Best practices for enabling neurodivergent people at work.
The Neurodivergent Enablement Indicators (NEI) are a collection of workplace practices — with observable indicators — that help organizations support employees with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and related profiles.
What NEI is
NEI describes what good workplaces actually do to support neurodivergent employees — not in terms of values or intentions, but in terms of observable, improvable practices. Things you can look for, assess, and change.
Each practice comes with indicators — signs that the practice is in place. Some signs are visible in public sources. Others require the organization to document or demonstrate them. Every indicator is specific enough to be evaluated, cited, and tracked over time.
Some practices in NEI are broadly good management. But every indicator was included because it matters specifically for neurodivergent employees — often more than the organization realizes.
Administrative complexity is borne by specialist functions, not front-line employees
Where a process concerns information core to a specialist function — finance, HR, compliance — the complexity of managing that information should sit with that function, not with general employees entering data.
Standard Administrative processes
Designed to evolve
Most standards are static documents. NEI is designed as a living framework — versioned, open, and built to improve over time.
Version-controlled
Every indicator and taxonomy node has a version history. Changes are tracked, diffable, and permanent.
Stable identifiers
NDI identifiers are deterministic hashes. Once assigned, they never change. Every citation stays valid.
Machine-readable
Structured data is available at stable URLs. Software systems can query, integrate, and reason over indicators.
Open governance
Proposals are public, reviews are documented, and decisions are traceable. No opaque committee process.
Best practices by industry
NEI practices are relevant across all industries — but some are more commonly critical in specific contexts. A hospital, a software company, and a financial services firm all benefit from the same practices, but the ones most urgently relevant in each are different.
For a software company, output-focused evaluation and noise management are primary concerns. For a hospital, role clarity and access to support without disclosure carry higher priority. The industry applicability layer makes these patterns explicit, to help organizations focus their attention where it matters most.
This layer is advisory and provisional — open for community review.
Designed for an AI-assisted future
Most standards are designed for human reading only — PDFs and web pages optimized for a person scanning a document. NEI is built differently. Every indicator has a unique, stable identifier and a structured data representation from day one.
That means software, AI agents, and analysis tools can work with NEI indicators natively — retrieving specific indicators, mapping text to framework concepts, or building assessment pipelines on top of the framework without manual data extraction.
Who this is for
Design better workplaces
Understand and improve your workplace for neurodivergent employees using structured, observable criteria.
Learn more → ResearchersRigorous measurement design
Peer-reviewed foundations, auditable evidence layers, and transparent methodology built for academic use.
Learn more → Standards BodiesA reference for modern standards
A working demonstration of version-controlled, open, machine-readable standards development.
Learn more → DevelopersStructured data, stable IDs
Stable identifiers, machine-readable formats, and integration patterns for AI and HR technology.
Learn more →The problem this solves
Most workplaces were designed around a narrow set of cognitive assumptions: that everyone processes information the same way, communicates the same way, and can navigate the same administrative and social environments with equal ease. Those assumptions are wrong, and the cost is paid by neurodivergent workers every day.
That cost is largely invisible. It shows up in attrition, in unrealized potential, in quiet exhaustion — not in dashboards or performance reviews. Organizations often don't know they have a problem until they've already lost someone.
NEI gives organizations, researchers, and advocates a shared vocabulary for describing and evaluating the infrastructure that actually matters. Not intentions. Not values statements. Observable, improvable practice.
A community project
NEI is open-source in spirit and in practice. The framework is developed transparently, governed by community input, and available for anyone to use, critique, and contribute to. If you work in HR, organizational design, occupational psychology, accessibility, or any field that touches how workplaces are built — you have something to contribute.