What institutional design means for neurodivergent employees at work

Individual onus dominates much of the conversation surrounding workplace neurodiversity. Disclosure is seen as an individual responsibility, as is the requirement to request adjustments or procure a diagnosis. Eva Redford, writer on neurodiversity and systems design, thinks that framing is the wrong way round.

Eva received an autism and ADHD diagnosis in early adulthood and found that the diagnosis did something unexpected. ‘What surprised me wasn’t the diagnosis itself,’ Eva says. ‘It was what it did to my memory. Suddenly I could re-read years of experiences through a completely different lens. The struggles I’d attributed to personal failing started to look like something else: a persistent mismatch between how I process the world and how the systems around me were designed to be navigated.’

That reframing, from individual deficit to institutional design, is the intellectual foundation of Eva’s work. And it has direct implications for HR professionals and DEI leads trying to understand why their inclusion efforts are not producing the results they expect.

Eva spoke to Neurodivergent Works about how schools create the conditions neurodivergent employees are expected to navigate, why most workplace inclusion programmes are asking the wrong question and what systems-level change would actually require.

The design assumptions institutions don’t announce

The starting point for Eva’s analysis is that institutions embed assumptions about what counts as normal without announcing them. Over time, certain ways of thinking, communicating and producing become so normalised that they begin to look like human truths, rather than calcified choices.

‘People labelled disordered are often not failing systems,’ Eva says. ‘They are revealing the limits of systems designed for a narrow type of mind.’

Schools are the first institution most people encounter and the one that establishes the template. They train students to sit for extended periods regardless of internal state, shift attention on demand, perform understanding in standardised formats and navigate constant social evaluation. For students whose nervous systems align with those expectations, this can work reasonably well. For many neurodivergent students, though, it manifests as forced adaptation.

Regulation is treated as personal responsibility rather than environmental design. Performance is narrowly defined: timed tests, written output, verbal participation, which privileges certain processing styles while obscuring others. Success is measured by compliance as much as competence.

‘Most damaging is what happens to identity,’ Eva says. ‘Students who consistently struggle don’t conclude the system is poorly designed. They conclude they are.’

The continuum from school to workplace

The assumptions established in school continue into professional life. Traits such as quick processing, communicating in socially expected ways and performing under pressure become a baseline for capability at work.

‘Neurodivergent people often enter the workplace already having learned that success depends on masking, over-regulating, or working against their natural cognitive styles,’ Eva explains. ‘What looks like a workplace challenge is frequently a continuation of an earlier pattern: an environment designed around a narrow behavioural model where belonging is conditional on how well you can approximate it, not on how well your actual strengths are understood or used.’

This reframes a question HR professionals often ask: whether the workplace is being asked to fix something the education system created. Eva’s answer is that the premise is wrong.

‘Both systems are actively maintaining the same assumptions about productivity, communication and behaviour. This isn’t a handoff. It’s a continuum.’

Where most inclusion efforts fall short

Eva is direct about the limits of current approaches to neurodiversity inclusion, including in the United States, where the conversation is further advanced in some respects but carries the same structural limitations.

‘Most inclusive systems still exclude. They just do it more quietly.’

The neurodiversity discussion remains focused primarily on autism and ADHD, with cognitive difference as the primary axis. But human variation doesn’t stop there. It is also cultural, linguistic and economic. Designing for cognitive flexibility without accounting for lived experience in its full context simply relocates exclusion.

‘These approaches change the method without changing the assumptions about who the system was originally built for. The environment feels different, but not to everyone.’

The shift HR professionals need to make

The practical implication of Eva’s analysis is captured in a single distinction: the difference between an accommodation mindset and a design mindset.

Where accommodation asks how an individual fits the system, design asks what assumptions are built into the system itself. This includes competence, communication and professionalism.

Most of the barriers neurodivergent employees face are not dramatic. They are everyday design choices: unclear expectations, rigid communication norms, performance tied to visibility, environments that require constant self-regulation.

‘Redesigning those, making expectations explicit, offering multiple ways to demonstrate competence, building flexibility into how work gets done, isn’t lowering standards,’ Eva says. ‘It’s removing hidden ones.’

The evidence, Eva argues, consistently shows that those changes do not only benefit neurodivergent employees. Clearer roles, less ambiguity and fairer evaluation reduce friction for everyone.

‘Designing for neurodivergent people is really designing for human variation. That’s not a DEI initiative. That’s just good organisational design.’

For HR professionals and DEI leads, that reframing is the takeaway. The question is not how to accommodate difference within an existing system. It is whether the system itself was designed with human variation in mind, and whether there is the organisational willingness to examine that.

‘The constraint isn’t feasibility,’ Eva says. ‘It’s willingness, specifically, willingness to reexamine what competence and professionalism actually mean, and who those definitions were originally written for.’

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