Creased Puddle

Creased Puddle Helping organisations and individuals increase their understanding of neurodiversity through practical, proven solutions. 🧠

A July 2026 employment tribunal found that requiring cameras on in meetings can amount to a failure to make reasonable a...
14/09/2026

A July 2026 employment tribunal found that requiring cameras on in meetings can amount to a failure to make reasonable adjustments, where an employee's conditions mean video leaves them anxious or overwhelmed.

The case does not ban "cameras on" policies. It does say employers should consider exceptions when medical and workplace evidence shows video puts someone at a substantial disadvantage.

Practical points for line managers:
• Treat camera-off as an adjustment option rather than a courtesy
• Pair meeting rules with how someone actually works best, whether that is chat, email, voice or video
• Where a need is long term, temporary return-to-work tweaks are not a substitute for lasting adjustments

Creased Puddle works with organisations that want managers to feel confident supporting neurodivergent colleagues day to day.

Our next 3-hour line manager awareness course takes place on 22nd September for just £50. Three hours of learning which changes the way you support your staff from the very next day.

🔵 Sign up here: https://www.creasedpuddle.co.uk/courses/neurodiversity-for-line-managers-and-supervisors/

Source: Personnel Today, Jul 2026

11/09/2026

Have you ever given someone feedback and watched them respond with tears?

Suggested a small change and got a fast, detailed defence of their work back?

Seen someone stay later and later, redoing work and checking it is okay?

Our CEO Caroline Turner explains what you might be seeing: rejection sensitivity dysphoria, or RSD. For the person living with it, feedback can land far harder than it was ever meant to.

We have written more about it, including why the feedback sandwich does not work for everyone: https://www.creasedpuddle.co.uk/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-why-the-feedback-sandwich-doesnt-work-for-everyone/

A recent employment tribunal has set out some helpful points on reasonable adjustments and ADHD at work.A victim and wit...
07/09/2026

A recent employment tribunal has set out some helpful points on reasonable adjustments and ADHD at work.

A victim and witness care officer at a UK police force disclosed her ADHD at the start of her contract and requested noise-cancelling headphones. These were not provided.

The tribunal heard that the legitimacy of her privately made diagnosis had been questioned, and that no occupational health referral was made because there was no "official" one.

It upheld disability harassment and a failure to make reasonable adjustments, and awarded £19,100. Other claims, including unfair dismissal, were dismissed.

The judgment confirmed that the duty to make reasonable adjustments rests with the employer rather than the employee.

That distinction matters for anyone managing adjustment requests. A request that is acknowledged still needs to be actioned, recorded and reviewed.

Acas is clear that a worker does not need a formal diagnosis to be owed support, and that what matters is the impact of the impairment rather than the paperwork behind it.

Early, practical adjustments protect people. So does giving managers the confidence to have these conversations well.

02/09/2026

What reasonable adjustments actually help someone stay well at work?

What does inclusive performance management look like in practice?

And what does good absence management practice look like when the goal is helping someone get back into the workplace, not managing them out of it?

These are the three questions our CEO Caroline Turner opens our Neurodiversity for Line Managers and Supervisors course with, because they are the ones most managers are quietly stuck on.

Not because managers do not care. Because nobody has shown them what a good answer looks like.

Over three hours, live on Teams, we start with neurodiversity itself and the conditions within it, Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia are just a few among them, then move into the areas of overlap that actually shape a working day: executive functioning, stimming, masking, and the impact of the sensory environment.

Live on Teams and capped at 20 places, so there is opportunity for a real discussion.

Our next session runs Tuesday 22 September, 10:00 to 13:00.

Book here: https://www.creasedpuddle.co.uk/courses/neurodiversity-for-line-managers-and-supervisors/

3,000 complaints about ADHD and autism services tell us something important.Not that people are asking for too much.That...
31/08/2026

3,000 complaints about ADHD and autism services tell us something important.

Not that people are asking for too much.

That systems are under pressure, pathways are hard to navigate, and people often need clearer support while they wait.

The recent Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report highlights long waits, regional variation, unclear information, and fragmented access to assessment, treatment and ongoing care.

This is not a blame exercise.

Many people across health, education and employment are trying to do the right thing in complex circumstances.

But the question for employers is practical:

If someone is waiting for an ADHD or autism assessment, or trying to understand what support they need, does work make things clearer or harder?

Line managers are often the first people to notice a change, hear a disclosure, manage absence, respond to performance concerns, or receive a request for adjustments.

That moment matters.

Employers cannot fix NHS pathways.

But they can give managers the confidence to respond clearly, fairly and without waiting for everything to be formally diagnosed.

Our next Neurodiversity for Line Managers and Supervisors session runs on Tuesday 22 September, 10:00 to 13:00, live on Microsoft Teams.

It is practical, needs-led and designed for the conversations managers are already having.

Book here: https://www.creasedpuddle.co.uk/courses/neurodiversity-for-line-managers-and-supervisors/

26/08/2026

Someone asks for an adjustment.

Nothing excessive.

Just clarity before an interview.

Written instructions after a meeting.

A bit more structure around priorities.

A quieter space to do the work well.

But then the uncertainty starts.

The manager worries about being unfair to everyone else.

HR worries about consistency.

The employee worries they have asked for too much.

And what should have been a simple, useful conversation turns into a knot.

That knot is where good people get tired.

It is where trust starts to thin.

And it is often where avoidable absence, performance concerns or recruitment drop-off begin.

Neuroinclusion does not have to mean expensive systems or complicated policy rewrites.

Often, it starts with understanding where your existing processes create barriers, and knowing what practical, reasonable adjustments actually look like.

Our 3-hour Neurodiversity Awareness Programme for HR professionals is designed for talent acquisition teams, case managers and HR generalists who want clear, practical tools they can use straight away.

We will cover:

Neurodiversity and neurodivergent conditions
Barriers in recruitment, onboarding and HR casework
Low-cost reasonable adjustments
Fair and consistent approaches to adjustment requests, absence and performance
How to equip line managers to make adjustments stick

Live on Microsoft Teams
5th November 2026
10:00 - 13:00
£50 + VAT per person
Sign up here: https://www.creasedpuddle.co.uk/neurodiversity-training-for-hr/

This programme is heavily discounted for a limited time to make professional neuroinclusion training more accessible for SMEs.

If you are in HR and want to make your processes fairer, clearer and more usable for neurodivergent people, book your place today.

23/08/2026

"I think I might have ADHD?" - Then what? How should the conversation go?

21/08/2026

Channel 4's "The Great ADHD Myth?" closed with a caption about what happened after filming. The support that had been paused came back a couple of months later, and things improved.

We are not going to argue the clinical question here. That one is not ours to settle.

There is something else in it worth your attention, though, because it turns up in workplaces far more often than anybody intends.

A support gets paused. A few weeks pass. Nothing appears to go wrong. And the quiet conclusion is that it was not really needed.

Almost nobody decides to do this. That is rather the point.

A team reorganises, and the written brief stops arriving. A new system replaces the one somebody had spent a year learning to work around. The quiet room becomes a meeting room. The compressed hours lapse when the manager who agreed them moves on.

Then a few weeks pass, the work still gets done, and it starts to look like evidence.

So what do those weeks actually cost, and why is it so hard to see from where you are sitting?

The work still gets done because the person makes sure it does. What they spend to manage that does not show up in anything you are looking at.

It comes out of their evening. It comes out of the weekend they needed in order to start Monday. It comes out of the margin they were keeping for the week when something really does go wrong.

So the first few weeks look fine.

What arrives later has usually changed shape by the time it reaches you. A difficult performance conversation. A period of sickness absence. A resignation from somebody who seemed to be managing.

None of that is a failure of anyone's character, and it is not a failure of yours either. It is what happens to any arrangement that depends on one person remembering it.

Nothing about the duty has changed in the last fortnight. The Equality Act 2010 asks about the effect of an impairment, not about its cause. The debate does not alter what is owed.

What makes an adjustment last is not good intentions. It is a system.

Put it in writing, so it survives a busy month.

Attach it to the role rather than to the manager, so it survives a reorganisation.

Review it on a date, not on a hunch, so nobody has to raise it as a favour.

None of that is expensive, and none of it depends on where you land on the argument.

And if you want to know whether an adjustment is still doing its job, there is a quicker way than waiting to find out.

Ask.

It takes a minute, and it is the only version of this that gets you an answer before somebody has paid for it.

19/08/2026

Channel 4 aired "The Great ADHD Myth?" last night.

If you manage people, some of your team watched it. Some of them are at work today wondering whether their colleagues now think they made the whole thing up.

There are fair questions inside the programme. Assessment quality varies a great deal. Waiting lists are long, and the private market that grew up around them is uneven. Medication is not, and never has been, an automatic first step. Those things deserve a proper argument.

But the argument is not what we see.

What we see is the day to day.

We see the person who does their best thinking out loud in a meeting, then cannot start the task afterwards, and does not know why, and has quietly decided the reason is that they are lazy.

We see the manager reading a missed deadline as a commitment problem, when that same person has hit every deadline that arrived in writing.

We see someone who has been masking for years. Doing two jobs at once, the work itself and the performance of finding it easy. Then wondering why they are finished by Wednesday.

We see the hyperfocus that produced the thing everyone praised last quarter treated as unrelated to the inattention that produced the thing nobody mentioned this quarter. Same person. Same brain. Same week, sometimes.

None of that gets settled by a documentary.

What helps is rarely complicated and rarely expensive.

Ask people what they need instead of guessing. Put the brief in writing, with the deliverable, the audience and the deadline in it. Build in the recovery time that masking costs. Design the environment around how somebody works, rather than asking them to spend their energy working around the environment.

That is most of it. The rest is doing it consistently, on the weeks when it is inconvenient.

Nothing about your responsibilities changed last night. The Equality Act 2010 still applies. Reasonable adjustments still apply. What was working on Monday is still working today.

What did change is that somebody who told you about their diagnosis last year may now be wondering whether that was a mistake.

Ask how their day is going. Start there.

The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures is being rewritten.Acas published the draft on 30 Jul...
18/08/2026

The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures is being rewritten.

Acas published the draft on 30 July. It is the first full revision since 2009, and for the first time it includes guidance on the duty to make reasonable adjustments.

That is a significant addition.

The Code is the benchmark employment tribunals refer to when considering whether a process was handled fairly, and awards can be adjusted by up to 25 per cent either way where it has not been followed. Guidance placed inside it carries real weight.

The wider context helps explain the timing. Employment tribunal cases citing neurodivergent conditions rose from 265 in 2020 to 517 in 2025, with Autism and ADHD the most commonly cited conditions.

We have written up what the draft sets out:

1. The three examples of adjustments included in the draft, and some further ones worth considering.
2. What "reasonable time to prepare" means in practice for a neurodivergent employee.
3. The provision naming a reasonable adjustment as a possible outcome of an informal conversation, before anything becomes formal.

Why manager confidence matters here, given that 59 per cent of line managers told Acas they were unsure how to make a reasonable adjustment.

Acas is consulting until 23 September and has asked specifically whether the examples in the draft are clear and whether any should be added or changed. If you have supported someone through a workplace process, your experience is useful evidence for that question.

Sign up to our newsletter where we will be sending out more information about these proposed changes in the next few days, link is in the comments 👇

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