An Introduction
Neuro-inclusion has had a lot of attention in recent years. A quick look at the data confirms it: 60% of employers now say neuro-inclusion is a focus area for their business, mentions of neurodiversity in UK job postings have risen almost fourfold since 2018, and more than 4,300 organisations now take part in Neurodiversity Celebration Week (CIPD, 2024; Indeed, 2024). By any measure, this is no longer a fringe conversation.
So why isn’t that reflected in day-to-day experience?
That’s the question we set out to explore in our latest Insight Panel series, bringing together People and Culture professionals, people managers, and individuals with lived experience. The conversations weren’t theoretical. They were grounded in what leaders are observing in their organisations, and in what neurodivergent employees are experiencing day to day. The question underpinning all of it was simple, if not easy to answer: what does impact look like when neuro-inclusion is genuinely embedded?
Awareness has not translated into lived experience
The same data that shows awareness rising also shows something more uncomfortable. One in five neurodivergent employees still report harassment or discrimination at work. Only half feel their organisation has an open, supportive climate to even discuss neurodiversity. Nearly a third have chosen not to disclose, out of fear of stigma or career impact. And despite everything organisations now say about being neuro-inclusive, fewer than a third provide neurodiversity awareness training to all staff, and only 46% of managers feel confident supporting a neurodivergent colleague (CIPD, 2024).
More recent research suggests little has changed: psychological safety among neurodivergent employees has not improved since 2023, and managers’ lack of understanding remains the single biggest barrier to adjustments, ahead of cost (Birkbeck & NiB, 2026).
Our panels described this as a “say/do” gap: the space between what an organisation states its intentions to be, and what people experience. It isn’t necessarily a story of bad faith. As one panel member put it, organisations are often doing the right things, but people don’t always feel the difference. Good intent doesn’t automatically become lived impact, and a few factors explain why:
1. Awareness gets mistaken for implementation. Training gets delivered, a policy gets written, and the assumption is that the work is done. But awareness is the start of the process, not the outcome of it.
2. Legacy culture resists what’s new. Ways of working that have existed for years don’t shift because a new value statement has been published.
3. “EDI fatigue” shuts down honest conversation. When inclusion becomes a source of mental exhaustion or defensiveness rather than curiosity, the harder, more useful conversations stop happening.
4. Accountability isn’t shared beyond HR. Inclusion work is too often contained within HR, rather than led as a mandate from the top of the organisation.
There’s also a definitional problem here. Culture is notoriously difficult to define, and harder still to measure, which makes it almost impossible to change if you can’t first describe what you’re trying to shift. The CIPD suggests that a more useful lens than “culture” is organisational climate: the meaning and behaviour attached to the policies, practices and procedures that employees experience. Not what’s written down, but what employees experience on a typical working day.
So what does "impact" actually mean?
When our panel members talked about impact, they weren’t describing a compliance checklist. Words like trust and experience came up again and again, alongside terms that pointed to something more relational: engagement, relationships, belonging. Alongside these sat more personal language: confidence, insight, capability.
Put together, this describes thriving: people gaining the confidence and strategies to know what works for them, and being able to articulate it for themselves. In practice, that might look like someone being ready for a promotion, or receiving strong feedback on how they’re showing up in their role. It’s a markedly different picture from simply “having support in place.”
It also describes belonging: feeling part of a team, building positive relationships with a line manager and colleagues, and experiencing a genuine improvement in day-to-day working life. Crucially, this doesn’t stop with the individual. Better relationships and morale for one person tend to benefit the people around them too. Inclusion, done well, isn’t a solo initiative, it affects the whole team.
Looking across the panel discussions, a clearer pattern emerged. Organisations seeing meaningful change were paying attention not to one thing, but to three interconnected levels: what leadership intends, what the organisation is structurally set up to do, and what people actually feel. We’ve come to think of these as strategic, operational and cultural impact.
The three types of impact
Strategic impact: the “why”
This is about intent: what the organisation is deliberately trying to achieve, and why neuro-inclusion matters to its success. It’s a question of clarity and ownership. Why does this matter here? What does success actually look like? Who is accountable for it? The strongest organisations link inclusion to organisational health, retention, sustainability and performance. The weaker version treats it as compliance, or a “nice to have.” Most organisations we spoke to have strong intent but limited operational follow-through to back it up.
That gap between intent and follow-through shows up in the wider research too: 85% of employer representatives report rising demand for neurodiversity support, but only 38% say they have enough resources to meet it (Birkbeck & NiB, 2026).
Good practice at this level looks like publicly documented commitments; a steering committee driven by business leaders rather than sitting solely within HR; neuro-inclusion explicitly framed as a performance and sustainability issue rather than a values statement; and hiring goals that treat neurodivergent strengths, pattern recognition, problem solving, as genuine business assets rather than a diversity metric.
Operational impact: the infrastructure
This is the policies, processes and resources that either enable or block inclusion in practice. It’s where many organisations get stuck, because impact depends on whether needs are being met and barriers removed over time, not addressed once on a form. When systems are unclear, or under-resourced, the individual has to manage that uncertainty alone, and that isn’t inclusion.
In practice, good looks like moving away from one-size-fits-all workspace design toward flexible, sensory-friendly environments; real budget allocated to training and assistive technology; disclosure pathways that are safe, visible, and kept separate from performance management; and line managers equipped, through proper learning and development, to be relationship enablers rather than gatekeepers.
This is often where things break down in practice. More than a third of managers report having received no neurodiversity training at all (City & Guilds Neurodiversity Index, 2025), and managers’ lack of understanding, not cost, is now the most commonly reported barrier to putting adjustments in place (Birkbeck & NiB, 2026).
Cultural impact: what people experience
This is where all of the above is felt, in trust, belonging, and outcomes over time. It shows up less in language like “bring your whole self to work” and more in specifics: people feeling heard, trusting the organisation, and not blaming themselves when something is difficult. Disclosure comes up often in this context, but importantly, not as a target to achieve. Even a small rise in disclosure is a meaningful signal, because it reflects psychological safety rather than pressure to share.
That signal matters because psychological safety among neurodivergent employees has not improved compared with three years ago (Birkbeck & NiB, 2026), which suggests strategic commitments and operational processes aren’t yet reaching how people actually feel day to day.
Cultural impact also surfaces indirectly, through reduced grievances, lower sickness absence, improved morale and better retention, genuine organisational health indicators, not soft outcomes. It’s visible in leadership narratives shifting from deficit-based language to strengths-based framing, in colleagues seeing adjustments as legitimate rather than a source of resentment, and in the everyday, easy-to-miss moments where a manager actually responds when a need is raised.
Taking your organisation's Impact Pulse
These three levels are connected: strategic intent sets the direction, operational infrastructure puts it into practice, and culture is where people experience the result. But in practice, organisations rarely move through all three at the same pace. What came through across the panels was more uneven than that: pockets of impact at one level, without matching activity at the others.
One organisation might have real operational activity in place, awareness training delivered, adjustments made, perhaps triggered by a single Access to Work claim, but no strategic intent or leadership sponsorship driving it. The activity exists, but it isn’t connected to anything wider, because no one senior has said why it matters or what success should look like. As a result, that activity tends to stay isolated: a one-off training session or a single adjustment, rather than part of an ongoing approach.
Another organisation might have clear strategic intent: a public commitment, a steering group, genuine leadership buy-in, but no budget or operational infrastructure to put it into practice. The “why” is well established, but without the processes and resources to support it, that intent doesn’t translate into anything employees actually experience.
Culture is where impact is ultimately felt, but it depends on what’s happening at the strategic and operational levels. An organisation with activity but no strategy, or strategy but no infrastructure, is unlikely to see much change in how people experience their day-to-day working life.
Most organisations we spoke to are strong in one or two of these areas, rarely all three. The more useful question to take back to your own team isn’t “are we doing enough?” It’s sharper than that: which of these three levels do we actually have in place, and which is missing?
That’s usually where the real work starts.
How can neurobox support you?
If you’re looking to move beyond awareness and understand where your organisation’s strategic intent, operational infrastructure and lived culture are, and aren’t, aligned, we can help. Whether you’re reviewing existing practice or starting fresh, we’ll work with you to:
- Audit your current neuro-inclusion approach across strategic, operational and cultural indicators
- Design manager training that builds real confidence and capability, not just awareness
- Build adjustment processes that work in practice, not just on paper
- Access measurement frameworks that track impact over time, not just satisfaction at a single point
About the author
Deborah works strategically with corporate clients to enable neuroinclusion in the workplace through our consultancy and audit services. She also works with academic research partners on impact-driven research projects, developing NB’s research and innovation agenda.
She has a PhD in dyslexia, performance training, and inclusion from the University of Kent. Her practice-based research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, books, and toolkits, including work with Routledge and the British Dyslexia Association. She has also contributed expert commentary to a range of publications, including the Financial Times.
Deborah is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Healthcare and Communities at Coventry University.
Related readings
