What does it mean to us to be described as a neuro-affirming business and workplace?
For a long time, if an employee had ADHD, Autism, or Dyslexia, the burden was on them to adapt to a rigid environment. My brother, for example, was diagnosed with profound Dyslexia in the early eighties, and when my mother tried to discuss this with his headteacher, the response was a terse, “We don’t recognise such things here!” So he was not provided with any recognition of his needs, let alone actual support. Thankfully, awareness of such a diagnosis and what this might mean for an individual, either in an educational setting or the workplace, has improved.
Working here at Vitality360, I do notice a profound shift. We have been seeing an increasing number of clients who have or suspect they have Autism, ADHD or a combination of both, 32% of our current caseload in the last three months, in fact. We have been adapting over the last year to determine how best to serve this client group, who are coming to us with fatigue symptoms or other complex comorbidities, multiple symptoms, or diagnoses. It is important that any rehabilitation for people presenting with an autism or ADHD diagnosis, or indeed who suspect that they may be neurodivergent, is given the appropriate, individually tailored support which considers the neurodiverse lens as part of the clinical picture. There is a considerable body of emerging research demonstrating a relationship between neurodiversity and an increased likelihood of fatigue conditions (stats).
We also have several team members who are neurodivergent, or who suspect they are, or who have someone close to them who is, so we have lots of personal experience. As the HR, Compliance and Business Manager, and receiving a late diagnosis of Autism alongside my ME/CFS, I have had to consider what this means for me personally, and thereby what adaptations I need in place to support me to work well.
Being neuro-affirming means viewing neurological differences not as "deficits" to be cured, but as natural variations of the human brain. Instead of forcing unique minds to squeeze into standard corporate moulds, a neuro-affirming company reshapes its environment, culture, and policies to unlock everyone's potential. This has certainly been my experience working for Vitality360, and below I offer some core principles that define a neuro-affirming organisation and what that means in my lived experience.
1. Building a Strengths-Based Culture
A neuro-affirming workplace flips the script on traditional performance management. Instead of thinking about what an employee struggles with, the focus shifts to their distinct cognitive advantages.
Neurodivergent individuals often possess remarkable strengths that drive immense business value, such as deep creative immersion, hyper-focus, innovative out-of-the-box problem-solving, and exceptional pattern recognition and attention to detail. When I was recruited, it was with the explicit intention to support the business in their processes across all aspects of my job title: human resources, compliance, operations, and business development. The fact that I am able to manage three specialist areas of expertise, which would probably be whole departments in a larger organisation, seems indicative of my particular ability, due to my autism, to switch between activities and to prioritise tasks well. The fact that all three areas require expertise in facilitating processes and managing projects really aligns with how my brain works at its best. It tends to see things in a helpful, logical, and systematic way, and I am very tenacious in meeting challenges and ensuring the outcome is achieved!
My experience demonstrates that aligning roles with these natural processing styles not only supports staff but also provides a competitive edge; in our case, having one person successfully manage three distinct business areas improves efficiency.
2. Ditching "One-Size-Fits-All" Accommodations
Different brains have different environmental, sensory, and communication needs. A neuro-affirming company replaces rigid office rules with flexible, personalised adjustments. I have a personally tailored adaptation plan that sets out an agreement between my line manager and me on how to support me in working well. These include things like only having a certain agreed number of meetings per week (as these are particularly exacting on all levels), and more unpaid leave, for example. Crucially, HR departments or Employers need to ensure that they don't gate-keep these tools behind mountains of HR paperwork or require formal medical diagnoses. We are at an advantage here as a smaller company.
Simple, high-impact adjustments often include:
Sensory support: Providing quiet zones, noise-cancelling headphones, or dimmable/modified lighting. I work from home so I can control the level of sensory input, including smells and temperature. I am unable to tolerate strong fragrances, whether in personal care products like perfume or deodorants, or in cleaning or washing chemicals. I also need my environment to be ordered, and I have found working in what I might perceive as chaotic workplaces nigh on impossible in previous roles. Before my autism diagnosis, I didn’t fully understand why this was and instead felt shamed by an almost compulsive need to be ‘organised’.
Temporal flexibility: Offering flexible working hours or normalising asynchronous work so people can produce results when neurodiverse brains are most alert. My employer has adapted my working hours so that I can rest in the afternoon and then work again into the evening. There is an approach in the company that is more focused on supporting productivity than on measuring it by hours worked; capacity, not capability.
Communication choices: Allowing written updates or structured messaging channels instead of relying entirely on impromptu, high-anxiety verbal meetings. This has been the area where, as a team, we are learning the most, as we all have different ways of communicating. I can be very literal, and I can also be a bit too brief, leaving others without a sense of connection through context or perceived friendliness! I have learnt to include an ‘I hope this email finds you well’ sentence before I launch into the task at hand.
3. Creating Safety to Drop the "Mask"
"Masking" is the incredibly exhausting process in which neurodivergent individuals consciously hide their natural behaviours, such as suppressing the urge to fidget, maintaining uncomfortable eye contact, or mimicking social scripts, to blend in.
Constantly masking at work is one of the leading causes of chronic professional burnout and mental fatigue. This happened to me 23 years ago, and I have written about it more extensively on this blog.
Neuro-affirming organisations actively build psychological safety. When employees know they won't be judged for thinking, moving, or communicating differently, they can finally drop the mask. This energy can then be redirected into doing great work and building authentic workplace relationships.
I have the advantage as a remote worker of being able to do what I need in this regard, and in my experience, choosing not to mask is quite a complex process that I have needed ongoing support with psychologically and somatically. An employer or line manager can't second-guess what a neurodivergent person may need, so that individual needs to have a degree of awareness of their experience and a capacity to express it in a style most likely to be heard by an employer. Communication around workplace adaptations is a key area we support our clients with, if appropriate. Often, the client and the organisation are receptive to learning, and this provides a good place from which to begin a conversation around the delicate balance of meeting objective business needs while also designing adaptations to support the neurodivergent individual to work in their ‘flow’ with minimised stressors.
4. Auditing Language and Updating Policies
Language is a fast-moving aspect of our lives and it can be challenging to keep up with the evolving language used to describe the neurodivergent experience. As a team, we continually ensure we keep our professional knowledge in this area up to date as things evolve..
Neuro-affirming companies reject outdated, pathologising language, such as labelling colleagues as "high-functioning" or "low-functioning," which oversimplifies human capability. Instead, neuro-affirming organisations actively embed neurodiversity into their broader Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) frameworks, ensuring that recruitment, promotion, and day-to-day management processes are intentionally designed with cognitive diversity in mind. As the person who writes these frameworks for our organisation, I am in a unique position to influence these matters.
Taking the Next Step
Shifting your organisation's culture doesn't happen overnight, but you don't have to build the roadmap alone. Excellent training frameworks, legal guidance, and auditing resources are available through specialised professional groups. In the UK, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) offers extensive resources for HR professionals looking to guide neuro-inclusive workplaces.
By embracing a neuro-affirming approach, you stop trying to fix people and start fixing the workplace. The result? A healthier, more innovative, and genuinely inclusive culture where every mind has the space to succeed. We intend to practice what we preach here, in the lived working experience of our colleagues.
Written by Katherine Sewell, Business Development, HR & Compliance Manager
https://theautismservice.co.uk/learn/what-does-neuro-affirming-mean/