Why neurodiversity must be at the heart of WHS strategies in Australia
The psychological health and safety of Australian workers is not an optional extra anymore. It’s codified. With psychosocial risk management now a requirement under WHS law, employers must treat psychological hazards with the same diligence as physical hazard.
We have come a long way.
AS/NZS ISO 45003:2021 and the 2024 Model Code of Practice on Managing Psychosocial Hazards have drawn a decisive line in the sand. These frameworks outline what employers should be doing, the best practice approach of systematically consulting with workers to identify, assess and control the psychosocial risks of work and review them regularly.
Yet for all the procedural clarity, a foundational vulnerability remains hidden in plain sight.
If your psychosocial hazard identification and risk management plan doesn’t include identifying burnout, brownout, sensory processing differences, meltdowns, tantrums, stimming, hyperfocus, or rejection sensitivity, you’re not seeing the full risk landscape.
You have a gap. A big one. And that gap could be your legal and operational Achilles’ heel.
🐘The elephant in the room is neurodiversity🐘
It’s rarely named outright in risk assessments, yet it’s central to how psychological safety works in practice. Despite consistent reminders in both ISO 45003 and the Model Code that workers aren’t all the same, in practice, OHS Management Systems, including psychosocial risk management many still operate on the unspoken assumption that “most people” think and respond in similar ways.
It’s true. The majority of the workforce in most workplaces are neurotypical. That means they think and function in ways that are typical. But that doesn’t mean that their way of being is “normal” or “right”.
A substantial minority of the workforce think and function differently. Pretending otherwise isn’t just naïve, it’s negligent.
Neurodivergent workers there in every workplace, whether you know it or not.
Most of these workers will never disclose their neurodivergence to their employer. They will never go to HR and ask for “reasonable adjustments” under the Disability Discrimination Act.
- If you are an employer thinking you don’t need to worry about neurodiversity inclusion because “we don’t have anyone like Rain Man or Bart Simpson on our team”, you are missing the point entirely.
Why?
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- Because most neurodivergent adults in Australia have never been formally diagnosed and diagnosis is simply inaccessible to them due to the cost and a shortage of trained clinicians and long wait times (The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, 2022; 2023).
- Many neurodivergent people don’t identify with the “disabled” label. They are only disabled to the extent the systemic barriers in their environment disable them.
- Neurodivergent workers will usually not disclose this to their employer because they’ve seen what’s happened to other workers who did. They may have experienced discrimination and judgement in their past, so they won’t go there again.
💼 Neurodivergence changes how psychosocial risk is experienced 💼
Whether you know it or not, you already have a neurodiverse workforce.
They’re silently navigating a system that was not built for them, doing their best to fit in (“masking”) like a square peg in a round hole. This effort alone is psychologically draining.
Neurodivergent individuals regulate attention and emotion, perceive and respond to risk and experience the physical environment differently from neurotypical people. This means that they experience psychosocial hazards in their environment that others may not perceive as hazardous, and they respond differently too.
Think of that well-intended office coffee machine, aromatic bliss in the morning to some, but a source of nausea or panic to others, like fingernails scraping on a chalk board. Same environment, radically different experience. Why? Because their nervous system is wired differently. That’s the psychosocial terrain employers need to understand.
If your psychosocial risk management plan does not include the identification of “brownout” in a worker, how will you identify the psychosocial hazards contributing to it, much less assess and control them before they result in “burnout”?
🔥 What’s brownout, and why does it matter?🔥
Uniquely experienced by Autistic and/or ADHD workers, brownout is the slow drain of psychological energy that shows up as detachment or mental fatigue. At work this may be mislabelled as a performance issue. Commencing a performance management plan, without exploring the work-related psychosocial factors that are contributing to the brownout only exacerbates the situation.
Brownout usually precedes Autistic/ADHD burnout, a profound and debilitating state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that results from ongoing stress related to sensory overload, intense social or communication demands, and the continuous effort to “mask” autistic traits to fit into neurotypical expectations.
While typical burnout is largely situational and reversible with rest, Autistic/ADHD burnout is more systemic, triggered by a mismatch between the individual’s needs and their environment, and it requires deep, sustained change to recover. It’s not just about feeling tired, it’s about losing the ability to function.
What about meltdowns? These may be confused with tantrums, yet they’re entirely different! One is a calculated display of emotion to get a desired outcome, the other is an involuntary, traumatic loss of control in response to overwhelming psychological and sensory overload. Misunderstanding a meltdown and reacting punitively exacerbates the trauma.
The same goes for stimming, hyperfocus, and rejection sensitivity. These aren’t fringe phenomena. They’re common features of the neurodivergent experience, and whether employers support or suppress them can tip the scale between thriving and burnout.
🚩 Legal obligations are clear 🚩
From a legal standpoint, the duty of care is unambiguous. Under WHS law, employers must:
- Identify and control psychosocial hazards
- Consider individual variability
- Consult workers in the process
Ignoring the neurodivergence of a substantial minority of your workforce is a system failure. Neurodivergent people experience psychological illness and/or injuries at more than twice the rate of neurotypical people. Neuroinclusion is a core work health and safety responsibility falling squarely within the employer’s primary duty of care.
🌱 Neuroinclusion isn’t just ethical, it’s strategic 🌱
The upside of neuroinclusion is enormous. Neurodivergent workers bring unique problem-solving, creative thinking, and depth. Sir Richard Branson is famously quoted as saying:
“The world needs a neurodiverse workforce to help try and solve some of the big problems of our time”.
✅ The path forward ✅
It’s time to finally see the elephant in the room and acknowledge what’s been politely ignored for too long.
When employers consciously include neurodivergent perspectives in psychosocial hazard identification, consultation, and work design, they move beyond compliance towards capability and psychological safety for all workers.