On the Couch with Biscoes
On the Couch with Biscoes is your home for honest, unscripted conversations with the people who help our local community thrive. Brought to you by Biscoes Solicitors, this podcast steps away from the legal world and into the stories, values, and experiences of the businesses, organisations, and individuals we collaborate with every day.
Each episode invites you to settle into a cosy, comforting space where real people share what keeps them moving, lessons learned, challenges overcome, and the passions that drive their work. If you’re searching for heavy legal talk, this isn’t the place. But if you want heartfelt, open conversations with the voices shaping our community, you’re in exactly the right spot.
So grab a cuppa, get comfy, and join us on the couch. There’s always room for one more.
On the Couch with Biscoes
On the Couch with Tamzin Hall
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In this episode of On the Couch with Biscoes, Alison is joined by Tamsin Hall, founder of The Neurodiversity Academy, to explore how businesses can better understand and support neurodiversity in the workplace.
Tamsin explains what neurodiversity really means, breaking it down into simple, relatable terms and highlighting how different brains process information, communicate, and approach tasks. Drawing on her experience as a workplace needs assessor, she shares practical ways employers can create more inclusive environments with simple, impactful changes.
The conversation covers common workplace challenges, from communication styles and meeting anxiety to task management and performance concerns and how these can affect neurodivergent individuals. Tamsin also shares real-life examples of how small adjustments, such as clearer communication or alternative ways of reporting progress, can significantly improve performance and wellbeing.
They discuss the importance of tailored strategies, recognising that what works for one person may not work for another, or even for the same person on a different day. The episode also highlights how employers can support staff through coaching, training, and workplace assessments, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.
A practical and insightful episode for employers, managers, and professionals looking to build more inclusive, supportive, and high-performing workplaces.
Welcome to On the Couch with Bisco's, your home for honest, unscripted business and community chats brought to you by Bisco solicitors. We work with all kinds of businesses and organisations through our local community, and we've learnt so much from the people behind them. So now we want you to hear from them too, to understand the values, lessons, and experiences that kept them moving. If you're looking for hard-hitting legal content, this isn't the podcast for you. This is a cosy, comfortable space for local people and our best collaborators to have a voice. So grab a cupper and come and join us on the couch. Hi, I'm Alison Lee and you're on the couch with Biscoes. And today on the couch is Tamson Hall. Hi Tamson. Hi, how are you? I'm good, thank you.
SPEAKER_00Tams, tell us a little bit about what you do. Okay, so um I'm the founder of the Neurodiversity Academy. Um I support organisations and individuals to navigate the world of neurodiversity. So take it from potentially being complex situations to something more simple and easy to navigate.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Um so we've um engaged with you at Bisco's, haven't we? Um so could you just kind of explain um what you've what you can do for employers?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it starts with I'm a qualified workplace needs assessor. So workplace needs assessments is something that I can do from training to training days, training sessions, lunch and learns, just coming and talking to people about neurodiversity, to coaching, to management coaching, anything under that new adversity banner to just help leaders to understand new adversity, the individual to understand new diversity, and create inclusive cultures.
SPEAKER_01Okay, can I just break that down a little bit? Of course. Okay, so neurodiversity is something that we see on um documentation and social media. What does it mean?
SPEAKER_00Great question. And you can Google it and you can AI it and you come up with all these different definitions. The way that I describe it is my brain simply works differently. So I show up differently, the way that my brain processes things is different, and the way that I behave can be different. So, for example, for me, I'm dyspraxic. So I have no spatial awareness and I struggle with space. I am clumsy, I drop things down me. If you come for breakfast with me, if I go to a breakfast networking meeting and there's beans involved, it normally ends up. Yeah, I've I've banned beans now from our from our networking. Um so, in simple terms, my brain simply works differently. It isn't broken, it isn't wrong, it isn't ineffective, it is just simply different, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So um, for somebody who um has uh neurodiverse uh traits, um, what would a workplace um mean to them in terms of how they do their job, how they take on board any inductions or learning or just task management?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it can be so it can be draining, it can be hard, it can be anxiety-inducing, it can be so challenging if the workplace is set up for neurotypical. Whatever neurotypical looks like, because depends who you ask in the field as to whether you know neurotypical is actually the majority, it could be that actually the neurodivergent amongst us are the majority, but we're trying to fit into a neurotypical workplace, and that can be so challenging from the second that somebody wakes up in the morning to the second they go to bed in the evening, and simple things like meeting agendas, yeah. If you get invited to, and we were talking about it just before we came on, right? If you get invited to a meeting and the meetings tomorrow at four o'clock in the afternoon, and your manager says, Meeting to discuss your job, the individual will go to, I'm getting fired in an instant. Whereas a bit more information in the meeting agenda, a bit more information about what that meeting is going to entail, and a bit more thought about the title of the meeting, it can stop somebody going from I'm sitting here doing my job, so I'm gonna get fired and I'm gonna lose my job, my my house. And it's small changes, and and and I truly believe that to create an inclusive culture where neurodivergent people can come in and feel really confident and happy and uh comfortable, it doesn't need to be huge, great big gestures, it's the small thing. So it's the meeting, meeting, um, meeting agenda in advance, it's being careful about how you're inviting people to a meeting, it's not saying, Oh, I need to catch up with you later on. It's saying, Have you got five minutes now? I need to talk to you about ABC. It's being aware of a sense sensory overload, it's being aware of the lights, the sound, the noise, the lunchtime. It's it's all those small things that all add up but make such a big difference to somebody and how they can show.
SPEAKER_01So I've um I've seen you um do a presentation that you did actually for the business networking uh sessions that I run that um looked at some very simple, straightforward um methods by which um somebody who who maybe has you know uh maybe not been diagnosed, but you know has all the traits of ADHD, for example, um, might manage tasks better. Um so what what sort of things are you would would you suggest for somebody who who is struggling at work and and puts that down to maybe having some sort of neural neurodivergent traits? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So strategies are the are fabulous and they're the best when we tailor them to the individual. So I'm gonna share some things with you today that are work for a lot of my clients, but sometimes we need to change things. So, for example, have you heard of Eat the Frog? Yes, yes, so eat the frog for anybody that doesn't know what eat the frog is, it's it's having your to-do list and doing the hardest thing or the most complex thing on there first. Now, for neurodivergent brains, that can be the worst thing to do because it stops people from getting started. They are just sat in paralysis of I don't know where to start, I don't know how to start, I don't know what to do, this is too big. So, for some people, starting with the smallest and the easiest thing gets them started. So, for some, the opposite of eat the frog is fine.
SPEAKER_01So, I it was one of the things I've always um uh discussed with our trainee solicitors, for example, I that that idea that you procrastinate over a task that you think is going to take you longer, or that particular client is more difficult to manage, or the particular task in hand is um needs a lot more thought or um research potentially, and you think, oh, I haven't got time to do that now, I'll do something more simple. So um I've certainly used it as a as a mechanism for saying to junior lawyers, you know, eat that frog, get it done, it's the big thing, and it's because you're procrastinating, it'll just get bigger and uglier as it sits in the corner. So I guess what you're saying is somebody who who um maybe looks at work differently, approaches work differently, needs a slightly different strategy just to get started.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And those strategies will differ day to day. So for somebody, one day, eat the frog might be absolutely the right thing to do. On another day, when they may be a bit more stressed, or hormones are taking a play, or they haven't slept very well, that is not the right strategy. So for neurodivergent brains, especially ADHD, where we look for that dopamine, we look for that new shiny thing. What okay, what's going to excite me now? That can be different day in, day out. And so the the best way to overcome that is to have have a list of things that you need to do. And for some people, having a list doesn't work, it needs to be a physical list, it needs to be some people prefer it on the computer, some people prefer it in their heads. So, whatever that that list looks like, and give yourself, if you can, autonomy to say, okay, I've I'm low in energy today, I haven't slept, I'm stressed, my hormone's all over the place. I need to see those easy things on my to-do list. Because if we can do the easy things first, we can give ourselves confident confidence. I've got this, I can do it, I can do stuff, and then the next day when they've slept well and and everything's all kind of you know back into a bit more balance, they might be able to do the harder thing first. So it's it's ideally having a couple of different strategies for a particular challenge and being able to choose which one today is going to work for me because it that can change.
SPEAKER_01So, what I'm what I'm hearing from that is um actually what works for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person and isn't going to work for the same person on a different day. Yes. So you work very closely with individuals um to develop a say a bank of strategies that they might use, and they have to choose the one that that particular day is going to work for them.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and also working with line managers to understand that the output to get to the output is going to be different for everybody else. Sometimes for a neurodivergent individual, what happens in the middle of project starting or piece of work starting to output can be very, very different. And we need different things. I've got an example. Can I share that example? Yeah. So I had a client and an engineering company, and the the guy was on a performance improvement plan.
SPEAKER_01And I I was going to ask that question because presumably the reason that a company might call you in is because they've they've got somebody who they think should be performing well, and what's what the the the difficulties that they're having in manifesting as poor performance.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do get called in a lot when it's you know actually times that we need to cross the T's and dot the I's we're potentially looking, looking at exit, maybe not looking at exit, maybe we just want to help that individual. We want to them to be able to come to work and to enjoy work. Um, but a lot of times it is can you just come in and make sure that everything we're doing is is where it needs to be. So with this, this engineering um guy who was on a performance improvement plan, and he was really, really struggling to show his line manager what he was doing day in, day out. And the manager wasn't comfortable, wasn't confident that the the individual was doing work each day. So part of the performance improvement plan was I want you to come to me at four o'clock every afternoon, send me an email with exactly what you have done that day. So for my client, he's autistic and he stores a lot of information in internally. So he will take a lot of time researching and understanding and just creating in his mind, he can't put it on paper until he's got to the end. This is exactly what's going to happen, and this is exactly what needs to be done, and the next steps. So that planning process for potentially two or three weeks is all in his head, it's all research-based, and his manager couldn't understand that. So, where he was saying, I need a full written report every afternoon at four o'clock, what that manifested in is actually my client from about midday was stuck. He was in panic, he was anxious, he was worrying, I don't know how to put my thoughts on paper, I've got no idea how to put my thoughts on paper. So, what we did was we sat down all together and we came up with the idea of okay, instead of you writing an email to your line manager at four o'clock, pick up the phone to each other, have a conversation. And what that then resulted in is a five-minute conversation, manager feels confident that he knows progress is happening and things are moving. And my my coache was comfortable because he didn't he knew it, it was all he said, ask me a question about it, and I can tell you. I can't write it down because I don't know how to, and that changed everything, and so just understanding that it's different for everybody, the output will happen, but how you get there is going to be different for different neurodivergent brains.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, from an employer's point of view, and I'm I'm obviously an employer, um, it very often it's really frustrating when you, you know, you you recruit somebody, you've got somebody on paper who's you know should be able to do a job, and you see flashes of them being able to do a job really, really well. Um but but there are times where they're they're just not performing in a way that you think that they should, or you know, the company needs them to. Um, that employer could come to you um and say, look, can you do you know some work with this particular employee and just give us some some strategies or some some information about how we can change the dynamics in this situation, uh, change uh maybe the way we're communicating or how things um are prioritised so that we're getting the best out of people.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, absolutely. And and that can look like coaching sessions, it can look like strategy sessions, it can look like support for line manager, it can look like training, but also it can look like a workplace needs assessment, so something a bit more formal. So everybody knows, okay, this is absolutely what what needs to happen, and this is how we do it, and this is this is the structure and the process. So it's there's there's a lot that can be done for for workplaces for newer divergent individuals in workplaces that's really simple, and and and that's I suppose where where I want to get to. This isn't a conversation that's put in a box, put in a drawer, and isn't talked about. This isn't something that I want leaders to be worried about having conversations. We need to make it as simple as possible and have that communication.
SPEAKER_01And it's about, as you said right at the beginning, it's about creating inclusive workspaces where people who have some challenges around you know what other people find very, very easy um can actually thrive in a workplace. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Great, absolutely. Tamsin, thank you so much for coming in and explaining all that to us. And if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, um how would they do that?
SPEAKER_00Yes, so my website is thenewerdiversityacademy.com. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm Tamsin Hall, and I've got my insight discovery dots after my name, so I'm easily easily found. Brilliant. Thank you, Tamsin. Thank you for having me.