Image Credit: Getty Images / Olena Zagoruyko

The challenge of conveying health and safety information is compounded by the fact that not everyone communicates the same way. Although many people think of “accessibility” as referring to environmental features, the term may also refer to communication styles and practices. According to Oxford Review, an organization that provides accessible briefings of academic research, accessible communication “refers to the practice of creating and delivering information in a way that is easily understood and usable by all individuals.” Through strategies such as using plain language and providing information in multiple formats, accessible communication strategies “make content perceivable, operable, and understandable for everyone, including those with disabilities such as visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments.”

Neurodivergent people are among the groups that benefit from accessible communication. “Neurodiverse” and related words are nonmedical terms referring to a range of social preferences, learning and communication styles, and ways of perceiving the environment. People with autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, Down syndrome, dyscalculia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, sensory processing disorders, and a range of other conditions may consider themselves under the neurodivergent umbrella.

Attendees of AIHA Connect 2025 will have several opportunities to learn about neurodivergence and supporting neurodivergent workers, starting with keynote speaker David Finch’s opening session. Later, in an AIHA Connect educational session, What Works Institute CEO and cofounder John Dony and Senior Director of Expertise Sarah Ischer, CIH, CSP, will further discuss communicating occupational and environmental health and safety information to neurodivergent workers.

Dony, drawing on research conducted by What Works, estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of the workforce may be neurodivergent. “If there's a risk factor that affects 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent of your population, it'll be right at the top of your risk register most of the time, right?” Dony told SynergistNOW. Yet relatively little research has been done to determine the OEHS support needs of neurodiverse workers. “This session is about shining the light on that.”

An Empathetic Approach to Safety

For both Ischer and Dony, developing accessible health and safety communication started with empathy. Prior to joining What Works, Ischer worked with the National Safety Council and spent the majority of her career as an industrial hygienist in complex manufacturing, where she ensured that every worker under her responsibility was protected from illness and injury. “My experience is working with a very diverse workforce through training, monitoring, understanding the workforce needs, meeting them where they are, and then trying to be as adaptable as I can in creating an environment where everyone feels safe,” she said.

Ischer has been injured on the job herself, which led her to approach safety with empathy and to encourage other health and safety professionals to do the same. “I don't want anyone to have the same situation and response that I had,” she said.

Dony, who also previously worked with the NSC and as a safety and quality manager, has observed the need to account for different points of view when communicating safety information. “I've seen how it can be pushed aside,” he said. “I've seen how it can be framed in almost a blame sense and pushed back on the worker.” His undergraduate degree in sociology gave him awareness of how systems and people interact. When OEHS professionals implement health and safety programs, “we build systems that are meant to interact with people, engage people, and lead to certain outcomes,” he explained.

Moreover, Dony himself identifies as neurodivergent. He has personal experience with some of the differences between neurodivergent and neurotypical communication styles. For example, he has often found himself “mirroring” other people, a common neurodiverse characteristic that involves consciously or unconsciously imitating gestures, speech patterns, and attitudes to create comfort and assist in information processing during a conversation. Often, for a person who mirrors, “you might think that you're being a positive force, you think you're adding energy and inspiration to the conversation, you're helping reflect back what you're receiving and getting more out of it, and making the other person comfortable,” he related. However, “in a safety context, it can be very, very dangerous.” The person who mirrors may find themself agreeing to something that isn’t true, implying something that may not be accurate, or creating a false sense that something happened that didn’t, so mirroring may create challenges particularly in contexts such as event investigations.

Dony aims to combine his personal experience with his professional experience to create a new approach to OEHS, one that benefits all workers. He and Ischer agreed with an essential concept also conveyed to SynergistNOW by David Finch—that workplace accessibility programs for neurodivergent people benefit everyone.

“If you're able to meet people where they are,” Ischer said, “you're really helping the overall workforce, not just this one population.”

Strategies for Accessible Communication

Developing accessible health and safety communication strategies is hampered by a lack of research on the ways that neurodiversity interacts with work environments. What Works has begun to address this need by undertaking a study on how neurodivergence impacts health and safety. “As that cohort engages with the safety and health management systems we put into place, where do we run into issues?” Dony asked. “Where do we have gaps? Where are we unintentionally creating barriers or pushing down or not being attentive to certain issues that might have a very legitimate safety and health impact?”

Ischer explained that, by the time of the conference, the goal is not only to quantify neurodiversity but to provide “a practical guide as to how organizations can have inclusive policies, inclusive ways of doing incident investigations and management of change and risk assessments, even on things as simple as understanding how people like to receive information.”

So, although research is still in progress, Dony, Ischer, and the rest of the What Works team have identified several factors organizations should consider when developing accessible health and safety programs. “One is the traditional training and communication-type activities,” Dony said. “They’re usually text heavy. They're usually lengthy. They're usually one size fits all.”

Ischer agreed that organizations should rethink safety training. “Gone are the days where people like to, or want to, or can really understand ongoing, long, lecture-style training,” she said. “So really keeping it short, concise, and focused on scenarios and situations that people can benefit from learning about.”

She outlined a list of communication strategies that included “creating clear, concrete language so that people don't have to interpret jargon, using direct language so that people can understand it clearly, and also using visual aids when necessary.”

Workplaces should consider sensory and environmental conditions, such as by designating quiet rooms and focus spaces. “Specifically in manufacturing and hard industry, there may be a lot of noise, lights, and crowded work areas,” Ischer said. Organizations should recognize those environmental conditions “may change the way people are working and affect the way they understand and react to different safety cues,” she added.

Dony advised flexible yet consistent policies developed with neurodivergence in mind. “Most organizations aren't putting this lens on when they write a policy, write an intervention, or write a program. So they end up with a hodgepodge as they evolve in their policy approach.”

He emphasized that there are positive aspects of neurodivergence, not only challenges. Neurodivergence is “not a primarily bad thing or a primarily good thing. It's just a thing. It's a way you're wired,” Dony said. Moreover, organizations can set their neurodivergent employees up to better apply their unique skills. “This is a little bit about fitting the person to the job. So in a way, it's ergonomics at the end of the day.”

“If you've got an audit program and someone who really loves doing audits all day, get that person on the audit program,” Dony continued. “It’s the same thing with the people side of the business. If you need people who are going to be your relationship people out in the field, it's best for everyone if that person loves that job and has that skill set and shows up that way every day.”

Putting Strategies into Action

When Dony and Ischer present their AIHA Connect session on safety and health implications for neurodivergent workers, above all, they hope attendees will come away with practical strategies and the motivation to put them in action.

“It's one thing to just have people learn something,” Dony said. “Providing them with very direct next steps on what they can do about it is always necessary. And sometimes it's lagging when you bring a new topic to the fore.”

“It's really important for organizations to understand they shouldn't be waiting until someone self-identifies as neurodiverse,” Ischer said. “If someone is coming to you and saying, ‘I don't understand this work procedure,’ it's probably already too late. You've already put them at risk.”

“I think it only makes sense, from a business perspective,” she added, “to make the changes now to ensure you are fully protecting and covering all the people that may come into the doors of your business.”

John Dony and Sarah Ischer will present their educational session, “A Practical Guide to Safety and Health Implications for Neurodiverse Workers” at AIHA Connect on Monday, May 19, 2025, from 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Central time. AIHA Connect 2025 will be held May 19–21 in person at the Kansas City Convention Center, Kansas City, Missouri, and virtually. To learn more about the keynote sessions, view the conference agenda, or register, visit the conference website.

Resource:

The Synergist: "OEHS and Disability: Building a More Accessible Profession."