Workplace Accommodations and Neurodiversity

The prevalence rate of autism has grown exponentially in the past 20+ years. Understanding what may be distinct about individuals with autistic and neurodivergent characteristics and how to maximize their workforce participation will be increasingly important. This will need to become part of how we prepare the workplace for individuals with increasingly diverse sets of skills and characteristics, and how we prepare neurodivergent individuals for the workplace in order to secure employment for these individuals and allow them to thrive. (Bruyère in Employment and disability: Issues, innovations, and opportunities, Labor and Employment Relations Association Series 2019, Labor and Employment Relations Association, 2019). Knowing how to create a neurodiversity-inclusive employment process across the employee life cycle will be imperative, and accommodations will be an integral part of creating this more receptive and neurodiversity-navigable work setting. In this chapter, we lay out what accommodations are, what some of the common accommodations and workplace neurodiversity-inclusive considerations in the workplace are, how employers can create neurodiversity-inclusive organizational structures that will support and enhance inclusivity for others (Rivera in Workplace neurodiversity rising. Self-published, 2022), and emerging accommodations brought to the forefront by the impact of the pandemic and the emergence of AI applications in the employment process, as well as how these accommodations considerations will play out across cultural and country-specific contexts.