what I did need was more acceptance of how I got there.
My intensity. My questioning. My need to understand the full picture before I could simply “get on with it”. My tendency to keep pulling at a thread when something didn’t make sense.
Those weren’t separate from the abilities I brought to my work. They were part of the same brain that could spot gaps, see patterns, make connections and bring clarity to complicated situations.
I understand that now, but I didn’t then. I just knew that sometimes there seemed to be nowhere for all of me to go. And, when I questioned it, perhaps the most honest answer I ever got was:
“Too intense.”
Not your work isn’t good enough. Not you aren’t delivering. Just you are too much.
That’s a very different kind of workplace difficulty. Because how do you ask for support when the problem isn’t that you can’t do your job? What adjustment do you request when what seems to be causing the difficulty is who you arewhile you’re doing that job?
And, if you don’t yet know you’re neurodivergent, how are you supposed to explain any of that?
Good performance can hide a lot
One of the reasons I think we need to be careful about how we talk about neurodiversity at work is that, if we’re only looking for those who are struggling to perform, we will miss people.
Some neurodivergent people are delivering perfectly well. They may even be delivering exceptionally well. But performance doesn’t tell us how much energy somebody is expending to make that possible.
Someone can deliver while masking. They can deliver while constantly monitoring how they speak, react, question or interact. They can deliver while trying not to ask too many questions, talk too much, challenge too much, react too strongly, misunderstand an unwritten rule or somehow get being a colleague wrong.
And they can become extremely good at doing all of that. So good that the organisation sees no problem.
The work gets done, but absence of visible failure is not the same thing as absence of friction.
Sometimes the work is acceptable while the person doing it receives a message that they need editing.
Be a little less intense. Ask fewer questions. Need less explanation. Challenge less. React less. Take up less space.
I’m not sure we can call a workplace neuro-inclusive if that’s the deal.
Diagnosis doesn’t automatically make that disappear
My ADHD diagnosis eventually gave me an explanation for things I’d spent a lifetime experiencing without one.
Finally, I could begin to understand that some of the things I’d spent years trying to correct, conceal or compensate for weren’t character flaws. They were connected to how my brain worked.
However, one of the hardest things I’ve found since diagnosis is recognising that accepting yourself doesn’t automatically mean others will find it easier to accept you.
Sometimes support can start to sound remarkably like:
Can we find some strategies that will make your ADHD less noticeable to everybody else?
And that isn’t what I hoped diagnosis would give me. After all, I didn’t get diagnosed in my fifties just to get better strategies for pretending I didn’t have ADHD!
Of course, neuro-inclusion doesn’t mean behaviour can never be questioned simply because somebody is neurodivergent. It doesn’t mean colleagues don’t affect each other, or that one person’s needs automatically outweigh everybody else’s.
But there is an enormous difference between exploring what is happening and automatically deciding that the neurodivergent person needs to become easier for everyone else to accommodate.
Sometimes the question shouldn’t be:
How can we help this person fit better?
Maybe it should be:
What are we asking them to fit into – and does it actually need to be that way?
Why a neurodiversity policy isn’t enough on its own
A Neuro-Inclusion Policy cannot contain every process, communication standard, management practice or working arrangement in an organisation. And nor should it. However, its principles have to travel beyond the document.
What happens when somebody asks for clarity?
What happens when they need to understand the reason for something before they can make sense of what they’re being asked to do?
What happens when a process makes perfect sense to the person who designed it, but not to the people expected to follow it?
What happens when someone says, “This isn’t working for me,” but can’t yet tell you what would?
What happens when a colleague’s work is excellent, but their way of communicating, thinking, questioning or interacting doesn’t fit an unwritten idea of what a “good colleague” looks like?
And what happens when a manager promises support, but the moment someone identifies what they actually need, there isn’t time, flexibility or appetite to do anything about it?
That’s where the promise of neuro-inclusion is tested.
Because there’s something particularly painful about being told that an organisation understands the problem, being encouraged to explain what would help, and then discovering that nothing is actually going to change.
People can see the problem, understand the problem, and still do nothing.
A beautifully written policy doesn’t solve that. If anything, it can make the gap between the promise and the reality more obvious.
Sometimes we need to ask a different question
So yes, I think we need to ask:
What is this person struggling with?
But I’d like us to ask another question alongside it:
What is this person having to do simply to fit into the way we’ve designed work?
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Someone may not need their actual job simplified.
They may need expectations made explicit.
They may need to understand the bigger picture.
They may need information presented differently.
They may need permission to ask the question everyone else apparently understood without worrying that they’ll be judged for asking it.
They may need a manager who doesn’t automatically interpret questioning as resistance or a different communication style as a poor attitude.
Or they may simply need to stop spending quite so much energy performing a version of themselves that makes everybody else more comfortable.
This is part of the thinking behind The NEW E.R.A. Method®.
Explore before deciding what needs to change.
Sometimes increasing clarity and removing unnecessary friction will be enough. Sometimes doing that will reveal something underneath that genuinely does need additional support. And sometimes the thing that needs adjusting isn’t the neurodivergent person at all.
Policy is the beginning of the conversation
I think a Neuro-Inclusion Policy counts because it makes a commitment visible. It creates a reference point. It can establish expectations and make it easier for somebody to say:
This is what we said would happen.
But a policy is only useful if what it says matches what happens.
The real test of a neuro-inclusive workplace isn’t whether the organisation has a Neuro-Inclusion Policy.
And it isn’t simply whether its neurodivergent people are managing to get their work done.
Some of us always were.
What we really need to uncover is how hard people have had to work at being somebody else while they do their work.
Free Neuro-Inclusion Policy & Guidance
I’ve created an example Neuro-Inclusion Policy and accompanying guidance to provide organisations with a practical starting point for developing their own approach.
They’re free to download and there’s no sign-up required.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE NEURO-INCLUSION POLICY & GUIDANCE
The resources form part of the wider work around The NEW E.R.A. Method®: The Practical Framework for Building a Neuro-Inclusive Workplace.
