Is Your Workplace Truly Neurodiversity-Friendly?
Mental Health Awareness Week – 11–17 May 2026
From Equality Act duties to real tribunal lessons – a practical guide for building workplaces where every mind can thrive.
Mental Health Awareness Week is not just a moment to share resources and put a green ribbon on your intranet. For organisations serious about their people and their legal exposure, it is a prompt to ask some harder questions. One of the most urgent right now is this: are you doing enough for your neurodivergent workforce?
The numbers are stark. 964,000 workers reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25 up from 776,000 the year before. The HSE has made clear that employers can expect increased scrutiny of psychological health, and employment tribunal claims linked to disability discrimination, including neurodiversity, have surged to record levels.
So this Mental Health Week, let’s go beyond awareness and into action. Here is what you actually need to know and do.
Is neurodivergence a disability under the Equality Act?
It is one of the most commonly misunderstood questions in employment law, and getting the answer wrong is costly.
Under the Equality Act 2010, a disability is defined as a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. “Long-term” means lasting, or likely to last, at least 12 months. “Substantial” means more than minor or trivial.
Crucially, the tribunal focuses on the impact of a condition, not its precise diagnosis. Many neurodivergent conditions (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and dyscalculia) will meet this threshold for many individuals, though each case must be assessed on its own facts.
Key legal point
Where an employee or job applicant meets the disability definition, employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act. This duty is proactive: it does not wait for the employee to ask. Ignorance of a condition is not, on its own, a defence if you ought reasonably to have known about it.
This means neurodiversity sits firmly within your equality, diversity and inclusion, and health and safety obligations. Not as a “nice to have” inclusion initiative, but as a legal baseline. Take a look at our blog post on “What to Expect in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” for more information.
What recent tribunal cases are telling us
The number of employment tribunal cases featuring neurodiversity as a factor has risen sharply, from 265 cases annually in 2020 to 517 in 2025, representing a 95% increase. Disability discrimination claims now make up 13% of all tribunal claims, with the biggest quarter-on-quarter jump recorded in early 2025.
These are not abstract statistics. Behind them are specific cases with specific lessons. Here are three of the most instructive:
ADHD: Khorram v Capgemini UK (2025)
A cloud technologist disclosed her ADHD diagnosis during probation. An occupational health assessment produced clear recommendations including neurodiversity awareness training for her team, coaching sessions, and more structured task-setting. Capgemini implemented almost none of them. She was dismissed. The tribunal found this amounted to a failure to make reasonable adjustments ruling that the cost of the training “was not a prohibitive difficulty.”
Lesson: Occupational health recommendations must be acted upon, not filed away.
Dyslexia: Kitchen chef v Greene King (2025)
A chef with dyslexia was dismissed after struggling to read orders accurately in a busy kitchen environment. The tribunal found that simple, affordable adjustments (clearer print formats, visual order systems, verbal confirmation processes) could have made a meaningful difference. They were never considered.
Lesson: Adjustments don’t need to be expensive or complex. A failure of imagination is still a failure.
Autism / ADHD: James v Venture (2025)
A line manager made comments during a meeting that were intended to “lighten the atmosphere” but were perceived by a neurodivergent employee as violating his dignity. The tribunal upheld the harassment claim, intent was irrelevant. Additionally, a meeting was held in a brightly lit room despite known sensory difficulties. Both were found discriminatory.
Lesson: Good intentions are not a defence. Casual comments and environmental factors matter.
Rising risk
The Employment Rights Act 2025 will extend the tribunal limitation period for most claims from three to six months, and unfair dismissal rights are expected to become a day-one right from 2027. The window for liability is getting longer. The time to act is now, before claims arise, not after.
Rethinking recruitment, communication and processes
Some of the most significant legal risk sits at the very beginning of the employment relationship before a contract is signed. In one recent case, a candidate with Asperger’s syndrome was rejected after struggling with a timed, multiple-choice situational judgement test. The tribunal found indirect disability discrimination, discrimination arising from disability, and failure to make reasonable adjustments all at the recruitment stage.
This should prompt every organisation to audit how they hire as much as how they manage existing staff.
Recruitment audit checklist
- Are application processes accessible in multiple formats (not just online forms with strict word counts)?
- Do interviews rely heavily on unstructured social dynamics that disadvantage neurodivergent candidates?
- Are timed tests or psychometric assessments a genuine job requirement, or can they be modified?
- Do hiring managers know how to recognise and respond to a request for adjustments?
- Are job adverts written in plain, jargon-free language with realistic requirements?
- Is there a clear, welcoming process for candidates to flag support needs in advance?
Beyond recruitment, communication styles deserve attention. Many neurodivergent employees do better with written instructions rather than verbal, prefer clear agendas before meetings, struggle with open-plan noise, or need more processing time in discussions. These are not personal preferences to be accommodated at a manager’s discretion. Where they relate to a disability, they are adjustments your organisation has a duty to consider.
Reasonable adjustments in practice
The phrase “reasonable adjustments” can feel vague, but in practice it means: what changes would remove or reduce a substantial disadvantage the person faces because of their disability, and what does it cost to implement them?
Three tools are increasingly recognised as best practice and worth embedding into your HR processes:
01. Workplace needs assessments
A structured assessment, ideally carried out by an occupational health specialist or a trained workplace assessor, identifies specific challenges and recommends targeted adjustments. It transforms a vague conversation into an actionable plan. Critically, if you commission an assessment, you must take its recommendations seriously. Capgemini’s tribunal outcome was shaped by the fact that recommendations existed but were ignored.
02. Adjustment passports
An adjustment passport is a live document (agreed between manager and employee) that records what adjustments are in place and why. Its real value is portability: when someone changes role, team or manager, the passport travels with them. Employees no longer have to re-disclose and re-negotiate from scratch every time, which reduces a significant source of anxiety and workplace friction.
03. Flexible working by default
Flexibility in hours, location, task structure, deadline-setting and communication modes, is often one of the most impactful adjustments for neurodivergent employees. With flexible working now a day-one right in Great Britain, there is no good reason to treat it as an exceptional measure. Building genuine flexibility into how your teams work reduces the need for formal individual requests and signals an inclusive culture.
“Training itself can constitute a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act.”
Creating an inclusive culture for disclosed and undisclosed neurodivergence
Here is the uncomfortable truth: most neurodivergent employees will never formally disclose their condition to their employer. The reasons are well-documented: fear of stigma, concerns about career progression, previous negative experiences, or simply not having a formal diagnosis despite clear neurological differences.
This does not eliminate your duty of care. Where an employer could reasonably have known about a disability (through observable behaviour, performance patterns, or conversations) the courts have found that the duty to make reasonable adjustments still applies.
The practical implication? Building an inclusive culture protects everyone. When your managers are trained to spot potential signs of neurodivergent needs, when your processes are designed to be flexible by default, and when psychological safety is genuinely embedded in your team culture, you reduce risk for the organisation and for the individual. Read our blog post on “10 Ways to Improve Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ED&I) in the Workplace” to learn more.
What psychological safety looks like for neurodivergent employees
It means a person can say “I struggle with this specific type of task” without fear of performance management. It means line managers who respond to difference with curiosity rather than frustration. It means awareness at every level of the organisation that brains work differently and that is both normal and valuable.
The James v Venture case is a useful reminder here. Comments made “in jest” still constituted harassment in law. Every line manager in your organisation needs to understand that well-meaning ignorance is not protection and that the way to avoid harm is knowledge, not just good intentions.
Making your organisation neurodiversity-friendly: where to start
Becoming genuinely neurodiversity-friendly is not a one-off project. It is an ongoing commitment that sits across policies, practice, leadership and culture. But every journey starts somewhere, and these are the highest-impact steps to take right now:
1. Audit your equality and inclusion policies
Does your equality policy explicitly reference neurodiversity? Does your sickness absence policy account for neurodivergent-related absences? Does your performance management process have a mechanism for identifying when underperformance may relate to an unmet adjustment need? If not, close those gaps.
2. Invest in staff and manager training seriously
The through-line across every tribunal case we have reviewed is a manager who did not understand the impact of a neurodivergent condition. Training is not just good practice, the tribunal in Khorram v Capgemini confirmed it can itself constitute a reasonable adjustment. This training to develop your team should be practical, scenario-based and focused on real conversations, not just awareness-raising. Our blog post on “How to Include Neurodivergent Employees in Your Compliance Training Plans” dives into this in more detail.
3. Implement adjustment passports
Work with employees to create and maintain adjustment passports. Make clear these are collaborative documents, owned as much by the employee as the employer, and that they will be honoured when roles or managers change.
4. Review your environmental and sensory defaults
Open-plan offices, bright lighting, noisy canteens, back-to-back video calls, many standard workplace environments create disproportionate barriers for neurodivergent staff. Even small changes, like designated quiet spaces or the option to attend meetings by audio rather than video, can make a significant difference.
5. Engage senior leadership
Inclusion initiatives that live only in HR rarely shift culture. Senior leaders who are visible champions of neurodiversity (who talk about it, ask about it, and model inclusive behaviour) signal to the whole organisation that it matters. Consider a senior sponsor for your neurodiversity programme, and give that sponsor the knowledge to be effective.
6. Make mental health first aiders more visible
HSE’s Working Minds campaign continues to promote five evidence-based steps: reach out and have conversations, recognise the signs, respond to risk, reflect on what you find, and make it routine. Mental health first aiders play a critical role, but only if people know who they are and feel safe approaching them.
How InfoAware’s Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit can help
We have built our Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit of online courses specifically to help organisations move from good intentions to embedded practice. Whether you are looking to raise awareness across your whole workforce, upskill your management population, or equip your HR team with the knowledge to handle complex situations, our courses are designed around real-world application.
Through the toolkit, we aim to:
- Enable teams to be inclusive, productive and successful, not just compliant on paper
- Support managers and leaders to succeed by being dynamic, self-aware and fair in how they lead diverse teams
- Empower organisations and individuals to tackle bullying, harassment and discrimination confidently and early
- Enhance business and personal resilience and wellbeing across every level of the organisation
Our off-the-shelf training courses are fully customisable to your organisation’s branding, policies and learning objectives. Here is what you get:
Engaging interactions
Bite-sized chapters with easy-to-navigate menus and built-in knowledge checks
Fully customisable
Aligned to your branding, policies and unique learning objectives
LMS compatible
Works with all Learning Management Systems, including our Moodle LMS
Accessible by design
Subtitles, transcripts and optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop
Ready to take the next step?
Mental Health Awareness Week is the ideal moment to start, but the legal duty and business case for action don’t have a calendar. If you would like to explore how digital learning can help your organisation build a genuinely neurodiversity-friendly culture, we would love to have that conversation.
Book a free digital learning consultancy call with our team, or download our Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit catalogue to explore our full range of courses.
