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Earlier this year, we invited the CEO of Differing Minds, an organisation that helps workplaces become neuroinclusive, to be a guest on one of our neurodiversity webinars. During the webinar, Jess Meredith and our Head of People Celine Crawford explored the different ways employers can offer support for neurodiverse employees and create a genuinely neuroinclusive workplace culture that allows all minds to flourish.

We've put together this transcript from the webinar so any employers or HR professionals who could not attend don't miss out on Jess' invaluable insights - We hope find it helpful.

Introduction to neurodiversity in the workplace

Q: What is neurodiversity?

A: Yeah, good place to start always. So, I think there's a lot of misconceptions around the term and it is sometimes viewed as being quite complex. But in reality, what we're talking about is quite simply the diversity of our brains.

We all have unique brains, just like we have unique fingerprints. No two are the same. And what neurodiversity is saying is that that is a fact.

So it's not that somebody has neurodiversity, which is what a lot of people kind when we're talking about embracing neurodiversity. We are talking about embracing everybody and regardless of their brain type and their neurology.

But what's really important to understand, especially for the point in time we're at the moment in society, is that whilst I would love us to work towards a time where everybody's brain is equally valued, understood, accepted, embraced, we're not quite there yet.

So for the majority of people, in terms of how they communicate, process information, experience the sensory world, a number of different traits and ways of being - they're fundamentally similar. And that's the majority of the population.

But then we have a smaller group of people whose brains are different when you think about how we experience the world. And those are people who might be identified as being autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxic, have Tourette's syndrome, OCD, bipolar, I could go on. And there's a lot of complexity around the language. There's a lot of nuance around the language, but for the purposes of today, I will call those people neurodivergent people.

So those people who think differently and fit in the neuro minority.

And then for the rest of the population, the neuromajority, I use the term neurotypical. But some people, rather than neurodivergent, would describe people as neurodiverse or neurodistinct, neurospicy. There's lots of different terms!

So basically when we're talking about neurodiversity, we're talking about everybody. But it's useful to categorise, we love categories as a society, into those people who think and experience the world more typically, neurotypical people, and then that smaller group, as you mentioned, not actually that small, but up to 20 percent of people, neurodivergent people who are experiencing things in different way.

How to accommodate neurodiverse employees

Q: What changes can HR make tomorrow to better accommodate neurodiverse people?

A: I think the first thing that organisations should do is have some kind of statement of intent or policy.

Policy always sounds a little bit too structured and difficult, and people get worried about what to put in it. Really, you just want to create a statement of intent that says, “we want to be a neuro inclusive organisation. We're going on our journey. These are some of the things that we might want to do, but right now, what we're trying to get across is that we care,” and you want to push that out internally so people know.

You might want to ask people what their experiences are. You might want to ask people what ideas that they've got, because the best place of finding all of that is within your organisation itself.

The other thing is that neurodiversity and being neuroinclusive will take a long time, right? You can never be a hundred percent neuroinclusive because it's an ongoing journey. But there's two areas that I talk about a lot because I think it's so fundamental to how we work together.

If you crack these two things, you're almost halfway there, and that's running meetings and communicating because we have so many meetings in businesses that if we do those in a neuroinclusive way, that's half of people's day often, if not more. And then if we start to communicate people with people in a neuroinclusive way, that can be incredibly powerful as well.

Q: How can you ensure a meeting is neuroinclusive?

A: When we think about neuroinclusive meetings, often we just don't realise that we run meetings in a way that don't work for neurodivergent people. So things like making sure we're really clear about the expectations in a meeting, the format of a meeting, why we're there, what's expected from somebody. Because for a lot of neurodivergent people, specifically autistic people, but not only autistic people, there's a real need for clarity and expectations to be set. And in the absence of that, it can be really anxiety inducing. Something as simple as not putting a purpose or agenda into a meeting invite so that they don't really know what it's going to be about.

They don't know if they're going to need to contribute or what's going to be discussed. It can be so anxiety inducing that they might not go to that meeting. They might go and then not be able to contribute particularly well. ‍

Communicate upfront what the meeting is going to be about, and what will be needed from those attending. It can literally be purpose, generate ideas about X, agenda, introduction, idea generation, closing next steps. Then everybody knows what to expect.

Ask people how they want to be able to contribute to that meeting. Some people will really want to just, if it's a virtual meeting, come off mute, share their opinion. Some people might want to raise a hand so that they know that they're going to be asked. Some people might want to put things in the chat. There's lots of things like that. So have a lot more thoughts and ideas in your inclusive meetings, but in general, if you want to try to get something right, look at how you're running meetings is really key.

Q: What about communication? How do you communicate in a neuroinclusive way?

A: Communication is such a key part of our everyday work lives for the majority of us, whether it's communicating what somebody needs to do in a team, whether it's working together with somebody to figure something out, we're always communicating and we're so used to really just doing it in the way that works for the majority or the way that works for us, that actually understanding how others like to be communicated with and then trying to do that where possible can be, can be really, really powerful.

Simply asking people if they have communication preferences can be really useful. And so by that I mean, "if I needed to tell you something, would you prefer me to just drop by your desk and tell you? Would you prefer me to call you and tell you? Would you prefer me to write you an email and tell you?"

Because for some, again, for some autistic people, things like unexpected phone calls can be really difficult to handle, really uncomfortable, really anxiety inducing, to the point where they just won't take them. And if you don't know that about people, you might be getting really frustrated that they're not answering the phone to you. Or they might be getting really frustrated that you keep calling them and creating this anxiety, and actually that could be being done very innocently. So asking people what their preferences are, trying to talk about communication, and generally making it as clear as possible.

Try to remove as many acronyms, jargon, metaphors, colloquialisms as possible, all of these things that overcomplicate our language, because a lot of neurodivergent people need really clear, really concise, really succinct information.

So there's obviously lots to do and there's tons of quick wins actually but I think those kind of things can really help get you started and as you said, even if you're not going to get it right first time, if you're asking people and you're talking to them about why you're trying to make these changes, that can be such a huge step in the right direction.

Longer-term strategies that help maintain neurodiversity support

Q: What are the longer term support measures HR teams can implement to build a supportive workplace?

A: I think in the long term, it's much more around embedding it into the culture. It's taking that statement of intent and figuring out how we then make it happen. And I think one of the core components to this has to be training because the only way that you can really create a culture that works for everybody is by making sure that all managers, for example, understand what neurodiversity is and how to be neuroinclusive.

If you are a neurodivergent person and you share that with somebody, you need the manager on the receiving end of that to know what to say, how to work with you, to create like a plan as we talked about, and to contribute their own ideas about what could work best. I think training up people in a company is really important. And one of the challenges I see in organisations at the moment is around scaling that training or scaling neuroinclusion, because what a lot of organisations are really good at the moment is doing an introductory training session, a workshop or a talk. And so they get that conversation going within an organisation, but they sort of don't know where to go next.

Q: How do you make sure neuroinclusive practices are maintained?

A: So, at Differing Minds, it's two of the things that we are trying to do more with organisations so it doesn't become that kind of tick box, and you actually have this long term strategy for training up everybody in the organisation, creating internal expertise, making sure you have all of the kind of policies and guidance in place.

We've talked quite a lot about adjustments and things that you can do specifically to understand the individual, but also on the other side of it, it's how can we create a workplace and an environment that works for everybody from the outset.

So what can we do to make sure that if we are running an event, for example, that we have thought about those people who might need to take a break and not sit through hours and hours and hours of talks, or will need a quiet space to go to, maybe we give them a fidget toy, fidgets, focus tools, that kind of thing to use in those events. Or maybe we offer a virtual option for those people who can't be there. Whatever it might be, you're thinking about all of that at the outset, as well as having things that are adjustments for people. So I think there's the training part, there's kind of creating internal expertise and threading it through everything that we do within the culture becomes really, really important.

Q: How do you set up in-house support groups for neurodivergent people?

A: One of the really, really great ways of making an organisation neuroinclusive is to have a network. So often these networks kind of come about from individuals within organisations that want to make a change and want to share their views. And if that isn't happening naturally, I would always encourage people to create a network or ask people if they want to create an ERG, because that can be such a great hub for people who share ideas, share how it's going currently in the organisation, and it can be a bit of a voice for neurodivergent people, catalyse change, and has the capacity to actually make some of these things happen.

So I think there's lots that you can do, and if even those few things that I mentioned feel overwhelming, just really know that you can't do that overnight. I think the majority of neurodivergent people are quite realistic about how much time this is going to take to really thread through and start to embed in the culture of our society and organisations, but having a plan and showing people that that's what you're going to do can be really powerful and not expecting it to happen overnight, because what we're trying to do is change the mindsets of every single individual that works in that organisation because that's what is needed.

Sometimes the hardest thing to realise is that if we want to change the mindsets of people who have been exposed to this current narrative around neurodiversity for decades, that's not going to happen in a month. That's going to take years to unlearn all of that stuff, much like we're doing for lots of other areas of ED& I, and I think we have to be realistic about it.

Signposting neurodiversity support services

Q: How can you signpost neurodiversity support to ensure employees know where to access it?

So I think each organisation will probably have a good idea of how people find information in their own organisation, where the best place is to put them.

‍But the key thing here is, I think, to over communicate it.

It's not a case of, here are some resources, we're going to send them all out in email, and we're going to expect everybody then knows where to find them or we're going to pop them on our intranet, and then we're going to hope that people find them if they need them. You need to over communicate all the time.

‍So if you have, a reasonable adjustments policy or a neuroinclusion policy or some training materials, whatever it might be, you want to be putting that in onboarding processes so people know exactly where to find them. But as we know, when people get onboarded, they are bombarded with information, they get overwhelmed really easily. So you also want to make sure that that is then communicated out regularly to people and via different routes. So it might be that it goes via the network, if you create a network, it might be that it goes via manager training, It might be that it goes out once a year to everybody in the company.

But I think you can never communicate these things too much because for people that don’t need a reasonable adjustments policy, won't need to know where to find it. It just doesn't matter. They just won't listen to it. But if you do need it, you probably don't remember a year ago when you were onboarded where they said that that would be on the intranet, for example.

So it really is about communicating regularly and in different places.