About the author: Dr Caroline Gorden is the founder and director of CESI Learning and a published criminologist specialising in how credibility and guilt are constructed in formal processes. She holds a PhD in Criminology, has published over 25 peer-reviewed works on social exclusion, criminal justice, and institutional fairness, and is the author of Case Studies of Famous Trials and the Construction of Guilt and Innocence, published by Bristol Policy Press in 2022. She was previously a Senior Lecturer and Reader at Wrexham University, where she co-directed Cyfiawnder: The Social Inclusion Research Institute, and remains a Visiting Research Associate there. Since 2023 she has worked as a workplace coach specialising in adults with ADHD and autism. Her work at CESI Learning applies criminological research directly to workplace investigations, grievances, and disciplinary procedures.
This article is for: HR professionals, managers, and EDI leads who have inclusion policies in place and want to understand why those policies are not always producing the outcomes they should — and what to do differently.
What you will learn: Why inclusion policy and inclusion practice are not the same thing, where the gap between them tends to open up, and what it looks like to close it in ways that are legally defensible, operationally sustainable, and genuinely fair.
Why it matters: Research by EDI consultancy Onvero found that 89% of UK workplaces have an EDI strategy in place, but only a quarter of leaders feel it is fully embedded in their organisation’s culture. That gap is not a communication problem. It is a design problem.
I want you to think about the last time your organisation updated its inclusion policy.
Perhaps it was prompted by a specific incident, or perhaps it was a scheduled review, or perhaps it happened in response to new guidance or a change in the law. Someone drafted or revised a document. It was reviewed, approved, and circulated. It appeared on the intranet. Perhaps it was accompanied by a statement from a senior leader about the organisation’s commitment to inclusion. And then, for most organisations, not very much changed.
The policy existed. The practice did not follow. And the gap between those two things is not — as it is often framed — a matter of hearts and minds, or of organisational culture being slow to shift. It is, more often than not, a matter of process design. The policy was written, but the processes through which people actually experience their working life — how they are recruited, how their performance is managed, how formal complaints about them are investigated, how they are treated when something goes wrong — were not redesigned to deliver it.
That distinction matters enormously, because it changes where you look for the solution.
The strategy without the skill
The research picture here is stark. The Onvero study found that 89% of UK workplaces have an EDI strategy in place, but only a quarter of leaders believe it is fully embedded within their organisation’s culture. The City and Guilds Neurodiversity Index 2026 found that despite growing organisational awareness of neurodiversity, 37% of managers have still received no neurodiversity training at all. And 41% of neurodivergent employees report experiencing workplace barriers on a daily basis — not occasionally, not in specific difficult circumstances, but as a consistent feature of their working life.
These findings are not evidence of bad intentions. In my experience of working with organisations and coaching autistic adults in workplace settings, the people responsible for inclusion in most organisations genuinely want to get this right. What is missing, far more often than commitment, is the specific knowledge and the redesigned processes needed to translate that commitment into consistent, fair outcomes.
A policy that says “we are committed to making reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent employees” does not tell a manager what to do when an autistic employee’s behaviour in a disciplinary interview is being read as evasiveness. A statement of values does not tell an HR professional how to structure a formal investigation process so that an autistic employee’s non-chronological recall is not mistaken for inconsistency. A training day on neurodiversity awareness does not prepare someone for the specific, high-stakes moment when the process itself begins to construct an unfair outcome.
This is what I mean when I say inclusion policy and inclusion practice are not the same thing. And it is precisely this gap that the Buckland Review of Autism Employment, published by the Department for Work and Pensions in February 2024, identified as one of the most significant barriers to genuine workplace inclusion for autistic employees. Employers and managers, the review found, often report feeling under-prepared to identify and implement adjustments — not because they are unwilling, but because the knowledge and the process infrastructure simply are not there.
Where the gap opens up
In my research and in my direct experience of working with autistic adults who have been taken through formal workplace processes, there is a consistent pattern in where inclusion policy breaks down. It is almost never at the level of recruitment materials or induction programmes or awareness posters. It is at the level of formal processes — the situations that are high-stakes, time-pressured, and emotionally charged for everyone involved.
Grievance procedures. Disciplinary interviews. Performance improvement plans. Formal investigations. These are the moments where the gap between policy and practice is most consequential, where the legal risk is highest, and where the human cost of getting it wrong is most severe. And they are, consistently, the moments that inclusion training most rarely reaches.
There is a reason for this. Generic inclusion training tends to focus on the everyday — how to communicate inclusively, how to build a welcoming team culture, how to respond when someone discloses a neurodivergent condition. These things matter. But they do not prepare anyone for what happens when an autistic employee sits down in a formal interview and their communication style — their pausing, their literal interpretation of questions, their non-chronological memory, their compliance under pressure — begins to be read through a neurotypical credibility lens that interprets difference as dishonesty.
That specific situation is where inclusion policy becomes either real or performative. And it is where the design of the process — who conducts it, how questions are framed, what adjustments are in place, how responses are recorded — determines whether the outcome is fair.
What genuine inclusion practice actually looks like
Genuine inclusion practice, as distinct from inclusion policy, is built into the design of processes rather than layered on top of them as an afterthought. It does not ask neurodivergent employees to advocate for themselves in the middle of the situations that are already most difficult for them. It builds the knowledge of how to run fair processes into the people who run them, before those people are sitting across a table from someone whose communication style they do not understand.
In practice, this means several things.
It means that the people who conduct formal interviews involving neurodivergent employees understand specifically how autistic memory retrieves information under pressure, and why that matters for how questions are structured and how responses are recorded. It means they have a pre-interview process — communication sent in advance, written notice of the topics to be covered, consideration of the physical environment — that reduces the cognitive and sensory load on the employee before the interview begins. It means they know what structured interview approaches such as WAFA, or Witness-Aimed First Account, look like in practice, and why they produce more reliable and more equitable outcomes than standard questioning formats.
It means that reasonable adjustments are understood not as individual accommodations to be negotiated case by case, but as a set of process design principles that reduce the risk of misjudgement for everyone — autistic employees and non-autistic employees alike. Because when you design a formal process to be clear, structured, and fair for someone who experiences formal situations differently, you design it to be clearer, more structured, and fairer for everyone.
And it means that the people responsible for formal processes have access to practical tools — checklists, templates, structured frameworks — that translate that knowledge into consistent practice, rather than relying on individual good intentions to produce fair outcomes in the middle of high-pressure situations.
This is not a counsel of perfection. It is a realistic and achievable standard, and it is the standard that employment tribunals are now applying when they examine how formal processes were conducted. The cases of Mr Wright, who was awarded £850,000 after a disciplinary process that failed to account for his autism, and of Mr James, whose CEO described his reasonable adjustment requests as “a pain in the a**e,” are not outliers. They are the documented consequences of the gap between inclusion policy and inclusion practice, and they are becoming more common as both awareness and legal scrutiny increase.
The question worth asking
If you are reading this and you are responsible for inclusion in your organisation, the question I would invite you to sit with is this: if a formal complaint were made tomorrow involving an autistic or ADHD employee, and the process that followed were later scrutinised by an employment tribunal, would your organisation be able to demonstrate that the people who conducted that process had the specific knowledge and the practical tools needed to do it fairly?
Not the policy. Not the values statement. Not the awareness training. The specific knowledge and the practical tools.
If the honest answer is that you are not sure, that is not a failing. It is an extremely common position, and it is exactly the position that CESI Learning was built to address.
What CESI Learning offers
Our CPD UK certified course, Effective Interviewing of Autistic Employees in Investigations, Grievances, and Disciplinaries, is a four-hour online course, self-paced and available now at CESI COURSES – CESI Learning priced at £120. It is designed for HR professionals, managers, and anyone who conducts or oversees formal workplace processes involving autistic employees. It covers how credibility and perceptions of guilt are constructed in formal interviews, why autistic employees face an increased risk of misinterpretation in those processes, and how to apply structured, inclusive interview approaches that support clearer recall, mutual understanding, and procedural fairness.
It includes a practical guidebook — with a pre-interview checklist, a letter to employee template, a reasonable adjustments checklist, and structured questioning guidance — that you can use in real situations, not just read once and put away.
For senior leaders and managers who want to build this understanding at a strategic level, the CMI Level 7 Certificate in Autism-Informed Strategic Management and Leadership Practice opens for its first cohort in September 2026. This is the only CMI Level 7 qualification of its kind, mapped directly to the standard CMI Level 7 in Strategic Management and Leadership Practice, with a specialist lens in autism-informed leadership that covers the full arc of an autistic employee’s experience, from recruitment through to formal process. You can register your interest now at Join the Waitlist – CESI Learning
Inclusion policy matters. But it is not enough on its own. The gap between what an organisation says it stands for and what actually happens when a neurodivergent employee sits in a formal interview is closed not by better statements, but by better process design — and by the people who run those processes having the knowledge and tools to make them fair.
Fair processes don’t happen by accident. They happen by design.
Dr Caroline Gorden is the founder and director of CESI Learning. Her book, Case Studies of Famous Trials and the Construction of Guilt and Innocence, is published by Bristol Policy Press (2022). She can be found on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcarolinegorden
References
Gorden, C. and Birkbeck, C. (2022) Case Studies of Famous Trials and the Construction of Guilt and Innocence. Bristol: Bristol Policy Press.
Onvero (2025) EDI Strategy Embedding Research. Reported in People Management, November 2025.
City and Guilds Foundation and Do-IT Solutions (2026) Neurodiversity Index 2026. Available at: https://cityandguildsfoundation.org/what-we-offer/campaigning/neurodiversity-index/
Buckland, R. (2024) The Buckland Review of Autism Employment: Report and Recommendations. Department for Work and Pensions. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-buckland-review-of-autism-employment-report-and-recommendations
Chandler, R., Russell, A. and Maras, K. (2018) ‘Compliance in autism: Does it occur and is it a problem?’, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 56, pp. 10-21.
Wright v Cardinal Newman Catholic School [2021] London South Employment Tribunal.
