What is the difference between workplace adjustments and accommodations for neurodivergent staff
Have you seen these terms "reasonable accommodation" and "workplace adjustment" and wondered if they were the same thing? As general concepts, they are. The language is key and reflects disability discrimination laws within different legal jurisdictions.
In Australia our legally operative term is a reasonable adjustment. It refers to the steps employers must take to ensure disabled employees and candidates have the same access to opportunities as their non-disabled peers.
Hang on. Disabled? I asked about neurodivergent people
Whether or not an individual neurodivergent person identifies with having a disability, the legislation captures ‘neurological disorder’ within the disability definition.
This obviously frames neurodivergence through a narrow clinical or medical model, and does not reflect how many people wish to identify. For the purpose of adjustments, the logic is based on the clinical diagnostic criteria that frames these conditions as disorders, for example:
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
specific learning disorders, and so on.
You may have also seen the term “workplace adjustments” used. This refers to the context of the adjustment rather than limiting it to a physical workspace. As workplaces are being redefined and expanded into homes and hybrid environments, this creates opportunity for reasonable adjustments to follow suit.
So workplace adjustments are reasonable adjustments in Australia? Cool, got it.
When we talk about reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent staff, or any disability for that matter, its not a blanket set of adjustments based on your condition. Rather they’re specific measures that help your support needs, this could be things like:
adjusted meeting formats
time management tools
speech to text software
flexibility in when and where the work gets done
a reduced sensory load
There may be a list of accommodations that the organisation is aware they can implement immediately, or offered others in the past, but this is not to confine the possibility of what is a reasonable adjustment.
What constitutes unreasonable is highly contextualised, but requests may be lawfully rejected on the grounds of things like:
if the individual, even with the adjustments in place, could not perform the duties of a role
if the adjustment incurs a very high cost
So what's the short version?
In practice, reasonable adjustment and reasonable accommodation are two ways to describe the same obligation in different parts of the world. "Accommodation" comes from the Americans with Disabilities Act and appears widely in global HR content online, but it is not the Australian legal standard. In Australia, the relevant framework is the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and the term is reasonable adjustment.
