How a Neurodiversity ERG builds better teams

I’m one of two co-chairs of the Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group (ERG), and I have been for a couple of years. I’ve had mental health problems since my early teens, and I learned recently that I’ve been autistic and ADHD for my whole life.

The ERG covers all of TPXimpact, supporting all our neurodivergent staff in a wide variety of ways. This includes things like:

• help identifying and communicating their needs

• communicating what accommodations are available for neurodivergent people, and helping folks get access to them

• providing a community to share problems and solutions.

• being a friendly, understanding feedback route to leadership

• getting involved with building and implementing inclusive policies

• educating business leaders about neuro-inclusive practices

• presenting our learnings on neuro-inclusive practice to clients, and sometimes broader audiences

It is a wonderful community to be a part of, and extremely rewarding to be able to help so many people flourish.

Bringing neuro-inclusion to projects

When I am working with clients, I bring the same energy around championing inclusion, encouraging diversity, and enabling broad engagement. This benefits not only our teams, but also the clients.

All this means that we aim to implement practices like:

• clear meeting goals and agendas set and shared in advance

• transparently, clearly documented project priorities, and explanations of why they are that way

• synchronous and asynchronous comms methods agreed with everyone

• mutually agreed collaboration tools and approaches

• flexible working times

You might look through these and wonder what makes them neuro-inclusive practices? A lot of these sound like they’re nothing to do with neurodiversity – surely they are just good ways of working? Well, you’re not entirely wrong. They are good ways of working for everyone.

The curb-cut effect

Some of you may be familiar with the curb-cut effect. This is where you make a change for a marginalised group and it benefits more than the intended audience. 

In this example, lowering (cutting) curbs for wheelchair users makes crossing roads easier for the elderly, for people pushing prams, travellers with luggage, children, etc. 

Sending out clear meeting goals and agendas before meetings helps everyone to be prepared appropriately. It helps people choose whether they are needed or should prioritise something else. It can make meetings run smoother, take less time and get better outcomes.

But for some neurodivergent people it can be the difference between being overwhelmed by new and unexpected information, or having a manageable day; having an autistic meltdown/shutdown, or being able to function normally; being able to participate or not.

Making accommodations is not difficult

These kinds of accommodations can be crucial accessibility requirements for many neurodivergent people, and implementing them is much easier than you might think.

On a recent project for the Department of Education, one of the team needed to not start work until 10am, and the daily standup was scheduled for 9:30am. We didn’t need to ask why, go through a formal request process or jump through any hoops. We just checked it didn’t conflict with anything else, shuffled a couple of other meetings where necessary, and changed the time to half an hour later.

Every neurodivergent person is different, so what works for one person may not help others, and sometimes you’ll need to find compromises between conflicting needs. But as long as everyone works collaboratively to support each other, I’ve never found anything to be insurmountable.

When I struggled with some communication challenges, I reached out to people in the neurodiversity ERG to get advice and suggestions. Without them, I don’t know if I could have identified what I needed to do. But with the combined wisdom and experience of around 100 neurodivergent people, we can conquer anything. 

All it took to unlock that was having a Slack channel for us to talk in.

Neuro-inclusive practices create big wins

I could spend more words than I’ve already written telling you how neurodiversity unlocks innovation, boosts productivity, and improves team performance.

Instead, I will tell you the most important benefit to having an ERG community, above and beyond all these business wins. 

It means people like me can actually work. 

About 7 in 10 autistic people are unemployed. I would be one of them if it wasn’t for the inclusive measures championed by our ERG, put into practice by TPXimpact, and passed on to our client work environments.

So build ERGs, make neuroinclusive practices part of your daily working life, and you get to make the difference between having talented people contributing their extraordinary talents to your workplace.