This week I’ve been having conversations and fielding a lot of questions about the upcoming changes to employment law, which will extend protections against unfair dismissal to employees from 6 months into their roles. It’s currently 2 years, which on the surface seems absolutely demented when you think about it. UNFAIR dismissal. And we’re currently unprotected against that until we’ve worked for 2 years. So let’s take the win and celebrate that these protections are being brought forward to any member of permanent staff who has worked with a company for longer than 6 months.
Better than before. But in practice…?
I’ve been through the employment tribunal process. Those protections applied to me, but in reality still didn’t stop my employer behaving in a way that caused serious harm to my mental health.
A lot of the issues surrounded my then-recent ADHD diagnosis.
So, what difference could better training, support and understanding make? For those working in the creative sector, where an estimated 50%+ of staff are self reporting some form of neurodivergence, that training, support or understanding could mean the difference between being able to thrive in the workplace, or suffer the same challenges that I did. And to be perfectly frank: I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
This week I led a training session for NABS, on working with ADHD. These sessions are always oversubscribed, packed with ADHDers from across the advertising, media, marketing and PR sectors, looking for ways of making their ADHD work for them, looking to have their experiences validated and acknowledge their ADHD strengths.
But this session something else struck me.
There were more allies in that session than I’d ever seen before. Managers looking to support their staff with informed, person centric accommodations. One story in particular genuinely made me choke up – the care and support being offered by this individual manager to their team member was such in such stark contrast to the experience that I’d had that I couldn’t help but be moved.
So I know that this kind of training matters. It’s why I do what I do – using my lived experience and passion for helping my fellow NDers – because it could mean the difference between someone getting the right support at the right time, and… well, the alternatives are not worth thinking about.
What’s Changing
Here’s the bit that should worry every business leader reading this, not just the HR department.
Employer reps in this year’s Birkbeck/Neurodiversity in Business research rated their own training on supporting neurodivergent staff at just 4.97 out of 10. Their support for doing it well: 5.35 out of 10. And yet their confidence in managing neurodivergent talent sat at 6.61.
Managers are more confident than they are trained.
I don’t want this to come across as criticism of any individual managers out there, I’ve been in enough rooms with them to know most genuinely want to get this right. It’s a system that’s asked people to lead without giving them the tools.
And the demand for those tools isn’t slowing down. 85% of employer representatives in the same research say demand for neurodiversity support has grown in just the last 18 months. This isn’t a niche ask from a small group anymore. Across every sector, from finance to construction to the creative industries where I spend most of my time, people are seeking diagnoses, disclosing conditions, and asking their employers to understand them properly. Nearly three-quarters of neurodivergent people in this research reported more than one neurotype, so even the manager who did the one ADHD training session three years ago is probably still working from an incomplete picture.
Add the legal timeline I opened with, and you get a business risk arriving from two directions at once: a shorter window before an unfair dismissal claim can land, and a workforce that is more likely than ever to need, and to ask for, real understanding, not guesswork.
The old approach, of managers self-teaching as they go and hoping for the best, was already showing cracks. It will not survive the changes coming in 2027.
What You Can Do About It
If you’re a member of staff, neurodivergent or not:
Ask for this training. Don’t wait for HR to decide it’s a priority, put it on their radar yourself.
I want to be clear about something, because it’s the part people misunderstand most: this training is not just “for” the ADHDers and autistic people on your team. It’s for everyone who has ever sat next to someone whose way of working looked different to theirs and didn’t know what to make of it. It’s for the manager who wants to support well but doesn’t know how. It’s for the colleague who’s been quietly frustrated by missed context, without realising there was a reason for it. Psychological safety, feeling able to be honest, to make mistakes, to be yourself at work, is the single strongest driver of whether ANY employee, neurodivergent or not, stays and thrives in their role. Better understanding lifts that for the whole room, not just the people it was ostensibly designed for.
You don’t need a diagnosis to benefit from a workplace that understands how different minds work. You just need to work alongside other humans. So does everyone else.
If you’re a manager or a leader:
I’ll be blunt: you can’t self-teach your way through this one anymore.
The data backs that up, but honestly, so does everything I hear from the ADHDers and AuDHDers I coach every week. That’s not a personal failing. It’s an UK-wide gap, and it’s only going to get worse.
The numbers of people disclosing, diagnosing and asking for support are only going up, in every industry. Nearly three-quarters of neurodivergent employees are managing more than one neurotype, which means the version of “training” that’s a single slide deck on ADHD symptoms was never going to be enough, and it certainly isn’t now. And from January, you’ll have a fraction of the runway you used to have to figure this out reactively.
I sat in that NABS session this week and watched what it looks like when a manager gets this right. It changes lives. I’ve also lived what it looks like when a manager doesn’t. It changes lives in the other direction.
You get to choose which one you’re going to be. Get on board with proper training, not a tick-box session, but something that actually equips your team, before the choice gets made for you.
I run training sessions for businesses on ADHD, AuDHD, Neurodiversity and Mental Health. Take a look at my training page and schedule a conversation with me here: LINK
You can download the full Birkbeck / Neurodiversity in Business report here: LINK
To talk to me about ADHD or AuDHD coaching as an employee support book a call here: LINK