How GitHub supports neurodiverse employees (and how your company can, too)

In today’s global workplace, supporting employees by appreciating and understanding their background and lived experience is crucial for the success of any organization. This includes employees who are neurodivergent. Neurodivergence refers to natural variations in human brains and cognition. The term encompasses conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, mental illness, and other neurological differences.

Neurodivergent employees don’t just enrich the workplace, they’re good for business. According to Deloitte, teams with neurodivergent people can be up to 30 percent more productive than others. Neurodivergent folks excel in pattern recognition and the type of outside-the-box thinking highly sought after in the software industry.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at five ways GitHub fosters and supports neurodiverse employees via Neurocats, a GitHub Community of Belonging (CoB), and how you can do the same at your organization.

Let’s go!

Forktocat: An Octocat image that represents the fork function in Git, which we’ve adopted in Neurocats to represent the different ways our brains work.

1. Establish supportive communities

As an initial step, establish private, supportive communities where neurodivergent employees can connect, share their experiences, and find support. GitHub’s Neurocats community allows members to privately discuss their neurodivergence, offer advice to each other, and build a sense of belonging, all in a safe place where members can freely express themselves without fear.

Neurocats started as a private Slack channel under a different name years before it formally transitioned into a CoB. Originally called #neuroconverse, it gave the neurodivergent community at GitHub a space to chat. In the summer of 2021, a collection of passionate members started discussions with GitHub’s Diversity Inclusion and Belonging team about becoming a formal CoB. In October 2021, they formed as an official group at GitHub, and after some discussion, became the Neurocats. The community now consists of hundreds of members from across the company and continues to grow.

Setting up spaces for neurodivergent individuals to express themselves and meet other like-minded friends and allies not only improves their overall work life balance, it also accelerates the creation of new innovative ideas that could be the next big thing in your organization’s portfolio.

“As a neurodivergent people manager with dyslexia and dysgraphia, I am thrilled to be part of the Neurocats CoB, a community that embraces and normalizes our uniqueness,” says Tina Barfield, senior manager at GitHub. “By doing so, we can help drive environments where everyone’s strengths are celebrated, leading to greater innovation, creativity, and inclusivity.” (Please note, all employee names and stories have been shared with permission.)

Suggestions for establishing a supportive community:

• Have members lead. Embrace the powerful slogan, “Nothing about us, without us.”
• Consider how to protect confidentiality and anonymity. Many neurodivergent people may want to control to whom and in what context they share their neurodivergence. Always obtain permission before sharing information that identifies a person’s neurodivergence.
• Consider conversation history. In Neurocats, conversation history is wiped every four days.
• Never require diagnosis for membership to the community. In many cultures and countries, getting a formal diagnosis can be difficult if not impossible. If someone believes they are neurodivergent, accept them and support them.

2. Foster a sense of belonging

Giving employees the time and space to discuss their neurodivergence enables them to strongly relate to each other, lift each other up, and make personal discoveries that will help them navigate life both at work and at home.

“I didn’t know what being neurodivergent was before Neurocats,” says Lou Nelson, support engineer III who works on GitHub Premium Support. “I thought I was a weird kid with an ADHD diagnosis. Neurocats has become the lynchpin for my career. I have made valuable connections and have a deeper insight into myself than I could have ever done alone. As a member, I find it incumbent to share this experience with others so that they also don’t have to feel alone.”

When neurodivergent employees feel comfortable enough to share their stories more broadly, other employees will be drawn to those communities to either personally relate or learn and empathize about subjects they may not have previously considered.

“As a people manager with ADHD, I’m accustomed to being the ‘neurodiversity pioneer’ when meeting new teams or direct reports, setting an example by speaking openly about my gifts and challenges,” says Julie Kang, staff manager of software engineering at GitHub. “When I joined GitHub, and especially when I became a Neurocat, I was pleasantly surprised to find a culture that was knowledgeable, accepting, and celebratory of neurodiversity at a level I haven’t seen before in my career.”

Suggestions for encouraging a sense of belonging in your neurodivergent community:

• Declare safe spaces. Before meetings where neurodivergence is discussed, call out the fact that you want this to be a safe space. Encourage kindness and empathy.
• Warn about oversharing. If there’s a meeting where oversharing is possible, warn participants to think about their contributions and avoid sharing details that they may later regret.
• Understand privacy and confidentiality expectations. Participants should respect privacy and adopt guiding principles around privacy and confidentiality.
• Share information broadly with the company or organization. Create mechanisms where members of the community can safely share thoughts and feelings with the broader company or organization and, if appropriate, externally. Anonymize this information if required and always share with consent. Examples can include recurring Q&A sessions, presentations, and discussions with the entire company, organization or a segment of the organization all help allow neurodivergent employees to be seen.

3. Provide flexibility and accommodations

Neurodivergent employees can often benefit from flexible working arrangements. This could include flexible hours, remote work options, noise-canceling headphones, or customized workspaces to reduce sensory overload.

Asking for accommodations can be hard. Identify the process your organization or company uses to assess workplace accommodations. Encourage employees to utilize that process to obtain a workplace accommodation.

“One of the biggest things for me has been seeing how many other folks went through a lot of their life being told that they just needed to apply themselves, pay attention, work harder, etc. only to repeatedly fail out of college, get fired from jobs, and generally struggle to ‘human’ correctly,” says Caite Palmer, manual review analyst of security operations at GitHub. “These folks are now through all departments and levels at this large, successful company getting to do great work in a place where flexibility, asking a million questions, and problem solving are generally considered tremendous assets and encouraged.”.

Suggestions for providing flexibility and accommodations:

• Listen to your employees. Identify listening mechanisms to hear concerns from your employees. An employee or group of employees may share with you how a particular process or system is difficult. Their honesty and candor is a gift and an opportunity to improve your business.
• Consider providing a budget. At GitHub we have flexible benefits that allow employees to purchase equipment and tools which can help them focus, work, and even relax. Removing barriers for employees to obtain bespoke solutions that work for them reduces costs by removing long conversations and approvals from the process.
• Train managers to care. Part of the GitHub manager training program is geared to help managers foster a sense of caring and empathy for the employees in their teams. Encourage kindness across all levels of the company.
• Be clear about tasks that need to be completed and flexible on how that task is accomplished. An autistic employee might go for a long walk and then be able to hyperfocus on a task, completing it in half the time than it would have taken if they’d sat at their desk the whole time. Trust your employees to do their best work in the way that fits them and judge them on the work they produce.

4. Encourage open dialogue

Promote a culture of openness where employees feel comfortable discussing their needs and challenges. Consider holding regular meetings and forums to discuss topics related to neurodiversity, mental health, and well-being. With the Neurocats group, we hold monthly meetings to discuss various topics, which are important to our members. One member of the Neurocats leadership team describes their experience:

“We have a voice, which we use to highlight issues our members face day to day,” says Owen Niblock, senior software engineer at GitHub who works on accessibility. “We also hold monthly meetings to discuss topics from ADHD and autism to anxiety, mental health issues, and more. Over the years, we’ve had some success and find we are able to lobby for changes at a company level, leading to real tangible change that benefits the whole of GitHub.”

Enabling open dialogue means providing avenues for these discussions to happen. But going one step further and encouraging open dialogue requires more effort.

Suggestions for encouraging open and honest dialogue with the neurodivergent community at your company:

• Listen. You won’t be able to act on every piece of feedback you receive, but showing you acknowledge and appreciate feedback and making changes whenever possible will create a culture of frank and honest discussion.
• Make space. Conversations can happen at many levels and in many forums. Create space for a diverse set of feedback and ideas by accepting discussions in different formats. For example, you might have a meeting to discuss something with a follow-up GitHub Discussion to collect async ideas.
• Give access to the leadership team. At GitHub all our CoBs have an executive sponsor who’s a member of GitHub’s senior leadership team. This gives members an ally to raise issues with, help find solutions, and communicate problems directly upwards.
• Lead from the very top. Provide opportunities for CoBs to meet with senior leadership. For example, this year, each of GitHub’s CoBs have a meeting with GitHub’s CEO as part of a listening tour. This shows that the community’s views are important to the whole business.

5. Celebrate neurodiversity

Acknowledge and celebrate the unique contributions of neurodiverse employees. Recognize their achievements, provide opportunities for career advancement, and ensure they have a voice in the organization. Celebrating Disability Pride Month and other related events can help raise awareness and appreciation within the company.

“Neurocats was the first time I found people like me not only represented at work, but celebrated and successful,” Palmer says. “Sharing the rough days, the burnout, the overwhelm and frustration, but also the wins of finally getting appropriate support, being seen as creative instead of weird, and getting to learn about all the different ways brains can function.”

Celebrations should come not just from the community but also from leadership and the People Team. Sharing posts about the company’s mental health benefits during Mental Health Month (in May) or sharing information about the community during meetings or training can all help to celebrate your diverse workforce.

Suggestions for celebrating neurodiversity:

• Celebrations should come from all levels of the company. An internal post by a member of the leadership team or an informative post by the People team or Human Resources can show your company’s support.
• Don’t sugar coat it. Being neurodivergent can be hard. It’s not a superpower. Celebrate the diversity and the wins, but never minimize the real struggles that many neurodivergent people deal with every day.
• Make it visible. Share things in the format that makes most sense and will reach the most people.
• Promote. Ask members of the community to share information on your company blog or website.

By implementing these strategies, you can create an inclusive environment where neurodivergent employees feel valued, supported, and empowered to contribute their best work.

“Neurocats provided an environment that made me feel safe and confident in an astonishingly short amount of time, allowing me to bring my A game, leverage my strengths, and make a positive impact much sooner than usual,” says Julie Kang, staff manager of software engineering at GitHub. “The support and understanding here have been truly transformative for my professional growth, and I feel equipped to pay this forward to my peers and reports.”

Interested in learning more about GitHub’s approach to accessibility? Visit accessibility.github.com.