Many companies today throw around words like ’accountability’ and ’responsibility’ in addition to the increasingly popular ’inclusion’.

What most companies mean: ’Accountability’ – grass root level employees are supposed to take accountability for opinions and actions. As soon as an employee has reached a level above grass root, ’accountability’ simply means ’save face for the company’ no matter how incorrect that is.

What most companies mean: ’Responsibility’ – every employee is responsible for themselves, their tasks and related information. The main ’responsibility’ for the company is to always be right; if an employee disagrees with the company activities, communications or policies, the employee is simply not ’taking responsibility’.

What most companies mean: ’Inclusion’ – ”we gave you a job despite you not being ’normal’ so now you should be grateful and express your gratitude in every possible way so we can feel good about ourselves. If you don’t express this gratitude, at least be quiet.” If an employee points out inconsistencies in inclusion policies, the employee will be deemed difficult, not-a-team-player, un-hireable and other misleading denominations.

In order to be able to affect company policies, you need to be in higher management. Employees on the grass root level have nothing to say. Yes, part of the issue is the lack of sufficient knowledge, but the biggest part is what Stephen Hawking referred to as ’the illusion of knowledge’, meaning that people think they know so they don’t understand the need for further educating themselves.

Companies often do polls/questionnaires to show how an inclusive, fair and righteous workplace it is. Unfortunately many of the questions are adjusted to show a positive outcome. I remember one company I worked for over several years. The first polls were honest and the company addressed the results openly and vowed to change things for the better. But there was very little change in real life, instead the polls changed. The way the questions were phrased, the alternatives for answers etc. All to make the company look good.

Here in Europe many also hide behind the GDPR regulations, that state that companies cannot ask employees about certain personal information, including ability variations/neurodiversity. Therefore most companies have only a few questions regarding inclusion and, as all employees are requested to answer the same questions, the results are not reliable. You can do the math: if 85% of the employees do not have an ability variation and 15% do*, how well do you think the poll results will show what the employees with ability variations think? Especially since most companies brag about how inclusive they are and hence, most employees also believe that since they lack their own experience.

*I will not add any statistics in here, but feel free to google. The one thing I will mention is that many official statistics estimate the number of neurodivergent employees to be between 10-20% at any given workplace. There are also other ability variations to take into account, and not all of these other ability variations affect the above mentioned neurodivergent employees.