Neuro News
- Cassandra Nicholson
- Jul 14
- 3 min read
Neuro News
Week of 13 July 2026 | Neuroinclusion for workplaces and individuals
Happy Tuesday!
Today I will be at Brisbane Business Hub explaining how neurodivergent employees are your key to staying ahead of the competition. If you couldn't make but would like to know please reach out!
If your organisation is rolling out return to office mandates without checking it against neuroinclusion risk, that's exactly the kind of gap a Neuroinclusion Audit is built to catch. Get in touch to book a call.
If autistic inertia or time blindness is showing up in your own working day, 1:1 coaching is where we build external systems that work with your brain, not against it. Reply to this email to find out more.
Keep enjoying the cooler weather and have a fabulous week!
Cass
Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
0419 423 746
Neurodivergence Voice | Empowering Inclusive Workplaces
Neuro at Work
The Return-to-Office (RTO) Risk P&C Teams Aren't Modelling
RTO mandates are back on the agenda across Australian corporates, with Amazon and CBA among those setting fixed office-attendance targets.
The risk most policies miss:
neurodivergent staff are the group most likely to be quietly pushed out by them.
Recent research found 75% of neurodivergent employees rely on hybrid work to manage their health, and 38% have already been handed an RTO mandate.
More than half of that group said the mandate made them reconsider staying with their employer — citing reduced engagement, lower career satisfaction and higher burnout risk.
For P&C leaders: this isn't a preference issue, it's a retention and legal one. Under Australia's flexible work provisions, a request can only be lawfully refused if strict statutory preconditions are met — including evidence-based reasons.
If your RTO policy hasn't been tested against that standard, or against its impact on neurodivergent staff specifically, that's a gap worth closing before it shows up as unplanned attrition.
Neuro Hacks
Externalise the Clock
Interoception is the internal sense of body states — and for many ADHDers and autistic adults, that includes a weak or absent internal sense of elapsed time.
The result isn't laziness. It's a genuinely reduced ability to feel time passing.
The fix is to stop relying on internal time-sense and externalise it instead:
Visual timers (e.g. Time Timer) that show time as a shrinking disc, not just numbers
A countdown display on a second screen or phone, left visible during focused work
An alarm set at the midpoint of a task, not just the end, so there's a checkpoint before overrun
This isn't about discipline. It's about giving the brain a substitute sense it doesn't reliably generate on its own.
Neuro and Cass
Autistic Inertia
Autistic inertia is the difficulty initiating, sustaining, or switching out of an activity — and it cuts both ways.
"Stuck at rest": wanting to start a task and being unable to. "Stuck in motion": wanting to stop an activity and being unable to, even once it's no longer useful or enjoyable.
It's distinct from ADHD-pattern task initiation, which is largely dopamine-driven.
Autistic inertia is closer to a motor and executive control issue, compounded by sensory load and anxiety about the unknown on the other side of a transition.
First-hand accounts describe it as involuntary — not a motivation problem, and not something "try harder" fixes.
For late-diagnosed adults, recognising this pattern reframes years of being told you're "stubborn" or "can't just start things."
For workplaces, it means transition points — meetings ending, task switches, end of day — need more built-in buffer than a neurotypical default assumes.
Cheers,
Cass Nicholson | Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
Brisbane QLD, Australia +61 0419 423 746
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