Neurodiversity Acceptance Week 2025

• Diversity and Inclusion workshop development and delivery:
  • Led by our Workplace Psychologist and the Workplace Consultancy Team, we bring a workshop specifically focused on D&I to all of our workplace consultancy projects. The workshops have representatives from the clients’ neurodiverse communities, allowing us to truly understand the experiences and barriers in the workplace. We saw real success in this approach with Places for People, with great engagement and feedback to inform our design brief.
• Diversity and Inclusion design reviews:
  • During the design process, our Workplace Psychologist and project Interior Designer will regularly update the clients’ neurodiversity representatives on the design progress, cementing those relationships and allowing us to further enhance the inclusivity of their space based on feedback.
• Diversity and Inclusion-focused change management:
  • Change management is integral to a successful workplace change – and ensuring this works for the Neurodiverse community specifically, is super important to us. We’ll consult with our clients’ internal neurodiverse community to ensure we take the most inclusive approach – including multi-media information sharing, manageable amounts of information at any-one time, making it as digestible as possible, workshops to discuss any anxieties or concerns etc.
• Neurodiversity in FM workshops:
  • We’ve worked with organisations, such as Barclays, to upskill their internal people experience, culture and FM teams to ensure they’re best supporting their neurodiverse colleagues on a day-to-day basis. These have been wildly successful, with incredible engagement improvements in service offerings.
• Inhouse neuro-inclusive design knowledge:
  • We are proud to be constantly building our knowledge, whether that’s through first-hand experiences from projects, or through proactive learning opportunities, such as seminar attendance, internal training, workshops with our partners in neurodiversity, Creased Puddle.
• Internal awareness of neurodiversity:
  • Internally, we seek to create a psychologically safe environment for all of our own neurodiverse colleagues, whether or not they have a formal diagnosis or wish to disclose their neurodiversity. Through company-wide awareness and empathy, we’re finding that our neurodiverse community are being supported to bring their authentic selves to work, helping everyone to thrive – we’re not perfect, but we’re striving to be better every day!

• Employee-ownership initiatives:
  • As an employee-owned organisation, we have an EOT Forum, who are the voice of our colleagues. A recent initiative was to bring baskets of fidget toys into our meeting rooms and working area in order to facilitate stimming. This has already been a hit, allowing people to feel more grounded, focused, and present when they’re at work. A winning formula.
• External knowledge sharing:
  • We regularly present at exhibitions, seminars, or on podcasts about our approach to inclusive design, offering key tangible advice for other designers or clients on creating a more neuroinclusive space. We have also written resources, available for download, that go into detail about the theory and workplace application of neurodiversity.
• Tool development:
  • We will be (very soon!!) launching an incredible first-in-industry tool that deeply analyses your current or future workplace design from a D&I perspective… I can’t say any more just yet, but it’s going to be game-changing.
• Award-winning recognition:
  • Don’t just take our word for it – this year we were humbled to pick up the ED&I Initiative award at the IWFM Impact Awards. This recognition and acknowledgement demonstrates how we’re constantly pushing boundaries in our industry to be best-in-class.

This is just a fraction of our activities over the past year. For us, it’s all about the journey, not just posting on social media posts one week out of the year. Whilst we don’t proclaim to know it all, we certainly promise to keep learning, keep an open mind, and keep pushing ahead to drive change in our industry… exciting things are coming in this next 12 months! To learn more check out our Inclusion Equation series!