Inclusion that includes neurodivergent employees, not just talks about them

The awareness argument has largely been won

This is worth saying before anything critical, because it is genuinely true and it was not true 10 years ago. Most UK employers now know what neurodiversity means. Most have heard of ADHD, autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia as things that show up in a workforce rather than as things that happen elsewhere. Around one in five people may identify as having one or more neurodivergent identities, according to CIPD’s neuroinclusion guidance, so this is not a minority interest question. In a team of any real size it is not a hypothetical one either.

The awareness campaign worked. The problem is that awareness was never the outcome anyone actually needed. Knowing that roughly a fifth of your workforce may identify this way does not, on its own, change a single thing about how a one to one is run, how a job advert is written or what happens when somebody says they are struggling with open plan.

That gap between knowing and doing is where most organisations currently sit, and it is not a gap that another awareness session closes.

What the UK data says about the gap

Acas commissioned YouGov to ask 1,000 GB employees about this in February 2026 and published the findings that March. Only 32% said their employer effectively trains managers to identify and make reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent colleagues. 35% said the training was ineffective.

The remaining 32% said they did not know, and that is the group worth sitting with for a moment. A third of employees cannot say how effectively their managers are trained to make adjustments. They are describing an organisation where the question has simply never come up in front of them: no manager has ever raised it, no colleague’s adjustment has ever been visible, nothing in their working life has given them evidence either way.

Read the three numbers together and the picture is not one of employers refusing to help. It is one of employers whose good intentions are invisible at the level where they would matter. Roughly two thirds of employees either rate the training ineffective or cannot see any sign of it at all. The survey did not ask whether those employees would raise an adjustment. What we hear in the sessions we run is that people read exactly these signals before deciding whether to say anything.

Why a policy does not reach the person it was written for

Most organisations that are getting this wrong have a perfectly good adjustments policy. That is the confusing part, and it is why the problem persists: the document exists, so the box looks ticked.

But a policy is not the delivery mechanism. A neurodivergent employee does not experience the policy. They experience their line manager, in a series of small moments where a policy is not present and nobody is consulting a document.

• Whether the meeting has an agenda in advance, or whether being quick on your feet in an unstructured discussion is what gets rewarded.
• Whether instructions arrive in writing, or verbally in a corridor and then treated as having been communicated.
• What a manager’s face does in the two seconds after somebody discloses something. That reaction is remembered for years and is never recorded anywhere.
• Whether an adjustment survives a reorganisation, or quietly lapses when the team moves and nobody carries it across.

None of those are policy questions. They are habits, they belong to individual managers and they are what an employee is actually assessing when they decide whether it is safe to say anything. Which is close to what the Acas figures are measuring: not whether the organisation means well, but whether employees can see any sign that the manager in front of them is equipped.

Use the week to change something, not to mark something

National Inclusion Week runs from 14 to 20 September. It is a genuinely useful prompt, and the most productive way to use it is to treat it as a deadline rather than as a programme.

Pick one thing that will still be true in March, and change it properly.

• Make the adjustments route findable in under a minute. Ask someone who does not work in HR to find it from the intranet homepage while you watch. Most organisations fail this test and are surprised by it.
• Send interview questions in advance, to everybody. The interview then tests preparation rather than how fast somebody retrieves an example under pressure, and it needs no disclosure from anyone.
• Make adjustments portable. Agree that an adjustment moves with the person when their manager or team changes, rather than being renegotiated from scratch with a stranger.
• Train the managers. This is the one the Acas data points at directly. The other three are one-off changes to a process. This one changes the person who has to apply them every week.

The test for any of these is simple. In March, when nobody is talking about inclusion, will a neurodivergent employee in your organisation have a different experience because of what you did in September? If the honest answer is no, the week was a communications exercise. Our inclusive manager’s neurodiversity playbook works through the six situations where that difference is actually made, and there is more on the vocabulary and the basics in our post on neurodiversity at work in 2026. If you are planning the week itself, we have written separately on National Inclusion Week 2026 and what to do in the other 51.