Why this lab exists, and who’s running it.

CultureIQ Labs exists because three things converged. The first was a decade across five Canadian group benefits and disability management carriers. Reading files. Watching the same pattern repeat — stalled returns, supervisor conversations that should have been routine but weren’t, accommodation refusals grounded in documentation rather than in the work itself. By the time I’d seen it from enough sides, I knew the carriers had decent claim systems, the employers had decent policies, the literature had decent answers — and the thing that didn’t exist was a way to put all three together so they held up to scrutiny.

The second was the capstone. I completed my MS in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Capella University in January 2026 with an integrative project on neurodivergent employees in Canadian workplaces — specifically, how organizational climate shapes whether a worker discloses, what accommodations they get, how much they end up masking, and what that does to their brain health. The project developed four new measurement scales (NDACS, DBS, WAES, MAWS) and designed a sequential study linking climate to those outcomes through disclosure, accommodation, and masking — a dual-perspective design that puts neurodivergent employees and the practitioners who accommodate them side by side. It’s a study CultureIQ Labs intends to run.

The third was September 24, 2025. My father was terminated in June 2025 after months of psychological abuse by his boss. Three months later, on September 24, he died at fifty-four of complications from cirrhosis none of us knew he had. He was an old-school man who tied his worth to his ability to work. Losing the job didn’t just take the income; it took the identity. The workplace abuse he carried in silence — because the workplace gave him no safe way to name it — contributed to his death. He didn’t need resilience training. He needed a workplace where it was safe to say this is killing me without losing his job for saying it.