Workplace neuroinclusion needs to move beyond awareness and individual adjustments towards designing work for the cognitive diversity that already exists across every workforce, argues Ritu Kiran, Founder and CEO of Aubilities. Drawing on her experience as an HR and technology leader, parent and autistic woman, she explores why managers, workplace systems and the way organisations measure inclusion all need to change.
In 2018, my eldest son was diagnosed as autistic at the age of two. By then I had spent years in HR and technology working on the questions many organisations still ask: how do we get the best from people, build stronger managers and create environments where people can perform? Overnight, those questions stopped being abstract.
I began to see how often systems are built around an assumed “standard” way of communicating, learning, processing information or responding to the world. If you fit that standard, the system can feel effortless. If you do not, you are expected to explain the difference, request an adjustment and keep advocating until somebody understands.
Years later, my own autism diagnosis added another layer. It helped me reinterpret experiences from my working life and recognise something that now feels obvious: we spend a great deal of time asking people to adapt to workplaces, and not nearly enough asking whether workplaces have been designed for the range of people already inside them. The next phase of neuroinclusion has to move beyond awareness and accommodation alone. It has to become cognitive inclusion by design.
THE PROBLEM WITH WAITING FOR DISCLOSURE
Reasonable adjustments remain essential. But a model that begins only after somebody discloses a diagnosis puts a significant burden on the individual. The UK Government’s Buckland Review of Autism Employment found that only around three in ten working-age autistic people are in employment. It also found that only around 35% of autistic employees were fully open about being autistic across their organisation, while around a third felt unable to discuss their adjustment needs at all.
The CIPD’s Neuroinclusion at Work research found that only 38% of employees surveyed felt their organisation provided meaningful support to neurodivergent people. A third of neurodivergent respondents said their workplace experience had negatively affected their mental wellbeing.
These are not simply awareness problems. They are design problems. Employer attention to neuroinclusion has grown, yet these figures show how many people are still left to cope alone. If an employee has to disclose a diagnosis before they can receive clear instructions, predictable communication, flexibility, quieter working conditions or better ways to organise their work, we have made inclusion conditional.
EVERY WORKFORCE IS COGNITIVELY DIVERSE
Neurodivergent people are not one homogeneous group, and neither are neurotypical people. Two autistic employees may have completely different sensory, communication and processing preferences. The same is true of people with ADHD, dyslexic people or those with no diagnosis at all.
So organisations need to get better at understanding cognitive variation, rather than building fixed lists of “autism adjustments” or “ADHD adjustments”. This is where cognitive inclusion goes further than familiar ideas of inclusive or universal design. Those approaches rightly make buildings, tools and processes accessible to more people by default. Cognitive inclusion applies the same thinking to the invisible parts of work: how information is shared, how decisions are communicated, how focus is protected and how performance is judged.
In practice, it can begin with ordinary management decisions:
- Give people clarity about outcomes rather than relying on implied expectations.
- Offer information in more than one format when possible.
- Distinguish between work that genuinely needs to happen synchronously and work that can be done with greater autonomy.
- Make it normal for employees to discuss how they work best, without requiring them to justify every preference through a medical label.
Many of these principles reflect the practical changes Fair Play Talks has previously explored around adapting workplace communication for neurodivergent employees, including clearer instructions, different communication formats and time to process information. None of these changes lowers standards. In many cases, they make standards clearer.
INCLUSION HAPPENS THROUGH MANAGERS
Policies matter, but an employee rarely experiences inclusion as a policy document. They experience it through their manager. A cognitively inclusive manager understands that consistency is not the same as treating everybody identically. They can set the same performance expectation while allowing different routes to achieving it.
For one employee, a verbal briefing followed by discussion may work well. Another may perform better when the same information arrives in writing first. One person may thrive on frequent collaborative check-ins; another may need protected periods of uninterrupted focus.
The question is not, “Who gets special treatment?” It is, “What conditions enable this person to deliver the required outcome?” That shift turns inclusion from an HR intervention into a management capability.
It also means being honest that needs sometimes conflict. One person’s collaborative stand-up is another person’s interruption; one person’s quiet focus time can feel like isolation to a colleague. Good design does not pretend these tensions away. It makes them discussable, so a team can agree on shared norms, such as core collaboration hours, written follow-ups after meetings and quiet periods, rather than leaving each person to negotiate alone. And designing for difference does not replace an employer’s legal duty to make reasonable adjustments. It reduces how often people have to rely on it.
That capability remains uneven. Many managers are still expected to lead cognitively diverse teams without any trainingin how to do so. Equipping them is how inclusion policies become everyday practice.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR COGNITIVE INCLUSION
It is tempting to frame neuroinclusion as a moral obligation and stop there. It is one. But it is also a performance question, and organisations that treat it only as compliance are leaving value on the table.
The costs of getting it wrong are already on the balance sheet, even if they are not labelled as such. When talented people mask until they burn out, the cost appears as sickness absence. When they leave, it appears as recruitment costs and lost knowledge. And when they stay but cannot focus, it appears as underperformance, usually attributed to the individual rather than the conditions around them.
My experiences as a parent, an autistic woman and an HR and technology leader eventually came together in Aubilities. It was built on a simple principle: people perform better when they understand how they work, and organisations perform better when managers and systems can respond intelligently to those differences.
In practice, that has meant moving beyond diagnosis-led support. We help employees understand their own working preferences and cognitive strengths, help managers build the practical capability to lead cognitively diverse teams, and help organisations spot patterns that inform better decisions about learning, wellbeing and performance.
Technology can help scale that understanding, but it is not the answer on its own. The aim is not to sort people into ever more sophisticated boxes. It is to give people and managers better information, better choices and a shared language for discussing how good work gets done.
WHAT TO MEASURE
Perhaps the most important shift is what organisations choose to measure. The success of cognitive inclusion should not be judged by how many awareness sessions were delivered or how many people downloaded a guide. Those may be useful activities, but they are not outcomes.
Organisations should be asking:
- Do managers feel more capable of supporting different thinkers?
- Can employees access support without unnecessary friction?
- Are people able to focus and contribute?
- Is avoidable burnout reducing?
- Are retention, engagement and performance improving?
This matters because employees can appear to be performing while paying a substantial personal cost. Many autistic people describe masking at work, constantly monitoring and adjusting how they come across, and the exhaustion that follows. That strain rarely shows up in a performance review until it shows up as burnout or a resignation.
My son’s diagnosis changed the way I saw systems. My own diagnosis changed the way I understood myself. Building Aubilities has changed the question I now ask organisations. Instead of asking, “How do we accommodate people who think differently?”, perhaps we should ask: “How do we design work for the reality that people have always thought differently?”
That is a much bigger question. But it is also where responsible, inclusive and higher-performing workplaces begin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ritu Kiran is the Founder and CEO of Aubilities. She is the author of The Autism Parents’ Club. For more information and practical resources to build cognitively inclusive, high-performing workplaces, click here.
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