10 reasonable adjustments that retain the 15% of your team you might be missing
Most of these cost nothing. A few cost under £100. Almost all of them benefit the whole team, not just the neurodivergent colleagues you’re trying to support.
UK search interest in “neurodiversity training” has risen sharply through Q1 2026. HR teams aren’t ahead of this. They’re scrambling to catch up. This guide gives you the ten adjustments we see work in real teams — not a compliance checklist. Google Keyword Planner trend, Q1 2026
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The rest of this guide covers all ten adjustments, the four mistakes we see HR teams make most, and a 90-day rollout plan. One-off — you won’t need to do this again on this device.
Ten reasonable adjustments, grouped by where they land
Around 15–20% of the UK workforce is neurodivergent. In practice that means autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette’s, dyscalculia and more — often overlapping, often undisclosed. The adjustments below are deliberately universal: they help the neurodivergent colleagues you know about, the ones you don’t, and the rest of the team at the same time.
Fix the recruitment stage
Most neurodivergent candidates are filtered out before they even get to interview — not because they can’t do the job, but because the process tests performance under ambush. Four changes remove that without lowering your bar.
- #1Share interview questions 24 hours in advance. You’re assessing how well someone thinks, not how fast they improvise under pressure. Anxiety-first candidates (autistic, ADHD, generally under-slept) show their real thinking when you remove the ambush.
- #2Offer a written take-home as an alternative to live technical screens. Let candidates choose. The live screen tests verbal processing and working memory. A written task tests the actual skill.
- #3Publish the full interview process up front. How many stages, who they’re meeting, what each stage tests, how long each stage lasts. Certainty isn’t special treatment — it’s basic fairness.
- #4Give every new starter a written first-week plan before day one. Hour-by-hour for the first week, day-by-day for weeks two to four. The neurodivergent new hire isn’t the only one who needs this — everyone does, you just notice it less from the others.
Design the working day
Most office environments were built for a very specific kind of brain — one that copes well with open-plan noise, live meetings, and verbal handovers. These four changes make the day workable for everyone else too.
- #5Noise-cancelling headphones and a quiet room, by default. Not on request. Not after a conversation. Standard kit. Open-plan noise is the single most commonly cited drain on autistic and ADHD employees — and most people without a diagnosis quietly prefer it too.
- #6Flexible hours inside a short core overlap window. Say 10am–3pm. Outside that, let people work when their brain works. ADHD peaks at different times to neurotypical ones. Forcing 9–5 is often why your best people burn out first.
- #7Default to written async communication for anything non-urgent. If it’s not a decision that has to happen in the next hour, put it in a doc or a thread, not a meeting. This is the single adjustment that changes culture fastest.
- #8Send meeting agendas at least 24 hours ahead. Write decisions down. People who process best in writing, people with working-memory challenges, and people who happen to be on annual leave all benefit. Everyone in the room gets a better meeting.
You’ll notice none of these adjustments require a disclosure. That’s deliberate. Forcing someone to disclose a diagnosis before you’ll change the environment is both bad practice and bad policy — around half of autistic and ADHD employees never disclose at work. Design for them anyway.
Manage performance honestly
The stage where neurodivergent employees are most likely to quietly fall out of an organisation isn’t the interview or the first month — it’s the performance conversation. Two adjustments carry most of the weight.
- #9Document expectations in writing. Always. Not “be more proactive.” “Post a written weekly update in #team-planning by Friday 5pm.” Vague verbal expectations are where neurodivergent staff get told they’re underperforming against a bar nobody ever showed them.
- #10Regular, structured 1:1s — same format, same cadence, every week. Not an ad-hoc chat when there’s a problem. A predictable slot with a written agenda your report can add to. Most employees find surprise feedback hard. Neurodivergent employees find it disproportionately destabilising.
Under the Equality Act 2010, employers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled employees — and neurodivergence often meets the legal test of disability even without a formal diagnosis. Waiting for a tribunal claim to prompt the audit is the most expensive way to run this.
Four mistakes we see most often
These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re the four patterns that come up again and again in HR teams we work with — usually well-meaning, always expensive.
Waiting for a formal diagnosis
NHS diagnostic waits for ADHD and autism now routinely exceed three years. If your policy is “we adjust once we have paperwork,” you’re effectively saying “we don’t adjust.” The legal test isn’t the paperwork — it’s whether the person has a long-term impairment.
Treating every condition as a separate policy
An autism policy, an ADHD policy, a dyslexia policy. HR teams build a filing cabinet and managers never open it. Build one set of universally available adjustments instead — that’s what actually gets used on a Monday morning.
Putting the burden on the individual to ask
“Our door is always open.” Then the door is closed, because asking means disclosing, and disclosing feels like a risk — especially in a probation period or when a promotion’s on the line. Make the common adjustments opt-out, not opt-in.
What works instead
Make the first three or four adjustments in the list above standard across the whole organisation. No diagnosis needed, no form to fill in. Train managers on the other six so they can apply them in a 1:1 when it’s useful. Your retention numbers for new hires six and twelve months in are the scoreboard.
Around 1 in 5 of your workforce is likely neurodivergent — and only a fraction of them have told you. The adjustments that work are the ones that don’t require them to. ACAS, NHS England
A realistic plan you can start this week
You don’t need a committee, a consultant, or a budget line. You need someone to pick one adjustment and implement it by Friday. This is the shape of a 90-day rollout that actually ships.
Find out what you already do
Ask three managers how they handle 1:1 agendas, interview prep, and meeting invites. The gap between your intranet policy and real behaviour is the thing you’re fixing. Don’t announce anything yet.
Make three adjustments universally available
Pick three from the list above that don’t need training or budget sign-off. Most teams pick #1, #3 and #8. Announce them once, quietly, in a team meeting and on the intranet. Keep the language plain.
Run a manager session on neurodiversity
Not a one-hour webinar. A half-day, interactive, with real cases from your organisation. Managers need to feel confident about the other seven adjustments — and about what to do when a colleague discloses. This is the single highest-leverage training spend we see.
Check your retention numbers
Look at your new-hire retention at six and twelve months — particularly anyone who voluntarily told you they’re neurodivergent. Also look at who’s on a performance plan six months in. These two numbers tell you whether the adjustments are doing what they’re supposed to.
If you want a manager session running by June, start the conversation this week
Our Neurodiversity Awareness session is the training version of this guide — half a day, interactive, designed for whole teams or specifically for managers. Onsite or online. Tailored to your organisation’s language and challenges.
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