Disclosing a neurodiversity diagnosis at work can feel like a daunting leap of faith. How can HR and managers respond with inclusivity in mind to help employees perform at their best?

Imagine you have a high-performing senior analyst who never misses a deadline. To the organisation, she is a model of reliability. In reality, she spends every night suffering deep exhaustion as she recovers from the sensory overstimulation of the office and masking throughout the day.

She was recently diagnosed with Autism, inspired by the rise in adults seeking diagnoses, and decides to disclose her neurodivergence to HR.

How HR and her manager respond in this moment could determine whether they retain a high performer or lose her to burnout.

David Smith, Developmental Educator, Employ for Ability

Developmental Educator and co-founder of Employ for Ability David Smith, who is speaking at AHRI’s ‘From Awareness to Action’ webinar, says that while there has been a lot of work done to foster neurodiversity inclusion at the hiring and onboarding stages, HR has an important role to play in helping managers to respond to existing employees who disclose their diagnoses.

He notes that it can be daunting, especially if neurodivergent employees feel that they have been discriminated against in the past. 

However, masking neurodiversity is detrimental for everyone in the long run, so building a broader culture of inclusivity is key.

Tom Langley, Neurodiversity Consultant, Employ for Ability

To support a culture of disclosure, Smith says organisations need to move away from old “reactive” models of inclusion with “tick-box” inclusion accommodations.

Neurodiversity consultant Tom Langley, who is also speaking at AHRI’s ‘From Awareness to Action’ webinar, says that “often adjustments can be implemented without sharing the diagnosis itself. The focus should stay on what changes will help the employee perform at their best.”

Below, Smith and Langley unpack how HR can facilitate these changes with individuals, their team and the broader organisation. 

1. How should HR and managers respond when an individual discloses a neurodivergent condition?

The key to supporting neurodiverse employees is to remember that every person is unique and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, says Smith. 

“As Dr Stephen Shore says, ‘If you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism.’ The same goes for…all employees,” he adds.

As a starting point, Smith offers three potential ways to respond: 

1. ‘Thank you for sharing.’

A fear of backlash from their employer can make it difficult for people to share their diagnosis, so thanking them for sharing this information can be helpful, says Smith.

2. ‘My goal is to support you so you can do your best work here.’

“This allows you to focus on their strengths and the positives,” Smith adds.

3. ‘Let’s work together to understand what will help you be most effective at work.’ 

“Again, it’s not about deficit or disability. It’s more, ‘What things do I need to do to help you perform at your best?’ And that’s really important because you’re talking about positive improvement and how everyone could benefit. So there’s no link to stigma.” 

Crucially, this initial discussion should be a collaborative conversation on productivity. 

“It’s not, ‘What’s wrong with you? How do I fix you?’ but rather, ‘You’re not the problem. I’m trying to remove the barriers to you becoming your best,” says Smith. 

One thing to be careful of is to not unintentionally reinterpret the employee’s track record once a diagnosis is disclosed, says Langley.

“If they have been a high performer for years, a diagnosis doesn’t erase history. One big mistake organisations can make is suddenly shifting into a deficit mindset and focusing on risk rather than recognising the strengths and contributions that were already there.”

Co-designing adjustment plans

From here, HR can work with the employee to create a ‘neurodiversity passport’, a tool developed by Employ for Ability to document helpful adjustments, communication preferences and working styles. Resources such as the JobAccess Workplace Adjustment Passport can also provide a useful starting point for organisations exploring adjustment documentation, says Smith.

Another practical tool is a Personal Situation Plan. Developed in collaboration with the employee, it provides a framework to support their needs as required. The highlight of these forms is that they can benefit all employees, moving organisations towards a proactive culture of inclusion.

“It’s a co-design process that you work on with the individual because, who knows that individual best? They do.” – David Smith, Developmental Educator, Employ for Ability

Reviewing adjustment plans

The key consideration to remember is that an individual’s needs will evolve over time, so disclosure is not a one-off event, he adds.

“Adjustments aren’t set and forget,” says Smith. “If we put an employee in a different part of the office with less overstimulating lighting arrangements, are we seeing an improvement? Are [they] feeling supported? Are [they] performing at [their] best?”

“It’s important to review them regularly, which is why we talk about the need for managers to have one-on-one meetings with their workers weekly. It could be a 10-minute meeting with a very standard agenda, looking at what’s working, what’s not working.”

Smith recalls an employee he was coaching whose adjustments hadn’t been reviewed in a year. The employee was receiving a 10-minute break every hour to recharge, but said he’d feel more regulated with shorter breaks.

2. How can HR support teams to implement inclusive practices?

It’s important to remember that an employee’s medical information is private, and disclosure should always start from that principle, says Langley. 

“In practice, this could mean agreeing on a small ‘circle of confidence’ – typically the employee, their manager and HR – and, importantly, involving the employee in decisions about whether any information needs to be shared more widely in order to implement adjustments.”

Manager uplift

With this in mind, using the ‘neurodiversity passport’, or something similar, as a foundation, HR’s role in supporting teams is primarily in facilitating manager uplift.

“[The passport] has common sections around sensory workplace adjustments, executive functioning, communication preferences, strengths, challenge areas – but what’s in it is between you and the worker,” says Smith. 

This information may then need to be translated for managers into clear, practical changes that they can adopt with that team member, such as flexible start/finish times or specific communication channels for feedback, for example. 

He emphasises that while most workplaces are familiar with offering physical workstation adjustments for employees living with disability, such as offering standing desks and noise-cancelling headphones, there’s also a need for communication adjustments when it comes to supporting neurodivergent workers.

“One-on-one meetings, agendas for meetings, understanding different communication styles [and preferences] – these are non-physical, low cost measures that we [employers] implement.” – David Smith, Developmental Educator, Employ for Ability

Supporting managers to use inclusive phrasing and language is also important, he adds. 

For example, when a manager tells their employee to submit work but doesn’t specify the exact time – instead using vague markers like ‘By end of the day’ – it can create uncertainty for an employee. Additionally, common throwaway comments like, ‘You know what to do’, can also trigger anxiety. 

“A neurodivergent employee might be wondering, ‘What does end of day mean? Is it 5 pm, or 3 pm because I knock off at that time, or midnight even?’

“That comment, ‘You know what I mean’, [could imply that] you can’t ask questions because you’re meant to know what the boss means. A neurodivergent individual might think, ‘Actually, I don’t know what you mean, but I can’t ask because I’m meant to know.’

“They might think they could ask a peer, but probably won’t because they don’t want to look silly. They might stew on it and get stressed and [become] less productive.”

HR can assist by agreeing on reasonable adjustments with the employee, such as asking managers to write more explicit briefs or setting agendas for all meetings, says Smith.

Defining reasonable adjustments

Defining the limits of a ‘reasonable adjustment’ is crucial, he adds. Communicating this to managers helps to aid in the implementation of these changes.

Sometimes a ‘reasonable adjustment’ is reasonable in one workplace but not another. For instance, where noise-cancelling headphones may be perfectly practical in a corporate office, Defence Force employees aren’t permitted to use any electronic goods, and, therefore, an employee in that workplace cannot reasonably expect that adjustment to be accepted.

“You can say ‘no’. An employee might turn up with 10 changes, and you look at them and go, ‘Six of them are pretty good. I can implement those relatively easily.’” 

For the others that aren’t as easy to accommodate – say, they might involve prohibitive costs or create disruptions for the business – that would be reasonable ground to deny the adjustments, says Smith.

“If an employee says, ‘I want to work from home five days a week’, but we all come to work on Wednesdays because that’s our team day and we do training, you can say, ‘I can’t give you that, but I can give you this instead,” says Smith.

Performance evaluations

Another challenge can arise during performance evaluations, says Langley. 

“Sometimes behaviours that aren’t actually part of the job – like participation in social events or networking in a particular way – end up informally influencing performance discussions. This can lead to neurodivergent employees being evaluated on style rather than outcomes.” – Tom Langley, Neurodiversity Consultant, Employ for Ability

“I think a great place for HR here is to help managers focus performance conversations back on the actual responsibilities of the role and the results being delivered.”

Members can find out more by watching AHRI’s ‘From Awareness to Action’ webinar on-demand.

3. How can HR facilitate broader organisational shifts towards proactive inclusion? 

As work grows increasingly complex, Smith argues that HR can help build broader organisational frameworks that move beyond reactive policies and cultivate a culture of proactive inclusion.

Changes to work design

This could look like templatising changes by using communication scripts and training managers around how to pivot conversations from discussions about a diagnosis to strengths-based conversations about how to support employees to achieve their best performance.

For example, one way to assist neurodivergent employees in meetings could be stopping for a moment after key points to allow them to write down relevant information and giving everyone the opportunity to nod before continuing, says Smith. 

“Most of these adjustments are free. We all communicate slightly differently. We all learn differently. It’s about designing a system that accommodates as much of that as possible.” – David Smith, Developmental Educator, Employ for Ability

Often, supporting managers to adopt these changes benefits the productivity of not just neurodivergent employees, but all employees, helping to create a culture of proactive inclusion where everyone feels comfortable to request reasonable adjustments.

Addressing fairness complaints

Changes like this also help mitigate another issue you might face at a team level in a reactive system, says Smith – complaints from other employees about equality or fairness.

“It’s a common complaint in reactive systems of why did that person get that? The classic will be, ‘I want the window seat. Why did they get the window seat? I’ve been here longer than them. That’s not fair.’

“The conversation has to come back to explaining fairness and establishing a system of equity, not equality [across the organisation]. We don’t give everyone everything. We give people what they need to perform at their best,” says Smith.

This way, HR can help the organisation to move from responding to individual accommodation requests to thinking about the most cost-effective, simple way to get the best out of all employees, he adds.

“Have an early conversation with all employees about a framework for a career success plan, as one of our clients have called it. It improves productivity for all employees.” – David Smith, Developmental Educator, Employ for Ability

The key considerations for HR

Neurodiversity inclusion thrives when integrated into the core of workplace culture.

The safest and most effective approach is to shift from viewing adjustments as ‘disability support; to viewing them as ‘productivity tools’ that benefit the entire workforce, says Smith.

That might look like:

• Moving from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’: Establishing systems such as a ‘neurodiversity passport” or ‘Career Success Plans’ for all employees, rather than waiting for a formal disclosure.
• Standardising explicit communication: Eliminating vague instructions in favor of precise briefs and set agendas to reduce anxiety and cognitive load.
• Focusing on equity over equality: Recognising that giving everyone the ‘same’ setup (equality) isn’t as effective as giving each person what they need to perform at their best (equity).
• Implementing ‘set and check’ adjustments: Treating accommodations  as evolving experiments and regularly reviewing their impact on productivity.
• Upskilling managers on ‘low-cost’ adjustments: Prioritising practical changes to communication, scheduling and sensory needs (e.g. clear instructions, noise management, flexible work practices, and tools like headphones or fidget devices) over expensive physical overhauls.

These steps make it easier to foster a culture where disclosure is safe and performance is optimised across the entire neurospectrum.

Members can access AHRI’s ‘From Awareness to Action’ webinar on-demand to learn more about how to retain neurodivergent talent by building inclusive workplaces.