The Benefit of Offering One-to-One Assessments

Working in the neurodiversity sector, it is common for me to speak with organisations that seem reluctant to fund neurodiversity assessments for their employees. I can understand their reluctance. Individual assessments for each relevant employee are likely to be more costly than running a company-wide training session that everyone can attend.

To provide a bit of context on neurodiversity assessments, they are becoming increasingly difficult to access across the board. The education, healthcare and public workforce systems are incredibly backlogged, which means that the waiting list times and criteria are becoming lengthier. It is not uncommon for individuals waiting for ASC or ADHD diagnosis on the NHS to be waiting in excess of five years.

As an employer, you have the opportunity to engage with private neurodiversity providers or occupational health providers to offer your staff access to neurodiversity assessments. These are some of the benefits of doing so:

• Individuals who are waiting years on getting an assessment often experience challenges with their wellbeing. Having a proactive approach in place to support greatly influences wellbeing, productivity and absenteeism, among other things.
• Assessments provide tailored, individualised support. To offer an analogy - company-wide training can be incredibly useful, but if you need glasses, a training session on glasses won't suffice. You need the specialist assessment to access the tailored support you need.
• The cost of assessment can be an expensive outlay for one individual within the business, however tribunals can run into the thousands in compensation and legal fees.
• Its not as costly as you think - although up to 20% of individuals are neurodivergent, the uptake rate for referrals within organisations is much lower.

The impact of offering assessments is felt at an individual, team and organisational level. Results of an impact study of our services at a leading bank showed that:

• 90% of HR professionals reported that employee performance had improved.
• 91% of managers reported an increase in employee confidence levels.
• 93% of employees said that they feel more confident to disclose their neurodifference.
• 94% of employees said that they are likely to remain with the organisation for the next 2 years.

For further information of the types of assessments Lexxic offers, book in a chat with one of our team today.

This article was written by Mellissa O'Byrne, Consulting Business Psychologist at Lexxic