Tag Archive for: Technology

neurodivergent traits are strengths

Neurodivergent Traits at Work: How to Retain and Empower Your Team

Research from the British Dyslexia Association estimates that at least 15% of the working population has neurodivergent traits. That means in a team of twenty, at least three people are likely to be navigating the workplace through a different lens. Some will know it. Many will not. Most will have spent years developing strategies to manage in environments that were not designed with them in mind.

For managers and HR leaders, neurodivergent traits are not a problem to manage. They are a resource to understand. The organisations that get this right retain talented people, unlock genuine performance, and build cultures where more people can do their best work.

TL;DR: Neurodivergent traits are the characteristics associated with conditions like ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and dyspraxia. They include significant strengths as well as genuine challenges. This post explains what those traits look like in practice, how they affect performance, and what managers can do to support neurodivergent employees effectively.

What are neurodivergent traits?

Neurodivergent traits are the characteristics associated with neurological conditions, including dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, and dyscalculia, as well as acquired conditions such as PTSD and migraines. Crucially, research by Professor Amanda Kirby shows that co-occurring traits are more common than single condition profiles. Most neurodivergent individuals carry traits from several different conditions, which means no two people present in the same way.

This matters for managers. If you have met one person with neurodivergent traits, you have met one person. Applying a single solution to a varied population will not work. What works is understanding the individual.

Neurodivergent traits that benefit your organisation

A strengths based approach to neurodivergent traits is not just good for wellbeing. It is good for business. The traits that create challenges in some contexts are often the same traits that drive exceptional performance in others.

Creativity and lateral thinking: Many neurodivergent people think differently by default. They make connections that others miss and find solutions that a more linear thinker would not reach. In environments that value innovation, this is a competitive advantage.

Hyperfocus and depth: When interest and motivation align, many people with ADHD or autism can achieve extraordinary depth of focus. The challenge is creating conditions where that focus can be directed productively.

Pattern recognition: Many neurodivergent individuals are exceptional at identifying patterns in data, systems, or behaviour, skills that are highly valuable in analytical, technical, and strategic roles.

Emotional intelligence and empathy: Particularly common in autistic people, a heightened awareness of fairness, ethics, and the experiences of others can make neurodivergent employees exceptionally valuable in client facing, coaching, and leadership roles.

Persistence and resilience: Having navigated systems that were not designed for them, many neurodivergent employees bring an ingrained resilience and a capacity to persist through difficulty that neurotypical colleagues may not have been required to develop.

Common challenges and what they mean in practice

Understanding neurodivergent strengths is only half the picture. The other half is understanding where the workplace creates unnecessary difficulty, and what can be done about it.

Memory and information processing: Many neurodivergent individuals have limited short term memory capacity. Think of a bookshelf that holds three books instead of nine: when a new book arrives, an old one falls off. In environments where information is shared verbally, in long meetings, or without written follow up, this creates a significant and entirely unnecessary disadvantage. Written agendas, follow up notes, and the option to record meetings are low cost adjustments that make a material difference. For more on how technology can support this, read Is Being Technology Agnostic Important?

Organisation and process: Many neurodivergent employees find it hard to navigate organisational systems that rely on implicit knowledge. Knowing when to prep for a meeting, how to manage a shared calendar, and how to build buffers into a working day are skills that neurotypical employees may have absorbed unconsciously. Co-building processes with the individual, rather than assuming they will figure it out, makes the difference between someone struggling and someone thriving.

Time management: Time blindness is common in ADHD and affects some autistic people, too. It is not a poor attitude or a lack of professionalism. It is a neurological difference in how time is perceived. Practical adjustments like alarms, visual timers, and clearly structured working days significantly reduce cognitive load without requiring the individual to do something their brain is not wired to do. Read more about this in Time Mastery for Neurodivergent Executives.

Masking and well-being: Many neurodivergent employees expend significant energy to appear neurotypical at work. This is known as masking, and its cumulative effect on mental health and performance is substantial. An employee who wears heavy makeup may appear to be coping well while working twice as hard as their colleagues just to keep pace. When change happens, that person has no reserves left to adapt. Understanding masking is one of the most important things a manager can do. Loneliness and Masking: What HR Leaders Need to Know goes deeper on this.

What good support looks like

Support for neurodivergent employees is not about sticking plasters. It is about building an environment where people do not need them.

That starts with awareness, but awareness alone is not enough. Training needs to be supported by practical processes, accessible to everyone, and embedded in day to day management rather than buried in a policy document.

Good support means employees know where to go for help, what to expect when they ask, and that asking will not be held against them. It means reasonable adjustments are straightforward to request and reliably followed through. For guidance on what reasonable adjustment actually means, read Reasonable Adjustments: So What Is Reasonable?

For many organisations, a Workplace Needs Assessment is the most effective starting point. It gives the individual and their manager a shared, structured understanding of what is needed and why. Read more about the manager’s role in a Workplace Needs Assessment.

The organisations that do this well do not just retain neurodivergent employees. They create the conditions where those employees can contribute at their highest level. The costs of not doing it are real: attrition of talented people, legal risk under the Equality Act 2010, and the loss of the competitive advantage that genuine cognitive diversity brings.

If you would like to explore how to build better support for neurodivergent employees in your organisation, get in touch.

Related reading

Reasonable Adjustments: So What Is Reasonable?

The practical follow-up to this post. What reasonable adjustment actually means, what it does not mean, and how managers can act on it confidently.

Loneliness and Masking: What HR Leaders Need to Know

Understanding masking is an essential context for any manager supporting neurodivergent employees. This post explains what it is and why it matters.

Manager Role in Workplace Needs Assessment

If this post has raised questions about how to support a specific employee, a Workplace Needs Assessment is the structured next step.

Stay connected

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Technology agnostic TT

What Technology Agnostic Means for Neurodivergent Minds

A few years ago, I wanted an Audi TT (225bhp for those that care), it is a beautiful car, fast, agile and the envy of my mates. Being six feet 1 inch tall with long legs means that I ended up sitting virtually in the back seat. Turning a four-seater car into a two-seater car was less than ideal.

This story has resonated with me a lot especially as I look at the area of solving difficulties related to neurodiversity, (find out what neurodiversity is here), with technological solutions.

Technology-agnosticism is about saying there is ‘no one size fits all for a particular problem. That is not to say that a particular solution cannot solve a problem for many different people, it just will not solve it in the same way.

Think about it

It is the difference between an adjustable spanner and a standard spanner. One of them adapts to lots of assorted sizes of bolts with a greater margin for error and the other one fits one size of bolt perfectly but lacks flexibility. The question you always need to ask yourself is, do you even need that flexibility or is it okay to just do one thing perfectly well?

Many technologies, platforms and software products try and do everything for us, meaning they can end up not doing anything particularly well, so we need to make bigger compromises. It is easy to be bamboozled with a multitude of tools and promises that these tools can deliver, but if we lose sight of the problem that we are trying to solve, the danger is we end up with a solution to a problem that does not even exist.

Or to put it another way, a screwdriver to fix nails in the wall!

This becomes clear when you speak to individuals about the processes they perform and instead of describing what they do they reference the tools they use and how those tools perform the task. On its own, this is not an issue but where it becomes a problem is when the limitations of those tools start defining the process and its boundaries.

Here are some things to think about.

Being technology agnostic when things stop working

Take a pause and reflect on what has stopped working. Do not just switch to another app or another piece of technology before you have asked this question as you may well find that something more fundamental has changed, either with the environment or the processes you are using.

For example, I like to-do lists and I use a product called Todoist.com. It has worked very well for me. Unfortunately, when I started blogging, this platform just did not work for me anymore, so I had to go back and look at what the problem was, and it was to do with the amount of information I wanted to collect within my to-do list. So, I went back to the drawing board to map out what I wanted to achieve and then I was able to select a new software solution that helped me solve the problem, in this case Trello.

Invisible inefficiencies

Adapting a process that we use to fit the software tools with which we are lumbered. Are we keeping process components that really should be obsolete because the software demands them? I believe that if you look at your processes through a set of technology-agnostic glasses, you will find improvements and make changes that will simplify things!

Collaborating with a client who had used MS Outlook successfully to manage their diary, and who was now finding it did not give them the flexibility they needed to annotate, it caused a huge amount of anxiety about appointments. The other issue was the client felt they were not in control of their diary. In this instance, the client moved back to a paper-based solution. Now I realise for many reasons this is suboptimal in lots of organisations, but for this client, they were able to increase their effectiveness by not being stressed about their diary.

Revolutionising your processes

When evaluating what you are doing or why you are doing it, being technology-agnostic allows you to look beyond the constraints of the platforms and software that you are using. It allows you to imagine all the possibilities you might like to carry out, giving you scope to dream big and not have them thwarted by inappropriate tools.

Creating opportunity by being technology agnostic

When the shackles of, “it’s always been done this way” are broken all sorts of possibilities appear. This is also likely to enable you to move forward and to recognise your potential in terms of what you can achieve and how you are going to achieve it. Inappropriate tools that cause you to carry out actions and use time inefficiently reduce your effectiveness at work. Re-evaluating the tools you use creates an incredible opportunity to do things differently and to be more effective in your workplace.

If you would like to explore how to be more technology-agnostic in making decisions around assistive technology, then please get in contact.

dyslexia

How well does your workplace fit you if you have dyslexia?

Let me introduce you to Sarah, she has recently finished university and started working for a large retail bank in the UK as an Account Manager. She is responsible for developing clients for the bank by introducing them to the bank’s products and helping them understand how these products can make their businesses work better. Sarah’s role involves a large quantity of writing proposals in addition to producing other written materials.

Sarah was diagnosed with dyslexia at school and as a result, had some help so that she could study effectively and pass her qualifications. This help continued through university but since leaving university she has been able to cope without any help.

Unfortunately, in Sarah’s current role things started to get a little bit difficult as she is struggling with spelling and punctuation, in addition to remembering all the tasks and actions that she is given by her boss and team daily. Fortunately, when these issues were flagged to Sarah’s HR department, they immediately recognised it would be appropriate to ask Sarah what was going on. As a result, Sarah shared some of the tasks that she was finding difficult so the company initiated a Workplace Needs Assessment.

A Workplace Needs Assessment

An assessment that should be carried out by a qualified Workplace Needs Assessor who looks at an individual’s workplace, role, job description and tasks. Then working with the individual to make suggestions called Reasonable Adjustments.

Reasonable Adjustments

These are adjustments that can be made in the workplace to help people who have difficulties completing their everyday tasks. As an employer there is an obligation to provide these if you know, or could be expected to know, an employee or job applicant has a disability.

For Sarah to have this assessment, she did not need to have a formal diagnosis, she just needed to recognise that something was not working for her in her workplace. This assessment helped Sarah understand some of the difficulties she was facing. It also helped her understand some of the strengths that she offered to her workplace.

A vital part of the Workplace Needs Assessment is to amplify strengths and manage the difficulties of the individual.

Sarah’s employer had a legal responsibility under the Equality Act 2010 as Sarah is a neurodivergent individual who has a substantial and long-term condition that is covered under the act because of the following wording:

You are disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

This is important as Sarah’s Workplace Needs Assessment suggested a large range of different technologies along with some workplace coaching. In Sarah’s case however, several of the pieces of technology that were suggested did not work with the systems used by her employer. This resulted in a large amount of stress and anxiety for Sarah as she felt it was her responsibility to make IT work. Sarah’s manager tried to support her in this implementation but unfortunately was unable to make any headway in a reasonable time. In Sarah’s situation, the stress and anxiety got to a point where she was unable to continue working and had a prolonged period signed off sick from work.

I would like to make it clear Sarah’s is not an isolated case, implementation of help can cause even more stress and anxiety sometimes making the issues an individual faces far worse.

This unfortunate situation illustrates the need for a joined-up approach to reasonable adjustments within the workplace. It is vital when technology solutions are suggested that they work with the existing organisation IT infrastructure and policies. In Sarah’s particular case this situation could have been remedied very easily by having an IT representative involved in the process to ensure the technology suggested would work with the existing infrastructure. This is unfortunately overlooked in many situations causing a large amount of stress and anxiety for the individuals involved who are asking for help.

The final component is awareness within the organisation of the impact change has on individuals with neurodivergent conditions. What is often not recognised is that any change can be stressful and anxiety-inducing. To help alleviate some of this it’s really important that everyone within the organisation has an appreciation of what neurodiversity is and how it can impact their colleagues.

Some ways to help avoid this situation include:

  1. Creating a list of approved applications that IT are happy with will work within the organisation’s infrastructure and fit within the organisation’s policies.
  2. Making sure supervisors/managers are spoken to as part of the assessment process.
  3. Having a dedicated IT contact who can support the implementation of assistive technology.
  4. Ensuring that all members of the organisation have attended neurodiversity awareness training and are aware of who to speak for support.

If you would like to know more about Workplace Needs Assessments and how to implement them effectively within your organisation, please get in contact.