What a workplace needs assessment recommends for ADHD

What the assessment is

A workplace needs assessment is a structured look at one person's job and the barriers their condition creates in it. It's not a diagnostic assessment and doesn't try to be. The output is a report with recommendations: what would remove or reduce each barrier, and who should provide it.

It reaches the person by one of three routes:

• Through Access to Work. After the person applies, a DWP adviser commissions an assessment from an appointed assessor. The report feeds the award decision. This is the most common route for ADHD.
• Commissioned by the employer. Some employers pay for an assessment directly, often as part of an adjustments process or after a referral to occupational health.
• Privately. The person, or a coach working with them, arranges one and uses the report to ask the employer for adjustments or to support an Access to Work application.

The assessor is usually an occupational therapist or a specialist assessor with a background in neurodiversity. The conversation takes one to two hours, remotely or at the workplace, and covers the role, a typical week, the tasks that go well, the ones that don't and what the person has already tried.

What comes out of it for ADHD

Recommendations for ADHD group into four kinds. A good report has something in each, because the barriers rarely sit in one place.

1. Organising software

The most consistent recommendation, because the most consistent barrier is working memory: holding instructions, actions and deadlines in mind long enough to act on them. Software that catches things quickly, shows what's due and keeps notes next to the task they belong to turns a memory problem into a lookup problem.

Assessors recommend by category (task and project management, planning, routine) and usually name a product so the award is straightforward to buy. Alongside it, depending on the person: dictation for getting thoughts out, text-to-speech for long reading, mind-mapping for planning.

2. Workplace strategy coaching

A set number of sessions with an ADHD coach, funded as a support worker element. The coaching builds strategies around the person's actual job: how to start a task they've been avoiding, how to plan a week, how to handle interruptions. Reports typically recommend a block of sessions rather than open-ended support, with a review at the end.

Coaching and software are recommended together far more often than apart. The coach helps the person build the habit; the software is where the habit lives between sessions.

3. Equipment

Physical items that change the environment: noise-cancelling headphones for open-plan offices, a second monitor so reference material and the task are visible at once, a sit-stand desk where restlessness is part of the picture. Cheap, quick and often the first thing an employer can provide while the award is pending.

4. Working practice changes

The things an employer does for free. These are reasonable adjustments in the Equality Act sense and an assessment report is the strongest evidence for them. For ADHD, the ones that come up again and again:

• Instructions and actions in writing, not only spoken
• Large tasks broken down, each part with its own deadline
• A short regular check-in with the line manager rather than a long infrequent one
• Flexibility on start time where mornings are the hard part
• A quiet space, or permission to work from home, for focused work
• Agendas before meetings and notes afterwards

How assessors match support to barrier

The report is read by a DWP adviser who has to decide whether each recommendation is justified. The reports that get funded without questions share one habit: every recommendation is tied to a named barrier and a task the person actually does.

"Has ADHD, recommend software" is a weak sentence. "Reports losing agreed actions from the four to six meetings a day their role involves; recommend organising software that links meeting notes to tasks, so actions are captured in the meeting and surfaced when due" is a fundable one.

Writing a recommendation that gets funded

Whether the reader is a DWP adviser or an HR lead, the same structure works for each recommendation:

1. The barrier, in the person's own terms, tied to a task in the role.
2. The support, by category first and then the named product or provider.
3. Why they match: one sentence on how the support removes the barrier.
4. The cost and who provides it: Access to Work, the employer or no cost.
5. How it fits with the other recommendations, where it does. Coaching with software; headphones with a quiet space.

Two things to leave out. Don't recommend more tools than the person can adopt; three well-chosen items outperform seven. And don't restate the condition as the justification; the adviser is looking for the barrier.

Before and after the assessment

A supporter can make the assessment better without being in the room. What helps beforehand:

• A plain description of the job. Not the job description from the advert; what a typical week involves, how many meetings, how much writing, who the person is accountable to.
• Three concrete examples of where it goes wrong. A missed deadline and why, a meeting whose actions were lost, a report that took three times as long as it should. Assessors work from examples, and people with ADHD often can't produce them under pressure in the session.
• What's already been tried. Apps abandoned, adjustments that half-worked, a coach seen two years ago. It saves the assessor recommending it again and tells them something about fit.
• Anything the employer has already agreed. So the report builds on it rather than duplicating it.

After the report:

• Read it with the person. Reports arrive as PDFs and are easy to file unread. Fifteen minutes going through the recommendations together is where a coach or HR lead adds most.
• Separate the free from the funded. Working practice changes can start next week. Funded items wait for the award letter, so start the free ones now.
• Set up the funded items with the person, not for them. A licence sent by email has a short life. An hour with the actual calendar and the actual task list is what turns a recommendation into a system.
• Diary a review. Three months on, what's used, what isn't, what the person would change. Assessors expect their recommendations to be adjusted; the report is a starting point.

Where Humble fits

Humble is organising software in the task and project management, planning and routine category. It holds tasks, notes, meetings and the people they relate to on one timeline, so the person can see what happened, what's next and what's been shared with a coach. It's built for ADHD and autistic working patterns rather than adapted afterwards, and it sits alongside dictation, text-to-speech and note-taking tools rather than replacing them.

For a report, the product summary has a copyable recommendation paragraph, the price (£8 a month or £72 a year per person) and the proof assessors usually ask for. Set-up is one session, done with the person, so the recommendation turns into a working system rather than an unused licence.