In many organisations, repeated daytime school and care coordination is treated as an inconvenience to be tolerated rather than a legitimate operational reality. For neurodivergent families, this creates a cumulative penalty that can quietly drive high-quality employees out.

How the Penalty Builds

One meeting is manageable; recurring short-notice meetings, assessments, and care calls are different. Employees can become trapped in a cycle of apology, catch-up, and perceived underperformance.

Over time this erodes confidence and increases the risk of exit from leadership pipelines.

Policy Blind Spots

Generic flexible working policies may overlook frequency and unpredictability. They often assume occasional disruption rather than sustained caregiving complexity.

Policies should explicitly include repeated education and care coordination requirements to avoid inconsistent interpretation.

Fairness Across the Team

Team fairness concerns are real and must be managed openly. The solution is transparent workload planning, not denying support to those with legitimate constraints.

When teams understand prioritisation logic, support is less likely to be viewed as preferential treatment.

What Good Scheduling Policy Looks Like

Strong policy sets core collaboration windows, protects focus time, and allows asynchronous alternatives for non-critical meetings. It also defines backup ownership when urgent family events occur.

This approach improves reliability for the whole team, not just parents.

Retention Consequences

Where rigid norms persist, parent employees often downshift ambitions or leave. Organisations then lose capability and institutional memory that take years to rebuild.

Removing the school-meeting penalty is a strategic workforce decision, not a marginal HR adjustment.