Is Neurodiversity At Work Working? Three Red Flags.

One: Adversarial Employee Relations

The UK’s employment tribunal system is becoming a barometer of workplace neurodiversity failures. Disability discrimination cases referred into the free UK conciliation service ACAS have risen by more than 40% in a year, while neurodiversity-related tribunal cases have almost doubled since 2020, suggesting that organisational disagreements about adjustment, performance and inclusion are increasingly being resolved by judges rather than managers. ACAS’s own research suggests many disputes escalate because employers and employees fundamentally disagree about the nature of the problem: employers often frame issues as performance, attendance, or conduct matters, while employees experience them as failures to recognise disability and provide reasonable adjustments. Once that gap emerges, trust breaks down and legal escalation becomes more likely.

Two: Poor Quality Advice To Employers Becomes Standard

Reviewing the workplace needs assessments that are supposed to provide advice to employers on what they should reasonably adjust, there appears to be an increasing use of templates issued by untrained staff. Businesses are cutting corners by issuing tick lists of ‘standard adjustments’, despite there being no depth of research evidence to support these other than qualified coaching programs. Recent examples reported to me anecdotally includes a Security Guard advised to work from home once a week and the seemingly ubiquitous use of the phrase “manager must give clear instructions.” Do you know any managers who intentionally give obscure instructions? The issue here is more nuanced and requires an experienced coach or assessor to get to the bottom of communication style clashes rather than issue meaningless, ironically unclear instructions.

Three: Everyone Is On The Drama Triangle

The Drama Triangle dynamic is a sign of psychological unsafety, of toxic relationships that are rupturing. In the dynamic are a victim, persecutor and rescuer, locked into a power struggle. We have assumed that the neurodivergent employee is the victim, that their mean, unclear employers are the persecutor and that the inclusion intervention will be the rescuer (be that coach, advocate, trainer or whoever). However, this dynamic is now more fluid, with many manager and human resources professionals at their wits end. Having taken the role of rescuer to avoid being the obvious persecutor, they are now exhausted from doing extra work to compensate, walking on eggshells to avoid emotional overspills, trying to explain to colleagues why they have to come to work on time and meet deadlines but their peer does not. In short, they now often feel victimised, with their employee as persecutor, holding them ransom to an assessment report which was not reasonable or workable.

Where Do We Start To Repair?

We start with the antidote to the drama triangle – and move to adult-to-adult relationships at work. Neurodivergent employees are not children and they do not need mothers at work. We are capable of growth – of overcoming timeblindness, learning emotional intelligence, developing communication skills that facilitate us to ask for the clarity we need, rather than waiting for the perfect instruction. Workplace coaches and occupational psychologists have been delivering this type of personal development and relationship support for decades – it is effective. Jannett Morgan, a neurodiversity consultant and veteran of two decades in this work, had the following comment:

“Having been caught up in this goldrush, it’s been great to see how the changing narratives include and validate the experiences of Black neurodivergent people. It’s absolutely right to focus on the systems and structures that marginalise minority groups but saviourism and protective hesitation are not the answer. The “soft skills” employers cry out for are deeply ingrained in our culture, we just don’t call them “strategies”! The idea that neurodivergent people can’t ever be punctual, manage their emotions or work in teams does them a disservice.”

Further, we need the advice given in a pinch point to balance the needs of the person, the role, and the resources in the environment. There is no one-size-fits-all for reasonableness, we cannot say that home working is a panacea nor that it should be avoided – it depends on the context. Large employers have a higher expectation of what would be reasonable costs. Safety critical environments have a lower expectation of how far they should adjust for communication clashes. It is hard to automate these decisions still, so any digital platforms and adjustment menus still need escalation points. A far more efficient approach is prevention, where we empower managers and employees to have initial conversations about improving specific skills such as self-organisation or emotional regulation on their own. We then escalate to coaching or technology, rather than waiting for an expensive assessment to point out the obvious.

To the employers out there who are still wanting to do this well, and the neurodivergent employees who still feel stigmatised at work – the current impasse is helping neither of you. We cannot achieve neuroinclusion via a battle of wills. For neurodivergent careers to thrive, we need adjustments to help us achieve the required standard so that we may grow and progress. Lowering the standard for us is not inclusive, and we could even go so far as to say it is discrimination.