Measuring  Neuroinclusivity with a Single Digit

To example this point, it’s a known fact that neurodivergent individuals struggle more with mental health. The ancient Greeks believed creative inspiration was achieved through altered states of mind such as “divine madness.”  In many respects, it can be argued that neurodiverse social groups harbour some of the most imaginative and creative minds.  But, these qualities, much in demand in the business world today, come with the necessary baggage of sensitivity, social anxieties, and a wide range of conditions that, if extreme, can result in medical states of mental and physical disorder.  For business leaders and departmental managers to appreciate what changes to culture are needed, understanding the scale of the challenge matters.

The focus of the Universal Workforce Institute (UWI) is to create an inclusive workforce culture that encourages a sense and belonging.  Perhaps, for this reason, we care little about the size of neurodiversity group quotients, and more on the progress of work to build belonging cultures.

If there were one digit that spelt out the progress of organisations on their journey to forging a welcoming belonging culture for all, that would be something. Unfortunately, measuring behavioural change is one of the most challenging KPIs to originate!

What we know we need to qualify is:

1. What to measure.
2. How to measure it.
3. How to capture data to measure.

Common sense suggests, the solution is to develop a measurement approach that is integrated into the operational behaviours of the enterprise.  To explain how this can work, we need to take a step back and talk about the critical role that middle managers play in business.

Middle managers form the interlayer between executive teams that are distanced from the business as usual, and workers charged with delivering outcomes.  They are the essential conduit for all policies and actions passed down from on high, and they are instrumental in shaping the people, process, data, systems and behaviours that augment business activity. 

Bluntly, if you want to impact on the culture of the business, the will to do so and budgets must originate from the top-down, but the place to prioritise investments in budget, time and effort is the middle management layer.

There are challenges to developing a change agenda that involves middle managers, the biggest of which is TIME.

While middle managers are the most influential of stakeholders of the organisation, they are also the busiest.  Pull your entire layer of middle management from the front-line of business to inject new knowledge and retrain brains, and this will leave a barren wasteland!   Middle managers get their time pulled on from leaders—who want them to report—from their team—who want some personal time to receive mentoring and coaching—and from policies, systems and processes that always need updating.

Like all behavioural change projects, participants must believe that any intervention is going to be good for them and isn’t simply ‘another one of those corporate hobbyhorse initiatives’ that takes them away from work that must be done before they can go home.