How can we support neurodiverse colleagues without creating division?
By Jo Faragher on 6 May 2021
It’s estimated that around one in seven of the population in the UK is neurodiverse, but according to a survey by the Institute of Leadership and Management last year, 50% of employers would not take on someone who had a neurodivergent condition. So while more and more organisations are beginning to see neurodiversity as a key strand of their inclusion efforts, there seems to be a gap between intention and action.
Neurodiversity itself includes a range of conditions, including Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). So when businesses are looking at how they can better accommodate individuals who have one or more of these conditions, it can be difficult to know where to start. Research by Cranfield University recently revealed that neurodiverse people fear joining organisations due to ‘stereotype threat’, in that they have an assumption of what that organisation will be like but also fear revealing their difference because of a potential threat of themselves being stereotyped.
“A continuing issue is that recruitment is largely geared toward the neurotypical,” explains Dr Robby Allen, course director in management and leadership at Cranfield. “The workplace is constantly changing and evolving and although managing diversity is a significant challenge it requires informed knowledge and skill. Without it there is going to be a continued failure to recognise the strategic and competitive value of differences. Sometimes recruiters are too subtle in how they approach neurodiversity – this does not work as well as being explicit. They can be clearer on their commitment, not just in meeting the requirements of law but truly recruiting those best suited to a role.”
Creating division
There is also a danger of creating a dichotomy in the workplace between those who are considered neurotypical and those who are neurodivergent, rather than accepting that there is a wide spectrum of human cognition and experience. “If you say someone is neurodivergent you have to say someone else is neurotypical,” says Atif Choudhury of Diversity & Ability. “You might not know anything about that person, and doing so changes someone’s orientation. It’s not good or bad, it’s just human experience.” There may be many reasons why some employees do not even have a diagnosis due to cultural issues or access to the right services, he adds. “Neurodiversity role models tend to be very white and middle class, there’s rarely an intersectional position on this, which can create an access barrier.”
Adjustments organisations can make in the workplace that avoid creating this division tend to be “the ones that make life easier for other people anyway”, according to Anne Cockayne, senior lecturer at Nottingham Business School and an expert in neurodiverse inclusion programmes. She advises: “This could be giving plenty of notice about changes, making instructions clear, for example. Or tension might come where someone in a busy office wants the lights dimmed. It’s the marking out we need to be careful about – people don’t want to be labelled as needing special treatment.” Dr Allen at Cranfield agrees: “Our work has established that the use of the current reasonable adjustment concept is problematic because of the complexity of the process and a lack of trust by both those who request and those who provide the reasonable adjustment,” he says. “My colleague Tamsin Priscott coined the term ‘reasonable manager’ as an alternative to reasonable adjustment. Our research points to a number of attributes that assist the neurodiverse in creating an environment that encourages openness and declarations and not making assumptions about ability feature prominently.”
But while there are risks associated with creating a division between those who are neurodiverse and those who aren’t through targeted initiatives, it’s also worth bearing in mind that difference can be empowering. Dr Allen adds: “An interesting aspect is how this issue is seen by the neurodiverse themselves. Some people describe the word as liberating, they see their neurodiversity as something that makes them stand apart, something that they can own and be proud of to celebrate their difference. For those people they are happy that it acts as some divide; their difference can be empowering and inspiring.” Choudury takes a similar view: “There are members of the neurodiverse community who feel safe within those labels. Perhaps they’ve been abused physically or verbally and the label creates separation between them and those people – it’s way more complex than simply having a label applied to someone.”
Removing barriers
Aidan Healy, CEO of neurodiversity consultancy Lexxic, argues that it’s important for organisations to focus on barriers rather than individual conditions. “Workplace adjustments can be very effective at removing barriers in someone’s day-to-day job. But what they won’t do is remove other barriers, such as a line manager’s attitude, comments the individual may receive from colleagues, their perception of how inclusive the organisation is or how they experience recruitment and promotion policies,” he explains. “There may also be hidden conditions that employees choose not to disclose but those people face the same barriers. It’s not about ‘let’s find all the people with a dyslexia diagnosis and give them a certain adjustment’, it’s about barriers.” One example is the way businesses have approached working from home during the pandemic, he adds. “Someone on the autism spectrum who has sensory sensitivities might have found a commute into London overwhelming but often the conversation around working from home is limited to people with certain disabilities or situations. It took a pandemic to remove that barrier but organisations are now seeing they can approach this in different ways. If you only give a certain set of people a series of adjustments, you won’t be an inclusive organisation.”
Shifting the mindset into one of how removing these barriers will support any challenges the organisation is having, rather than ‘fixing’ problems certain employees may be having, can help with impact. “As a D&I leader you’re trying to solve an organisational challenge, so we try to translate that moral argument into a solution,” Healy concludes. “Rather than saying our neurodiverse people are unhappy so let’s spend more, shift it into ‘we have a challenge with retention or performance and here’s how our neurodiverse colleagues help that.”
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