Inclusion in the Workplace – A Benefit for All Involved

For many employees, workplace inclusion isn’t experienced through an organisation’s neuroinclusion strategy document. It is experienced through their manager.

We asked our Head of Adjustments & Innovation, Mark Woodward, for some expert insight on the topic. He highlighted that managers have a real influence on someone’s experience at work. Policies and processes are important, but it is often a manager’s everyday actions that are remembered.

By listening, communicating openly and being curious, managers can help people feel valued. Small actions, such as regular check-ins, flexible support where possible, or simply asking, “What would help?” can help employees move from just getting through the day to feeling able to do their best. Managers cannot solve every challenge, but they can create an environment where people feel comfortable talking about what they need. At its heart, good management is about showing people that they matter, and sometimes a little care and curiosity can make more of a difference than we realise.

For organisations looking to make meaningful change, one area to explore is the role of your managers. Do they have the confidence and knowledge to:

• Create psychological safety for their team members
• Have conversations about how their team members work best
• Recognise when workplace barriers are affecting team performance
• Understand reasonable adjustments
• Avoid assumptions
• Know when to seek specialist support for their team members
• Maintain adjustments over time

It is important to remember that managers don’t need to have all the answers. The key is having the confidence to have conversations with their team members.

It’s the question that often gets missed once the workshops have run and the policies are signed off. Answering it requires looking beyond activity and exploring whether inclusion is actually being experienced by employees.

Measuring inclusion within organisations isn’t just the practice of counting how many people have attended awareness training, how many inclusion policies have been written, whether an inclusion strategy is in place, or how many workplace adjustments have been implemented in the organisation. While it’s important to recognise these as significant indicators of neuroinclusive activity, they don’t truly tell us whether employees are experiencing a more inclusive workplace.

Our Head of Research, Dr Deborah Leveroy, recently published an article From Awareness to Impact: Embedding Neuroinclusion into Organisational Culture, which found that many organisations are already doing the right things — training delivered and policies written — but people don’t always feel the difference day-to-day.

Dr Deborah Leveroy and her insight panel described this as the “say/do” gap: the space between what an organisation says it’s doing and what employees actually experience. The most reliable way to check you’re closing that gap is to look at three things together: whether leadership can clearly explain why inclusion matters (strategic intent), whether the processes and resources exist to support it in practice (operational infrastructure), and whether people genuinely feel it, in trust, belonging and the confidence to be themselves (culture).

Most organisations are strong in one or two of these. Very few are strong in all three, and that’s usually where the real work starts.