Rethinking Capacity: Neurodiversity and Work Design in Insurance Claims

Neurodiversity is increasingly showing up across mental health and income protection claims – diagnosed and undiagnosed.

The paper below, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage: Why you should embrace it in your workforce” (Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano) reframes neurodivergence not as a collection of deficits, but as differences. When working environments, recruitment processes and management strategies are created to embrace them, these differences can add tremendous value to organisations in terms of productivity and innovation.

While this paper primarily focuses recruiting and retaining neurodiverse talent, it challenges us to consider whether delayed recovery and return to work is always about symptom severity… or sometimes about environmental mismatch.

In our roles, we often focus on treatment compliance and capacity assessment. But what if better outcomes come from better work design?

When we understand cognitive styles, strengths, sensory load, and motivational drivers, we can:

• Improve engagement
• Reduce psychosocial hazards for neurodiverse workers
• Reduce claim duration
• Support more sustainable RTW outcomes

Recovery isn’t just clinical. It’s contextual.

Read the Paper

 
Extract: “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage: Why you should embrace it in your workforce” by Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano, published May 2017 in the Harvard Business Review.

The incidence of autism in the United States is now 1 in 42 among boys and 1 in 189 among girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although corporate programs have so far focused primarily on autistic people, it should be possible to extend them to people affected by dyspraxia (a neurologically based physical disorder), dyslexia, ADHD, social anxiety disorders, and other conditions. Many people with these disorders have higher-than-average abilities; research shows that some conditions, including autism and dyslexia, can bestow special skills in pattern recognition, memory, or mathematics. Yet those affected often struggle to fit the profiles sought by prospective employers.

Neurodiverse people frequently need workplace accommodations, such as headphones to prevent auditory overstimulation, to activate or maximally leverage their abilities. Sometimes they exhibit challenging eccentricities. In many cases the accommodations and challenges are manageable and the potential returns are great. But to realize the benefits, most companies would have to adjust their recruitment, selection, and career development policies to reflect a broader definition of talent.

A growing number of prominent companies have reformed their HR processes in order to access neurodiverse talent; among them are SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft, Willis Towers Watson, Ford, and EY. Many others, including Caterpillar, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS, have start-up or exploratory efforts underway….

Although the programs are still in early days—SAP’s, the longest running among major companies, is just four years old—managers say they are already paying off in ways far beyond reputational enhancement. Those ways include productivity gains, quality improvement, boosts in innovative capabilities, and broad increases in employee engagement.