Knowing What’s Normal: How Companies Can Better Support Their Neurodivergent Workers
By Ed Rutkowski
Last night, while eating dinner at his Kansas City hotel, David Finch, the opening keynoter for AIHA Connect 2025, realized that the presentation he’d prepared wasn’t good enough. He had misjudged his audience, or so he deduced from conversations he overheard between people in town for the conference. They were more aligned on the topic of neurodivergence, the subject of his presentation, than he’d expected, but they also had surprisingly diverse personal and professional backgrounds. So, he finished his meal, went back to his room, and completely revised a presentation he’d been working on for six months.
At this morning’s Opening General Session at the Kansas City Convention Center, Finch related this story in a matter-of-fact tone, as if reworking a sixty-minute talk the evening before he was scheduled to deliver it to thousands of people was nothing new for him. This anecdote was one of several in his presentation that gave attendees a sense of what modern corporate life is like for neurodivergent employees and how organizations can better support them.
The term neurodivergence refers to cognitive variation among people. “There is a normal,” Finch explained, “and then, for the rest of us, there’s a failed version of normal.” While neurotypical individuals have innate abilities to multitask and navigate social interactions, neurodivergent people often struggle in these areas. Research suggests that as much as one-fifth of the human population is neurodivergent.
Finch is among them. His diagnosis came relatively late in life: he was 30 when his wife, a speech pathologist, suggested that he had Asperger’s syndrome. She turned out to be right.
Asperger’s is now classified as Autism Spectrum Disorder. Other diagnoses and conditions often labeled under the umbrella of neurodivergence include obsessive compulsive disorder, dyslexia, and attention deficient hyperactivity disorder. People with these conditions often display clever or unconventional thinking, loyalty, a talent for organization, significant expertise in technical subject areas, and impressive powers of concentration. Finch talked about the intense focus he can achieve in his role at a semiconductor manufacturer, which allows him to work long hours.
Neurodivergent people may also exhibit behaviors that Finch described as “the price tag for all these great things,” such as rocking back and forth, bouncing their knees, and having emotional outbursts in work environments. Finch suggested several simple interventions companies can use to manage these behaviors. Noise-cancelling headphones, for example, can help some neurodivergent employees stay focused. Scheduling adequate downtime between meetings and providing alternative communication channels such as Microsoft Teams or Slack are other ways that companies can support neurodivergent employees.
“Mostly, what we need is a window to the world of the company,” Finch said. During his career, he has benefited from working under a supervisor who allowed him to leave the building when conditions in the office became too noisy or overwhelming, and from a colleague who mentored him on social skills, such as how to order lunch for multiple people involved in a meeting.
Performance reviews may be particularly anxiety-inducing for neurodivergent people, who tend to dwell on even mild negative feedback. “Since the first day of kindergarten, their whole education careers and then their whole work careers, they have wanted to do the right things the right way,” Finch said. He recommended that supervisors put specific criticisms into a broader context.
He noted that when companies make these accommodations, they become better workplaces for all employees. “When we solve an equation for the variable of the neurodivergent person, we’re really solving the equation for everybody,” Finch said.
Ed Rutkowski is editor in chief of The Synergist.
