What is a support gap at work (and what is it costing you)?

A support gap is the distance between what people need to do their work and what their workplace actually provides. It stays invisible because most people mask rather than ask, and it surfaces later as missed deadlines, quiet attrition and tribunal risk. Mind the Support Gap is a free eight-question diagnostic that locates yours.

What is a support gap, exactly?

Every job quietly assumes things: that instructions survive the meeting they were given in, that priorities are obvious, that "done" means the same thing to everyone, that asking for clarification is cheap. For a lot of people, and reliably for neurodivergent people, those assumptions don't hold. The support that would close the distance, written briefs, explicit expectations, a reliable check-in, either exists in how your team operates or it doesn't.

The gap is rarely a matter of intent. Managers are not failing and the person who needs support is never the problem. More often there is simply no room: nobody designed the handover, the check-in lives or dies on one manager's spare capacity, and the structure people need is riding on goodwill that is already spent. Some of that is workflow you can design out. Some is genuine pressure on people. Either way it compounds quietly.

Why can't you see it from where you sit?

Because the people in the gap are working hard to make sure you can't. The 2023 Neurodiversity in the Tech Sector report found 40% of neurodivergent employees don't know what support to ask for and only 9% ever request adjustments. The CIPD found only around half of neurodivergent employees say their team has an open, supportive climate, and one in five have experienced harassment or discrimination at work related to their neurodivergence. People read that climate accurately and respond by masking: looking fine, pulling all-nighters, slowly burning out.

So the signals you actually receive are lagging ones. Work that arrives below someone's obvious ability. The brilliant hire who goes quiet in month four. Exit interviews that say "a better opportunity" and mean "I was drowning and asking felt unsafe". By the time a support gap is visible, you're looking at its consequences.

What does a support gap cost?

The bill arrives in instalments. Replacing a single employee costs UK organisations around £30,600 on average, and the attrition driven by missing support tends to take your most capable people, the ones who masked successfully right up until they couldn't. Below the leaver line sits the bigger, quieter cost: capacity your existing team loses to working unsupported.

The regulatory direction makes the gap pricier to ignore. Parliament's Work and Pensions Committee found 82% of adjustment requests take over four months to implement and has recommended a legal two-week response deadline, and the ADHD Taskforce put the economy-wide cost of unsupported ADHD at £17 billion a year. The era of support gaps being free for employers is visibly closing.

How does the diagnostic work?

Mind the Support Gap takes about five minutes. You pick your seat first, manager, HR or People lead, or founder, because the honest questions differ by role. Then eight concrete questions about how support currently happens in your team. Not "do you value inclusion" but "how does a piece of work actually get handed to someone": written steps or a verbal run-through, explicit deadlines and definitions of done or assumed ones, a reliable check-in or an open-door policy that relies on people asking.

Your result names where your gap sits, from "in good shape" to "beyond capacity", and recommends the next step that genuinely fits. Worth saying plainly: the recommendation is not always us. A small team with a moderate gap gets pointed to a workshop and better handover habits, not software. An organisation in good shape gets told nothing is broken. We built it as a diagnosis rather than a funnel, because a wrong-fit pitch helps nobody, and you can save the result as a PDF to forward to whoever holds the budget.

It's at gap.koalaforwork.com, free, and the result comes with the option of a call if you want to talk it through.

Sources: Neurodiversity in the Tech Sector report (2023) on the 40% / 9% figures and ~£30,600 replacement cost; CIPD Neuroinclusion at Work (2024); Work and Pensions Committee, Disability at Work report (May 2026); Report of the Independent ADHD Taskforce (NHS England, November 2025) on the £17 billion annual cost.