My Top 3 Reasonable Adjustments

My top 3 Reasonable adjustments (RA’s) in the workplace. 

1. Sensory Sensory Sensory! 

One of the best places to start if you are overwhelmed by RA’s in the workplace, either for yourself or your team members, is sensory processing support. For many neurodivergent conditions, like ADHD and autism, our sensory needs being met is step one to us accessing the workplace, or really any place. 

Here it can be vital to think about the environments that we are in. It can be helpful to then ask questions about the spaces we need to work in to figure these out. If our job is office based, how much noise is there? How bright is the room we're in? Is there somewhere we can go where it's quiet and we're not disturbed? Sometimes the solution is easy, we can simply leave the lights off over somebody's desk, or open a window for a gentle breeze to cool the room down.

When we're in a space where we have very little control over sensory input, instead we might have to think about the individual. So, if we can't turn off the lights, can we allow one of our team members to wear tinted or dark glasses instead?

When coming up with sensory reasonable adjustments, sometimes we have to think outside the box, and other times it's really as simple as allowing someone extra breaks to leave the building or sit in a quiet space, letting someone bring their own fidget aids into work, being assigned a specific seat away from busy areas, or approving a request to work from home so they can be in a familiar sensory environment.

2. Feedback and Communication 

Communication is a core element of most jobs. Many neurodivergent people struggle with the burdens of communicating in the workplace, this is not because we are poor communicators but because we often communicate differently. Reasonable adjustments around communication share this burden, allowing people to more effectively use their skills in a working environment. 

Some very small changes to how we approach communicating with others at work can make a massive difference to neurodivergent people. We're going to focus on one of these areas here for something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD.

RSD is where somebody is particularly sensitive to any perceived rejection, it doesn't need to be a purposeful rejection but for people who relate to RSD traits, taking feedback and working collaboratively in the workplace can be tricky. Again, not because they are not brilliant employees, but because they need a different style of feedback to work effectively.

One of the adjustments that can help here is agreeing systems of communication ahead of time. This makes it much easier from both a management and employee perspective, it means feedback and group work is made easier by simply having a meeting and talking about the ways in which feedback is most effective for us. For example, somebody with RSD might find it helpful if tone indicators (like emojis or  tone tags) are used in emails. For another person, it might be that feedback needs to be done face-to-face or over a video call and they ask a particular language to be used around the work that they have done, like avoiding harsh terms and sticking to more neutral language.

Feedback is an important part of most work, and allows us to grow in our roles, so agreeing how we give and take feedback is good for everybody, and can make working on projects and collaborations much easier all around. 

3. Write things down. 

Finally to end this list we're going to focus on the most simple accommodation we can make. For many of us, myself included, holding information in our heads might be particularly hard. From a manager's perspective, they might see an employee who isn't completing tasks in the way they expected or another who confirms tasks verbally but then struggles to remember them outside of that conversation. This doesn't mean that someone wasn't paying attention or doesn't care about the task, actually it can tell us that somebody is struggling to hold this information in their head and might get easily distracted by other priorities and responsibilities. 

The easiest way to help with this is to write things down. Providing written confirmations this could be by email after a virtual meeting, it could be a post-it note they can put on their desk. For more in depth tasks we sometimes recommend a process map that walks somebody through the stages of task completion and they can refer back to if they're ever doing the same complex task in the future. 

This is different than expecting somebody to take notes themselves, instead allowing them to be fully engaged in the moment, taking away some of the burden of having to hold information in their minds while also trying to process and understand it. It is also better for them than having to sort out a muddle of notes, automated transcripts or summaries later on. 

I particularly like this one for supporting team members because if I provide a summary of my expectations for tasks and they are confused, it tells me ahead of time that we're not on the same page, and I can easily re-explain myself in a way that avoids miscommunications in the long run.

These three simple adjustments are some of many that can massively improve the experience of neurodivergent people in the workplace. Not sure if these will be helpful? Take a look at our resource below with different suggestions on the possible reasonable adjustments that might help somebody access the workplace.

Our resource: Neurodiverse Training's Interactive Guide to Reasonable Adjustments