Neurodiversity in
the workplace —
what scoping
reviews in 2026
keep missing
about why the
workplace itself
is the problem

A new scoping review documents the workplace barriers neurodivergent employees face — and reproduces the framing that creates them

There is a particular kind of well-meaning research that documents exclusion with care, lists barriers with precision, identifies gaps with honesty — and then proceeds, in the same breath, to reproduce the very framing that produced what it was documenting. Dimatos’s scoping review of neurodivergence in the workplace, published in the Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal in May 2026, is a good example of the genre. Forty-seven peer-reviewed sources spanning 2001 to 2025, an iterative Arksey-and-O’Malley methodology, five themes synthesised across the literature, four research gaps identified. The work is honest, the methodology is sound, and the synthesis is fair.

It is also, despite all of that, a near-perfect snapshot of how mainstream HR and management scholarship still cannot quite see what its own evidence is telling it. The review documents that traditional interview structures are “standardised and optimised in a way that aligns with non-neurodivergent strengths.” It documents that neurodivergent employees prioritise the social, psychological, and individualistic dimensions of work while employers prioritise organisational and productivity needs. It documents that disclosure carries genuine professional risk and that adjustments-on-request still position the neurotypical workplace as the default and the neurodivergent employee as the deviation requiring negotiation. Each finding describes a structural problem with the workplace. Each is then framed as something to be managed via better HR practice.

The gap between what the evidence shows and what the frame allows is the editorial story. The review does not see workplace design as the variable to interrogate. It sees workplace design as the fixed environment and the neurodivergent employee as the variable requiring adjustment, education, mentoring, and structured support. The lens is so dominant across the literature that even a methodologically careful scoping review reproduces it without remarking on it. This is not a failure of the author. It is a feature of the field. And it is, with this, the right moment to enter, in my daily editorial coverage, the neurodiversity-in-the-workplace conversation properly, because the field is forming around this lens at the same time the alternative is FINALLY becoming visible.

The five themes describe an environment hostile to neurodivergent architecture — but call the architecture the problem

Take the five themes Dimatos synthesises from the literature and read them slowly without the overlay of the inclusion-and-accommodation doctrinarianism.

Employment barriers: neurodivergent candidates are screened out at interview stage because traditional interview design rewards eye contact, neurotypical body language, and a particular register of small-talk fluency that has no necessary relationship to job performance. The disclosure dilemma: employees face a forced choice between concealing how their cognition works (at cost to mental health and authenticity) or revealing it (at risk of competence-questioning, harassment, and damage to career progression). Employer education: HR professionals lack training in the cognitive and communicative diversity of 15-20% of the working population. Support structures: clearly-defined task requirements, structured communication, mentoring relationships — the things the review describes as “reasonable accommodations” for neurodivergent employees — turn out to be the things that make work workable for almost everyone. Collaborative decisions: neurodivergent employees and employers prioritise different aspects of inclusion, and the literature treats this as a gap to bridge rather than as evidence that workplace design currently optimises against the people being asked to fit into it.

Every theme is documenting structural design. The interview format is a design choice. The disclosure requirement is a design choice. The absence of any baseline, of any default understanding in HR in human cognitive variation (unless the organisation pays for neurodiversity consulting), is a design choice. The fact that “structured communication of task requirements” is treated as an adjustment for neurodivergent employees rather than as standard good practice is a design choice. The asymmetry of stakeholder priorities is what happens when a workplace is designed around 80-85% of the population (during a time of absolute-zero-regard for the worker-as-an-individual) and the remaining 15-20% are told to be included, but to do so are asked to advocate for “their own accommodation needs” through formal disclosure processes overseen by HR professionals who have not been trained appropriately.

I’ve been working this seam through the accommodation-as-alibi frame for some time. The argument is structural: a workplace that requires diagnosed disorder and disclosure to access deviation from the typical as “special adjustment”, requires individual, hierarchical (bottom-up) negotiation to access already-standard good-practice constructs, and requires the neurodivergent employee to do the educational work of explaining their own cognition to their HR department and higher-ups, is a workplace that has externalised the cost of its own design choices onto the people most damaged by them. The adjustments policy exists. Disclosure requirements are met. The legal duty is technically discharged. And the actual structural problem, the actual reality for all neurotypes — that the workplace as we know it today can be understood as the surviving remnant of the industrial revolution’s worker-as-economically-standardised and cybernetically-coupled unit and was designed around a narrow band of human cognitive variation and desired, predictable output in the first place (which we NOW call neurotypicality, but THEN was just the level of conformity that the workplaces tolerated from its individual workers, and scaled with) — remains entirely unchanged in its core fabric.

The Vickery scales developed at the University of Canterbury are the closest existing instrument that measures the right thing. The neurodivergent acceptance at work instruments separate individual-level acceptance from organisational-level acceptance, and treat the latter as a structural property rather than as the sum of individual attitudes. That distinction is the one mainstream HR scholarship still struggles to make. Dimatos’s review gestures at it through the “collaborative decisions” theme but does not pursue it to the point where the workplace itself becomes the unit of analysis rather than the neurodivergent employee within it.

Meanwhile, the cost of being asked to fit accumulates in the bodies of the people doing the fitting. Masking is not a quirk; it is sustained suppression of self-regulatory behaviours under chronic environmental mismatch, and recent work has argued it should not be read as an exhaustion symptom but as something the diagnostic system itself produces pressure toward. Technostress research is finally catching up with what neurodivergent workers have been experiencing for years. The literature on workplace neurodiversity sits adjacent to this evidence base without quite touching it. The reason it does not touch it is, as is usually the case, the lens.

The boutique-programme model: JPMorgan, SAP, HPE, and the limits of designated inclusion

The corporate exemplars Dimatos cites are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. JPMorgan Chase’s Autism at Work programme has produced real outcomes for the people enrolled in it. SAP’s neuroinclusion employee support circles do meaningful work. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s pod system pairing neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent employees during onboarding has demonstrated genuine value. These are not cynical gestures by any means, even if they exist because of the good PR they’d get. They are programmes designed by people who care, often co-designed with neurodivergent employees, and they have changed lives.

They are also, and this needs saying clearly, classic boutique inclusion. Each programme is small relative to the organisation it sits within. Each is often autism-specific rather than addressing the full breadth of neurodivergence. Each operates as a designated initiative — apply, be selected, be onboarded into the programme, work within the programme structure (all outside of gen-pop) — rather than as a restructuring of the wider workplace. The HR practices that produced the standard interview format, the disclosure-and-adjustment cycle, the productivity metrics optimised against non-neurodivergent norms, the meeting structures, the open-plan offices, the always-on communication expectations: all of those continue to operate around the boutique programme. The boutique programme is the carve-out (almost always because they can, so why wouldn’t they, at that point), not the redesign. So the redesign never comes. And it’s still not coming. Because of the default lens in play right now.

This is what the field defaults to when it cannot see the structural problem, or is incentivised to not do so. If the framing is “how do we include neurodivergent employees within existing structures,” the answer is naturally a designated programme that creates a sub-structure within which inclusion is more possible. If the framing were “what would workplaces look like if they were designed around the full range of human cognitive variation in the first place,” the answer would be very different — and would involve looking at the standard structures themselves, not at the carve-outs from them, and at each human ourselves, not at the one group identifying themselves as divergent from the typical (which Jung et.al. would track as an interesting societal phenomena indeed). Dimatos’s review cites the exemplars approvingly, as the literature does and will, because the lens treats them as the leading edge of inclusive practice. But they are also, at the very same time, the ceiling the lens cannot see past.

The leadership gap is the lens problem rendered visible

The fourth research gap Dimatos identifies — that neurodivergent leadership is barely studied — is the place where the lens problem becomes most visible. The review notes the gap, cites David Neeleman (JetBlue, ADHD) and Richard Branson (Virgin, dyslexia), and observes that several traits characteristic of neurodivergence map naturally onto known leadership models. The treatment is brief and gestural, as the literature it surveys offers little more.

What the gap reveals is the shape of the lens. The dominant frame asks how neurodivergent employees can be accommodated within existing workplace structures. It does not ask what happens when neurodivergent people design the structures. The exemplars the review cites are not exceptions that prove the rule of neurodivergent workplace difficulty — they are evidence that neurodivergent cognition tends to thrive in environments not designed against it. Neeleman built an airline. Branson built a conglomerate. The pattern across neurodivergent professional success extends well beyond the famous names: founders, freelancers, contractors, sole traders, creative professionals working outside conventional employment structures, academics carving out research programmes that suit their cognitive architecture, and adults who have built careers by selecting environments that fit them rather than negotiating accommodation within environments that do not.

The Neurodiversity Directory’s data and my own lived-experience consistently show the same pattern: neurodivergent people succeed disproportionately in environments they have designed themselves.

The leadership gap exists because the dominant frame cannot register this evidence as relevant. If you ask “how do we accommodate neurodivergent employees within workplace structures,” the success of founders and freelancers and self-employed neurodivergent professionals looks like a separate phenomenon, unrelated to the question. If you ask “what happens when neurodivergent people design the structures,” that population becomes the most important evidence in the field. The leadership gap is not a gap. It is the dominant frame’s blind spot, just rendered as absence and thus analysed as if not blind.

The cluster in my corpus that addresses neurodiversity in the workplace editorially through the rest of 2026 and beyond will work from this starting position. The five themes Dimatos synthesises are real, the four gaps are real, the existing literature is worth engaging with, and the boutique programmes are doing genuine work for the people they reach. None of that changes the structural diagnosis. Workplaces designed around 80-85% of the population, with adjustments-on-request as the inclusion mechanism, generate the barriers the literature documents. The way to address the barriers is not better adjustments. It is workplace design that treats human cognitive variation as the baseline condition of work rather than as a special case requiring HR intervention. That is the cluster’s spine. Future coverage will build from it.

Citations

Dimatos, D. V. (2026) — Neurodiversity Works — Literally: A Scoping Review of Neurodivergence in the Workplace

Vickery, L. (2026) — Individual and Organisational Neurodivergence Acceptance at Work: Development and Validation of Two Scales