Proactive Neuroinclusion: Remove Workplace Barriers Before Employees Have to Ask

Originally published: 16 September 2026
Newsletter title: If We Know What Helps, Why Wait to Be Asked?

What if support started before someone had to ask for it?

When we talk about supporting neurodivergent employees, workplace accommodations and adjustments are an important part of the conversation.

But they usually begin with someone encountering a barrier.

The employee has to recognise what’s making work difficult, work out what might help and then ask for something to change. Depending on the circumstances, they may also need to explain or disclose why they need it.

What if we could remove some of those barriers before anyone encountered them?

Many workplace friction points aren’t particularly difficult to predict. Unclear priorities, ambiguous expectations, inaccessible information, meeting actions that aren’t captured in writing and unnecessary rigidity can make work harder than it needs to be.

They’re not exclusively neurodivergent problems either. But for employees already using more executive function to prioritise, sequence, remember, regulate attention or filter competing information, their impact can be disproportionately high.

In this edition of The Neuro-savvy Leadership Newsletter, I explore what changes when we stop thinking about neuroinclusion only as something we provide in response to individual requests and start designing better conditions for performance from the outset.

In this newsletter you’ll discover

• Why relying solely on employees to request support can leave important needs unmet.
• How predictable workplace friction can create unnecessary barriers to performance.
• Why making support available by default benefits more than neurodivergent employees.
• How Structure + Support + Skills can help leaders identify opportunities for better work design.
• Where proactive performance enablement and individual workplace accommodations each fit.

Why it matters

A workplace can have a perfectly good accommodations process and still make people work unnecessarily hard.

If clearer expectations, accessible information, written follow-ups or greater flexibility would improve someone’s ability to perform, requiring them to struggle first and request those things individually creates an avoidable hurdle.

It also assumes that everyone who needs support will know what would help, feel comfortable asking for it and be willing to disclose whatever information may be required to access it.

Not everyone will.

Proactive neuroinclusion doesn’t mean trying to anticipate every individual’s needs or removing the role of workplace adjustments. It means looking first for unnecessary barriers we can reasonably predict and designing them out wherever possible.

Then, when someone does need something different, personalisation and individual accommodations can sit on top of a stronger foundation.

The result is a workplace where fewer people have to expend unnecessary effort navigating the system before they can get on with doing their job.

Read the original newsletter

This week’s edition of The Neuro-savvy Leadership Newsletter started with a binder full of customer enquiries from a work placement I completed back in 2002.

As I worked my way through it, I noticed people asking the same basic questions again and again, which made me wonder why we were waiting for them to ask for information we already knew they needed.

More than two decades later, I think the same question is worth asking about the way we support people at work.

In the full newsletter, I explore what that old binder taught me about predictable friction, why accommodations shouldn’t be our only approach to neuroinclusion, and how leaders can use Structure + Support + Skills to make good performance easier by default.

→ Read “If We Know What Helps, Why Wait to Be Asked? Getting Ahead of Predictable Friction” on LinkedIn

Related resources

You may also be interested in:

• Supporting ADHD Employees: Better Conditions Create Better Performance – Why better conditions, rather than more pressure, can create more sustainable performance.
• How Hidden Workplace Friction Undermines Performance and Productivity – How seemingly reasonable systems and processes can make work unnecessarily difficult.
• When Capability Becomes Camouflage – Why leaders shouldn’t assume capable employees will ask for support when they need it.
• The Manager’s ADHD Support Guide – Practical guidance for creating better conditions for ADHD employees at work.

About the Neuro-savvy Leadership Newsletter

The Neuro-savvy Leadership Newsletter explores ADHD, neurodiversity and workplace performance through the lens of leadership, organisational systems and sustainable ways of working. Each edition shares practical ideas for reducing unnecessary friction, improving how work is designed and creating conditions where different ways of thinking can translate into meaningful contribution.