Address culture before policy: The search for solutions for ND people may start with asking employees to fill out forms, declare their diagnoses, or describe their conditions, implying that employers will act on this information and design policies with their needs in mind. Bad move, Rivera cautions – unless you are fully serious about following through and actually making changes. I can see why this mistake could have an outsize effect on workplaces: if you solicit someone’s deeply personal medical and mental health information but don’t use it for their welfare, it starts to feel like surveillance. To encourage people with neurodiversity to open up, it’s better to show intent first, through actions like updating non-discrimination policies and encouraging judgement-free conversations about mental health. To collect information, anonymous organisational surveys and continued evaluation of the cohort may be a better idea. 

Don’t create a separate hiring pipeline: Hiring more ND people is a fundamental win for disability inclusion. But that win should belong to employees, not to enhanced diversity scorecards. ND people who may be unwilling to out themselves at work, or haven’t received official diagnoses, will be left out of a narrow pipeline that focuses only on ND hiring. It may also be a recipe for failure if the jobs in this pipeline are typically seen as low-level, low-growth jobs, which Rivera says is often the case. It also helps to understand workplace exclusion intersectionality. For instance, I learned from Rivera’s book, there’s a higher chance that neurodiverse individuals identify as LGBTQIA+. Both hiring and reasonable accommodations at work should reflect this reality, and not aim for empty scalability. 

Normalise discussions about vulnerability through leadership. I found this a striking solution to vague ideas about where to start with making the workplace safer for ND people –– have leaders talk about their own vulnerabilities in a way that models both safety and success for ND employees. I found it related to a point Rivera makes about the importance of diversifying decision-making at all levels of the organisation. Their point is specifically about opening up decision-making to ND people by making use of both emotion and logic, to take both acceptance and scepticism on board, and see them in continuity rather than in opposition to each other. I think that being able to apply this principle broadly and transparently helps advance inclusion overall, and enhances a culture of appreciation for our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths. 

Make communication clear. This feels so basic that it may not appear especially insightful. But Rivera’s discussion of how various neurodiverse conditions affect how we process information opened up many broader questions for me – about accountability, about simplicity in how we design tasks, and about fairness. We live life in ambiguities of all sorts, and the workplace is no different. But the simple and transparent communication of expectations, rules and methods allows people to avoid the confusion and misdirection that comes with those ambiguities. For neurodiverse people, this is crucial to success and to workplace well-being, and bypasses the issue of implied, unclear instructions and expectations set ‘in passing.’ It helps create a culture based on shared values and goals, rather than perks and personalities.  

Adaptability is everything. This is not a contradiction to the previous point. Without flexibility in time, in workspaces, and in work culture, ND people will be denied the reasonable accommodations that workplaces are required to make for employees with disabilities. Without health benefits that can be adapted to cover for ND people’s needs, their work-life balance is in danger of being upset. With too much rigid emphasis on following cultural diktat – needing to “fit in” socially, or going to “fun” events – an ND employee is at risk of burnout. And burnout, as Rivera succinctly points out, is not an employee problem. It’s an employer problem.