It’s Not the Person, It’s the Workplace: Building Neurodivergent-Inclusive Workplaces Through Flexible and Homeworking Practices

Building neurodivergent-inclusive workplaces presents an opportunity for employers to both tap into a wider talent pool and to demonstrate that they take inclusivity seriously. In most countries, including the United Kingdom, organisations have a legal responsibility to create conditions whereby neurodivergent employees receive the support and adjustments that enable them to be successful and thrive. Despite this, many neurodivergent people continue to experience poorer employment outcomes than neurotypical people, such as being more likely to be in precarious or temporary employment. A recent study shows that the employment disadvantages experienced by neurodivergent people can be substantially mitigated by generalised and simple organisational practices such as flexible and homeworking, suggesting that putting agency in the hands of neurodivergent employees can be a significant step towards enabling and celebrating neurodiversity at work.

While neurodivergence is a broad and somewhat contested term, it typically encompasses people with a neurocognitive developmental condition such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and Tourette syndrome. In contrast, neurotypical people are individuals whose brain functions in a way that is similar to most people in society. While some neurodivergent people report challenges in navigating workplaces designed for neurotypical people, contemporary research and practice frequently draw upon a strengths-based approach that recognises that neurodivergent people have distinctive skills and capabilities that they bring to the workplace. 

In the United Kingdom, employers have a legal responsibility to make reasonable adjustments to improve the working conditions of neurodivergent people. However, to receive these adjustments, neurodivergent people are often required to make a disclosure to their employer, which can mark them out as part of a minority and position their neurodivergence as akin to disability. According to a study recently published in Human Resource Management (HRM), this may mean that much of the work of creating neurodivergent-inclusive workplaces is likely to fall under the discretion and knowledge of human resource (HR) managers and organisational leaders. 

“We knew anecdotally that neurodivergent people are finding fulfilling sustained paid employment challenging. But we didn’t really know a lot in quantitative terms about the scale of the challenge, or in particular, about what organisations can do to make employment more satisfying for neurodivergent people. The ultimate object of this study was to explore what it took to make workplaces neurodivergent-inclusive. Due to increased recognition and identification of neurodivergent conditions, the younger age group in our study were 3 times more likely to be neurodivergent than the older age group. This suggests that the proportion of neurodivergent employees is likely to at least treble in the next 15 or 20 years. This is a growing proportion of the workforce, and I think it would be, from a simple instrumental perspective, poor practice and short-sighted by employers not to want to be neurodivergent-inclusive. So what organisations are doing to make sure that they are as receptive and accommodating of talent as they can possibly be is not just a really important moral challenge and responsibility but is also a fundamental economic challenge in a skills-constrained economy”, said Professor Stephen Brammer, one of the study authors and Dean at the University of Bath School of Management.

Using a large-scale nationally representative survey of over 25,000 individuals’ employment experiences and outcomes in the United Kingdom, the study investigated how employment outcomes (such as employment status, employment uncertainty/precarity, underemployment, job tenure, and hourly wages) for neurodivergent people differed from those of neurotypical people. The study found that the neurodivergent people experience employment disadvantage in many ways:

“We found that, compared to neurotypical people, neurodivergent individuals are more than twice as likely to be in precarious employment - to have volatile or uncertain hours, and more than ten times as likely to be in temporary employment. We also found that neurodivergent people are significantly more likely to be underemployed, so not to have as many hours of work in a given week as they might like, and that their employment tenures were significantly shorter, which suggests that they go from job to job rather than having sustained employment over time. So our study really demonstrates, in concrete terms, something that I think we’d long suspected, which is, there are really substantial adverse employment impacts among the neurodivergent community compared with neurotypical workers”, said Brammer.

The study also looked at what a solution to the problem could be. More specifically, it investigated how HR practices that give employees either locational or temporal flexibility in their work - flexible working practices such as home working/teleworking/remote working, job sharing, flexitime, annualized and compressed hours - improve the adverse employment outcomes experienced by neurodivergent people:

“The immediate question that begs is, what can we do about it? How can organisations create environments that are more inclusive to neurodivergent employees? So the second thing we were interested to do in the study was to explore the relevance of widespread HR practices. A lot of that work focuses on specific accommodations, for example, adaptations to work environments, training programmes or support programmes that enable neurodivergent workers to thrive in the context of workplaces. But rather than saying, for each individual, how do we create a package of accommodations around them that enables them to succeed, we asked the question, what about home working and flexible work practices that we’re seeing a lot of now in contemporary workplaces? To what extent do those fairly common and diffuse practices offer opportunities for enhanced employment outcomes for neurodivergent people?”, said Brammer.

The study found that flexible working practices significantly benefit neurodivergent people in the sense that they substantially bring the employment outcomes of neurodivergent people in line with those of neurotypical people: 

“Really quite common practices such as homeworking and flexible working, which we’re all seeing a lot more of in our employment lives, can substantially ease the problem. These practices really overturn much of the disadvantage seen among neurodivergent employees. For example, where home working is available to employees, under-employment disappears. It’s much more likely that neurodivergent people can sustain longer employment tenures where those practices are available”, said Brammer.

The study sees neurodivergence as a natural and valuable manifestation of human genetic diversity as opposed to disability, which has both theoretical and practical importance:

“A theoretical importance of this study speaks to how we conceptualise neurodivergence. A lot of the prior literature says neurodivergence is a disability, and thus focuses very much on accommodations, issues of disclosure and whose responsibility it is to seek accommodations. This literature centres on a problematisation of the person - the reason that somebody does not have a longer employment tenure or isn’t employed more is because of the disability that the individual has. We, however, believe in shifting from a problematisation of the person to a problematisation of the workplace. So we see a lack of neurodivergent inclusion as a problem of the workplace rather than a problem of the individuals”, said Brammer.

“We’d like to see a move away from the conceptualisation of neurodivergence as a disability towards neurodivergence as an opportunity for workplaces to  find ways to support people and to demonstrate that they take inclusivity seriously. Most neurodivergent people do not view themselves as disabled in the same way perhaps as somebody with another disability might, so disability framings are somewhat challenging, I think, to that population. Prior studies particularise and problematise individuals for what they can’t do, rather than for showcasing what they can do, and rather than asking organisations to create conditions where all employees can be successful and thrive. So, I think there’s something really important in HRM research, but more broadly in research on neurodivergence, to move away from a disability framing and to create new conceptualisations of neurodivergence that look at the value inherent in a diverse group of individuals”, added Brammer.

The study points out that organisational policies and HR practices have the capacity to play a substantial role in shaping employment outcomes for neurodivergent people:

“Our study shows that many of the employment disadvantages of neurodivergent people can be substantially mitigated by generalised and simple organisational policy interventions. So we’ve all seen in the post pandemic environment more home working and a lot more attention to different kinds of flexible working. All these things, which are increasingly available to people in many types of jobs, have the potential to create more inclusive environments for neurodivergent people. And yet, they aren’t available everywhere. So one of the key things we would see some great benefit in, is an extension of flexible and home working where that’s appropriate and where that’s possible. We see that as something that is beneficial for employees but also beneficial for organisations”, said Brammer.

“The broader question, we think, is how policies and practices can offer anticipatory support for neurodivergent people by enabling  greater agency in their working life. And I think that part of the generalised lesson of our study is that if organisations can put agency in the hands of employees, then that can be a significant part of becoming a more neurodivergent-inclusive workplace”, concluded Brammer.

Brammer’s co-authors were Layla Branicki, an associate professor at the University of Bath School of Management, Mark Brosnan, a professor of psychology and Head of Department for Psychology at the University of Bath, Aida Garcia Lazaro, an economist and researcher at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) and Centre for People-Led Digitalization at the University of Bath, Susan Lattanzio, the Research and Industry Engagement Manager and Deputy Director for the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalization, and Linda Newnes, a professor and Director of the Centre for People-Led Digitalization  at the University of Bath.

For further information about the study, contact Layla Branicki at ljb217@bath.ac.uk

Read the full article here.

Written by Jelena Petrovic, Knowledge Transfer Editor of HRM and Associate Professor at the University of Southampton Business School, j.petrovic@soton.ac.uk

HRM is a Financial Times Top 50 Business Journal published by Wiley.