Kit Slocum, Neurodiversity Strategy & Inclusion Lead at FLOWN
The finance industry prides itself on precision. Risk is carefully calculated, returns are robustly measured and inefficiencies are routinely rooted out. However, one significant source of organisational drag continues to go largely unaddressed: the systemic failure to support neurodivergent employees.
According to the City & Guilds Neurodiversity Index, neurodivergent employment rates sit at around 38–39%, compared to approximately 77% for non-neurodivergent individuals. Meanwhile, five million mental health days are lost annually across UK workplaces, many of them a direct consequence of environments that weren’t designed with cognitive diversity in mind. Perhaps most tellingly, just 39% of neurodivergent employees report feeling well supported from the start of their role. For an industry that prides itself on being built on talent, performance, and risk management, this represents a serious blind spot.
Finance is often steeped in a high-performance monoculture with long hours, fierce internal competition, and a culture that has historically rewarded conformity. For neurodivergent individuals, the result can be an exhausting and unsustainable expenditure of cognitive and emotional energy which contributes directly to burnout and departure. Research from The Access Group confirms that financial services significantly underperforms on neurodivergent inclusion compared to other sectors, with consequences visible in turnover and lost talent.
The irony is that many of the traits associated with ADHD, such as pattern recognition, hyperfocus, appetite for risk, and lateral thinking, map almost perfectly onto the skills the sector prizes most. Cognitive diversity of this kind has been shown to sharpen decision-making, surface organisational blind spots, and drive the kind of unconventional thinking that moves markets. However, inaccessible environments have made it nearly impossible for neurodivergent employees to show where they shine.
It’s a common misconception that ADHD brains can’t focus. The reality is that they struggle to regulate focus, and the working environment has a significant influence on that. If you take a look at the default finance workplace, you might find long meetings, back-to-back calendar blocks, dense email chains, and rigid 9-to-5 structures. These are almost optimally designed to work against neurodivergent employees and create barriers to their performance.
Finance, a sector that excels in finding efficient solutions to complex problems, doesn’t need to look far. The most effective and workable interventions are also the most cost-effective.
Body doubling is one of the most effective and underutilised tools available, especially for remote work. This practice, which is simply the act of completing tasks alongside another person, whether physically or virtually, works by providing the external anchor that ADHD brains often need to initiate and sustain focus. At FLOWN, our research found that structured virtual co-working sessions significantly improved task completion and reduced the paralysis that often accompanies executive functioning challenges found in those with ADHD. The mechanism works because watching others work activates mirror neurons, providing a small but meaningful dopamine signal that supports task initiation and follow through. Beyond the neuroscience, there is something equally powerful in the shared accountability and structured space that body doubling creates. There is a collective commitment to show up and do work together. For remote finance teams especially, virtual body doubling requires no budget and no new infrastructure. All it requires is a recurring calendar invite and a shared intention to work.
Structured flexibility is another low-cost, high-impact shift. This means defining clear goals and deadlines while giving employees genuine autonomy over how they reach them. For ADHD brains, external structure is essential. However, rigidity without flexibility creates anxiety and disengagement. Allowing people to work in their most productive window, whether that’s early morning or late afternoon, and to approach tasks in ways that suit their cognitive style, can dramatically improve output quality and retention.
Beyond these, a practical toolkit is broader than many organisations realise. Visual task boards, short check-ins instead of lengthy meetings, and AI-powered planning tools that reduce cognitive load are all simple adjustments that accommodate different cognitive styles. Offering a variety of tools and formats like visual aids for those who process information spatially, written summaries for those who need to absorb at their own pace, audio or verbal check-ins for those who think out loud, means that different brain types can access the same information in the way that works best for them. Crucially, none of these are neurodivergent-specific. These types of tools tend to lift performance across entire teams. But for people whose brains require more deliberate support, they make a disproportionate difference. And the simplest starting point for any manager? Just ask. Opening up a dialogue about what employees need costs nothing and can change everything.
Lastly, what’s often missing is not resources but awareness. The 2026 City & Guilds Index found that 51% of neurodivergent employees did not receive consistent support when they asked for it, suggesting the barrier may be less about willingness and more about understanding. Neurodivergent employees frequently mask their struggles because high-pressure work culture equates difficulty with inadequacy. When managers understand that a colleague’s inconsistent output may reflect genuine neurological variation rather than lack of effort, the dynamic shifts from frequent frustration to collaboration. The business case for neurodivergent inclusion is clear, but it is worth mentioning that behind every statistic is a person who has likely spent years working twice as hard just to keep up. The goal is not to extract value from neurodivergent talent. It’s to stop extracting a toll from it.
The finance industry talks constantly about competitive edge. Cognitive diversity is one of the most well-evidenced sources of it. Research from the Kellogg School of Management has shown that cognitively diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones (even expert homogeneous ones) on complex problem-solving tasks. The question isn’t whether neurodivergent talent adds value. It does. The question is whether the sector is willing to build environments where that value can actually be accessed.
The cost of doing nothing is already visible in the data of missed mental health days, the employee turnover, the disengagement, and the departures. The cost of doing something is, in most cases, as simple as a changed meeting format, a shared document, turning captions on in a video call, and a bit of education.
That seems like a reasonable trade.
