Ask any People director what their board wants this year and the answer rarely starts with culture. It starts with cost. According to Gallagher’s UK Workforce Trends Report, 52.4% of UK leaders name cost pressures as their single biggest challenge, which means the People function is now under the same scrutiny as every other line on the budget. Prove the value, or justify the spend.
The difficulty is that most of the data People teams have to hand was never built to prove value. It records what happened, not what changed. And nowhere is that gap wider than in neuroinclusion. A significant slice of the workforce, real legal and retention risk attached, and almost no organisation able to say, with evidence, whether any of its efforts are working.
The Measurement Gap
Cost pressure changes what counts as a good answer. When 52.4% of leaders are managing to a tighter budget (Gallagher UK Workforce Trends Report), every programme has to earn its place, and the way you earn a place is with evidence. Yet the same research finds that 25.2% of leaders struggle to measure productivity and engagement at all. The expectation has risen while the measurement has not.
Gallagher is unusually candid about why.
The real challenge is measuring the impact of a benefit in terms of productivity or employee happiness… leaders often fall back on basic usage numbers simply because such data are easier to track, even though they do not necessarily prove the real value of the investment.
Gallagher UK Workforce Trends Report
Read that twice. It is a profession conceding, in print, that the numbers it reports are the numbers that are easy to collect, not the numbers that prove the investment worked.
The pattern repeats across EDI more broadly. CIPD’s Inclusion at Work report found that 79% of UK organisations recognise the importance of EDI, but only 48% have a strategy and just 17% measure its impact. Intent is near-universal. Evidence is rare. Between the two sits a reporting habit that mistakes activity for outcome: completion rates, attendance figures, the number of sessions run. All easy to pull. None of them tell you whether anything changed.
This is the difference between counting and measuring. Counting tells you that 200 managers attended a neurodiversity awareness session. Measuring tells you whether those managers now handle an adjustment request differently, faster, more consistently, without escalating every case to HR. The first is a number you can produce by Friday. The second is the one your board actually asked for.
And the cost of getting it wrong is not abstract. Replacing an employee can run to a sizeable multiple of salary once recruitment, lost productivity and ramp-up are counted, and neurodivergent employees leave at higher rates wherever support is thin. A completion rate cannot price that risk. A retention figure, measured against a baseline, can. Which is exactly why a board will trust one number and quietly discount the other.
Why Neuroinclusion Is The Test Case
If EDI measurement is weak in general, neuroinclusion is where it breaks down completely, and that makes it the sharpest test of whether your measurement works at all.
Start with visibility. Around one in five people is neurodivergent, yet most are invisible in workforce data because disclosure rates are low. Research found that 65% of neurodivergent employees fear discrimination from management. You cannot measure a population that does not feel safe identifying itself, and the standard inclusion dashboard, built on disclosure, simply cannot see it.
Then there is what the standard metrics measure. Representation and pay equity matter, but they say nothing about the operational levers neuroinclusion actually turns on: whether managers can hold an adjustment conversation, how long an adjustment takes to put in place, whether recruitment and onboarding screen neurodivergent talent in or out.
And the stakes are climbing. UK tribunal cases citing neurodiversity have risen sharply since 2022. The legal and reputational exposure is growing while the measurement infrastructure stays still.
The conclusion writes itself: if your inclusion measurement can’t see neuroinclusion, it’s not really measuring inclusion.
Introducing the Neuroinclusion Maturity Index
The Neuroinclusion Maturity Index (NIMI) is built to close exactly this gap. It is a free 10-minute self-assessment that scores your organisation across six operational pillars, places you on a four-stage maturity arc and returns a same-day report you can take into a board conversation.
The six pillars each measure a distinct lever:
- Leadership & Strategy
Whether neuroinclusion has executive ownership, budget and measurable goals, or sits with HR alone.
- Talent & Retention
Whether recruitment, onboarding and progression work for neurodivergent talent, or screen it out.
- Manager Capability
Whether managers handle adjustment conversations with confidence and consistency, or whether everything escalates.
- Culture & Belonging
Whether disclosure rates reflect reality, or only what employees feel safe sharing.
- Employee Experience & Support
The speed, consistency and resolution rate of adjustment requests across the employee lifecycle.
- Measurement & Accountability
Whether outcome data exists, and whether anyone owns it.
Each pillar places you on one of four stages:
- Ad Hoc: Reactive, patchy practice; activity happens but isn’t measured. Most untouched organisations sit here.
- Developing: First measurement and structure emerging; recognition that the work needs a system.
- Embedding: Live scoring, board-level visibility, consistent practice across the organisation.
- Strategic: Governed, year-on-year, peer-comparable; neuroinclusion is part of how the business runs.
The framework is built by neurodiversity specialists, neurodivergent professionals, and a neuroscientist, not benchmarked against external industry comparators. It tells you where you stand against a defined model of maturity, not against an anonymous league table.
Why This Matters Beyond HR
The reason to measure across six pillars rather than one is that neuroinclusion is not a single initiative you can switch on. It is an organisational system, and it succeeds or fails across distinct operational levers; leadership, management, recruitment, culture, day-to-day support and the accountability that holds them together. Treat it as a training tick-box and you measure attendance. Treat it as a system and you can see where the system is failing.
That reframing is what moves the conversation out of HR. A maturity score across six pillars is not an HR metric, it is a business diagnostic, in the same register as the productivity, retention and risk numbers a board already tracks. It gives People leaders the language and the evidence to make neuroinclusion an organisational question rather than a departmental one.
Where To Start
The honest starting point for most organisations is that none of these numbers exist yet. That absence is not a failure, it is the diagnosis. You cannot prove the value of neuroinclusion work without a baseline, and you cannot build a baseline you have never defined.
The gap between intent and evidence will not close on its own, and the boards beginning to ask what they got for the money will not stop asking. The organisations that pull ahead over the next two years won’t be the ones running the most training. They will be the ones that can already answer the question, with data.
The Neuroinclusion Maturity Index is one way to start having an honest answer. Take the NIMI assessment here.
