By Bryony Berry, Lead Consultant & Business Strategist, Ensono The skillsets your neurodivergent employees bring to their work are uniquely suited to the demands of the moment. Make sure you’re providing the environment and support they need to flourish.
The business case for a diverse and inclusive workforce is strong and well-established.1 From increased loyalty and retention to improved financial performance, organizations win when their workforce reflects a broad range of experiences, abilities and perspectives, and encourages their expression. But one thread in the diversity tapestry can sometimes be overlooked or underappreciated, despite its enormous potential for positive contribution: neurodiversity.
Neurodiversity is an umbrella term that encompasses autism, ADHD, dyslexia and a host of other cognitive differences. With an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the population presenting as neurodivergent (myself among them), your workforce is just about guaranteed to have neurodivergent individuals within its ranks. The likelihood is even greater in tech organizations, where the natural skillsets and superpowers neurodivergent people possess—analytical thinking, hyperfocus, attention to detail, pattern recognition and an affinity for repetitive tasks, to name just a few2—are precisely what so much of the work calls for.
Neurodivergent individuals follow tech icon Steve Jobs’s imploration to “think different” by definition. In an industry where things are changing at a dizzying pace and the old ways of solving problems just aren’t working, that is an invaluable asset. Writing in CIO Journal, Sovos CTO Eric Lefebvre said, “Being neurodiverse has been a huge competitive advantage in my technology career. The ability to pivot fast and hyperfocus are strengths, not weaknesses, and a leader that can do both effectively is an asset, not a liability.”3 Another neurodivergent tech leader, software developer and Mentra CTO Shea Hunter Belsky, says that being autistic allows him to zero in on solutions to ill-defined tasks. “I can make connections and identify patterns that often go unmissed and architect the solutions.”4
1Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle, Kevin Dolan, Dame Vivian Hunt and Sara Prince, “Diversity wins: How inclusion matters,” mckinsey.com, May 19, 2020 2Nancy Doyle, “Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults,” ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, September 2020. 3Eric Lefebvre, “Embracing neurodiversity in IT for competitive advantage,” cio.com, July 28, 2023. 4Perri Ormont Blumberg, “Neurodiversity adds to the workplace, as these successes show,” New York Post, June 11, 2023.
The conspicuous cost of invisible adaptation
The fact that you have neurodivergent talent doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve identified themselves as such or, even if they have, that they’re being recognized and receiving the accommodation that would enable them to work at their best. That’s a problem.
Neurodivergent people can and do adapt to a world designed for neurotypical people. But that adaptation comes at a cost: to their own wellbeing in terms of anxiety and stress, and consequently, to any organization or aspect of the business they’re contributing to. All that effort spent adapting drains energy away from applying the unique skills and superpowers neurodivergent people bring to the table. The best athlete in the world isn’t going to bring as much to their team if they have to climb over the stadium wall to get to the field.
A recent Wiley/Edge study found 50 percent of younger tech workers report feeling uncomfortable at work because of their gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic background or neurodevelopmental condition,5 a scary number for tech organizations whose staff is starting to age out of the workforce.
As culture becomes more aware, understanding and accepting of neurological differences, the demand—explicit or perceived—for employees to hide or adapt them is becoming decreasingly tolerable, especially among employees who have come of age in an era of inclusivity. Fortunately, more and more companies are taking a proactive approach to understanding and serving the needs of their neurodivergent team members, welcoming new ones with open arms, and carving out a significant competitive advantage for themselves in the process.6
5“Diversity in tech and its role in future equality,” Wiley Edge, September 2022. 6Robert Austin and Gary Pisano, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage,” hbr.com, May-June 2017.
If you build it, they will come, stay and thrive
If you don’t want to witness a mass migration of some of your most forward-thinking, innovation-minded talent, you may want to evaluate the practices and policies within your organization and teams. Chances are, you already have the building blocks in place to quickly facilitate a more neurodivergent-inclusive work environment that delivers benefits for all. With a thoughtful, intentional look at existing structures, policies and tools, and possibly the addition of some new ones, you can create a workplace that takes the pressure off neurodivergent employees to adapt and conform and replaces it with the empathy, understanding and freedom they need to lean into and fully unleash their gifts.
Protect the power of asynchronous work. The pandemic-accelerated transformation of the workplace has in many ways been a boon to neurodivergent professionals. The ability to work remotely some or all the time, in a comfortable, already-adapted environment, reduced social occasions, and the ability to work asynchronously—i.e., not necessarily in concurrent timeframes—mitigate or remove many of the barriers to focus and productivity.7 Channels such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc. enable fast, targeted communication and collaboration when it’s needed, but they also allow people to stay “in the flow” if they are engrossed in a specific task—a common superpower of people with ADHD and autism.8 This enormous benefit collapses, however, when the always-on nature of these channels creates a climate of constant interruption and the expectation of immediate responsiveness.
Setting reasonable top-down rules of engagement for collaboration and communication channels that sanction periods of uninterrupted focus, and empowering neurodivergent—and, for that matter, all team members—to maintain and enforce them without fear of reprisals can ensure work moves forward and gets done both on the timeline the business requires, and in the way that best suits those doing it.
7Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., “Neurodiversity, Talent, and the Promise of Hybrid Work,” psychologytoday.com, March 22, 2022. 8Annie Dupuis et al., “Hyperfocus or flow? Attentional strengths in autism spectrum disorder,” ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, September 16, 2022.
Easier
Harder
No difference
Keeping collaborative workshopping spaces such as Lucidspark, Miro, etc. open and accessible offline after the live session is another way to engage and support neurodivergent team members. Enabling people to revisit and contribute to boards over time can bring more folks to the table, allow space for thinkers to add their insights at their own pace, and give everyone space to “listen” and absorb others’ ideas and have them pollinate unique thoughts of their own. This approach is also great for longer term planning, big picture or strategic thinking, and market or competitor analysis.
Measure on outputs, relax on inputs. More broadly, if people know the endpoints they need to get to, the routes they take to get there can vary with no loss to the business while enabling teams to really bring the best of each member to the work at hand. Allowing individuals and teams to establish their own practices and processes, update methods and collaboration tools, etc. that best suit the people contributing removes the pressure to adapt and conform to extraneous standards. Include discussion and review of these as part of the standard setup and ongoing evaluation of ways of working.
This doesn’t need to be applied universally; not having shared systems and processes for various HR-related tasks, for example, could make things unmanageable. But try to think about defining standardized processes only where they add value directly, not where “many routes to one goal” would be just as beneficial.
Enable and encourage visual communication. A picture is worth a thousand words, and for many neurodivergent people it is the preferred way to communicate their big-picture system thinking: to show the links they see between things that others might not see, or to share their unique framing that can help others see a challenge or issue from a different angle. Research suggests that both neurodivergent and neurotypical people may process and remember visual information more easily than verbal content. Providing tools and training for people to use visual modeling tools, embracing the use of icons, and even memes and GIFs, can make mixed media communication easier for everyone and more widespread, and empower people who feel more comfortable using it to do so.
Of course, not all messages can be communicated visually. But even text-based communications can often be simply adapted to support the needs of neurodivergent audiences. Taking care to break up dense multi-sentence paragraph blocks into more digestible chunks focused on a single point, formatting text so key points clearly stand out, and bulleting action items are all easy ways to make information more consumable and impactful for everyone on the receiving end.
Enlist assistive technology
A variety of hardware and software solutions provide simple, powerful and immediate ways to support neurodivergent employees. Noise-canceling headphones can help those with sensory sensitivity to stay focused and on-task, and speech-to-text or text-to-speech programs can dramatically ease communication challenges for people with dyslexia. Bionic reading applications can make it far easier for people with ADHD to ingest a large volume of text quickly and with full comprehension. Mind mapping programs support visual thinking and ideation. The list goes on, and so do the benefits.
Making tools like these available and easily accessible, and encouraging their use, will remove unnecessary barriers and burdens from neurodivergent employees and enable them to work at their best.
Create a community
Neurodivergent employees exhausted by years, maybe even decades of hiding or subordinating their differences need a clear message from employers that they are seen, welcomed and embraced for exactly who they are. Establishing an Employee Resource Group, or ERG, that acknowledges, discusses and celebrates diverse skills and ways of thinking does exactly that (our group here at Ensono is called Beautiful Brains). And it provides a safe space for neurodivergent people, or people who feel they might be neurodivergent, to share and discuss challenges, superpowers and things that help them.
While maintaining that space’s safety is critical, the benefits often extend beyond its immediate borders. Empowering neurodivergent people to share their ways of doing and seeing things can be contagious and embolden the whole community to try different approaches, explore their creativity in different ways and take risks with their thinking. For example, adopting the more data-centric, less emotional analysis of many people with autism can be a great way to avoid confirmation bias. Taking more time over decisions and information processing, which is often preferred by people with dyslexia, can help us all to use “type two” or “slow” thinking. And sharing the confidence to handle uncertainly and move between possibilities—a superpower of many of our colleagues with ADHD—can reduce anxiety for others who may find a lack of a clear direction stressful, and help them move forward without a pre-defined direction.
In a world where innovation drives success, championing neurodiversity isn’t just an ethical imperative; it’s a strategic advantage. Supporting the professional fulfillment of your neurodivergent employees and the continuous growth of their innovative capacities will enrich every dimension of your organization and accelerate your path forward.
