Managing Performance When an Employee Discloses Neurodivergence

Understanding the Situation and Your Legal Obligations

You’ve started a formal performance management process with an employee and suddenly they disclose they have ADHD, autism, dyslexia or another neurodivergent condition. The manager is frustrated and wants to proceed. You’re caught between legal risks and business pressure, wondering if the employee has just played an untouchable “disability card”.

The reality is more nuanced and more manageable than you might think.

Why Disclosure Often Happens During Performance Reviews

The Privilege of Disclosure

Before assuming the disclosure is tactical, it’s crucial to understand that revealing a neurodivergent condition requires several factors to align:

• a sense of safety where employees believe they won’t face discrimination or stigma
• emotional readiness to overcome the fear that disclosure will be used against them
• the ability to navigate societal narratives about over-diagnosis and neurodivergence being used as an “excuse”

Common Triggers for Late Disclosure

Most disclosures during performance processes are genuine. Reasons that they happen at this stage include:

• Recent Self-Discovery: Many adults are only now recognising their neurodivergence, driven by increased awareness and better information. As they understand their challenges they can no longer mask them as effectively.
• Changed Circumstances: Life changes can reduce someone’s capacity to mask their challenges, whether that’s taking on new responsibilities or role changes, having children, experiencing menopause or increased stress at home.
• The Unravelling Effect: Once someone begins to recognise and understand their neurodivergent traits, masking becomes significantly harder. They cannot simply “put it back in the box”.
• Past Negative Experiences: Previous stigma or discrimination may have prevented earlier disclosure.

Is This Disclosure Genuine?

While it’s natural to question timing, treating all disclosures as genuine is both the safest and most practical approach.

If the disclosure is not genuine, which is rare, then this will become evident through the process. An employee acting in bad faith will consistently resist support, make excuses and fail to engage constructively. The outcome will be the same regardless of your initial assumption.

However if you dismiss a genuine disclosure then you risk discrimination claims, failure to make reasonable adjustments claims, losing a valuable employee who could thrive with proper support - all resulting in significant legal and reputational costs.

Are the Performance Issues Disability-Related?

This is the critical question that determines your next steps.

The High Probability Connection

If an employee discloses ADHD, autism or dyslexia, there’s a strong likelihood that their performance challenges are connected to their neurodivergence. This connection may not be obvious for several reasons:

• the employee may be newly diagnosed and not yet understand how their condition impacts their work
• managers and HR may lack deep understanding of these conditions
• the relationship between specific traits and performance issues can be complex

The Business Case for Exploration

Even if you’re uncertain whether the issues are disability-related, exploring barriers and solutions is good business practice. It’s substantially more cost-effective to support an existing employee back to full performance than to dismiss and replace them.

Pause and Assess: Your Critical First Step

When an employee discloses neurodivergence during a performance process then your immediate action should be to pause and reflect. The question isn’t whether you can continue with performance management (you can) but whether you should continue right now, before you’ve properly explored what’s happening.

If you can be absolutely certain that the performance issues are completely unrelated to the disclosed condition and that you’ve already explored and implemented all possible reasonable adjustments then you may continue. However, if you’re reading this article, you’re almost certainly not in that position. Continuing without this certainty exposes your organisation to significant legal risk.

The pause is essential. It gives you time to understand what barriers this employee is facing and what adjustments might enable them to perform effectively. This isn’t about letting someone off the hook, it’s about ensuring you’ve given them a fair opportunity to succeed before proceeding with any formal action.

Understanding Barriers: The Foundation of Support

Never rely solely on generic online lists of adjustments for specific conditions. While these resources can provide useful starting points, neurodivergence is highly individual. ADHD alone has approximately 15,000 different combinations of traits that can lead to diagnosis. Add co-occurring conditions, which are highly common, and the variation becomes enormous.

You must understand what specific barriers this individual faces, how their neurodivergence manifests in their role and what environmental or procedural factors exacerbate challenges and what strategies and adjustments would genuinely help them succeed.

Workplace Needs Assessments: Your Expert Solution

When an employee is newly diagnosed or self-identifying, when they cannot clearly articulate what changes would help or when they don’t fully understand their own barriers, a workplace needs assessment becomes essential. This isn’t just about ticking a compliance box. It’s about getting expert, legally defensible recommendations that actually work.

A comprehensive workplace needs assessment examines the complete picture. It involves:

• detailed analysis of the job role and specific tasks
• consideration of the work environment and its impact
• examination of team dynamics and management style
• identification of the employee’s strengths alongside their challenge areas

The assessor will typically speak with both the manager and the employee to understand not just what the job requires but how it’s actually being performed day-to-day and where the friction points occur.

The result is specific, tailored recommendations for tools, strategies and adjustments that address this individual’s needs in their specific role and context. These are evidence-based interventions designed around the unique intersection of this person’s neurodivergence and their particular work environment. Learn more about what workplace needs assessments involve and when they’re needed.

Implementation often requires a phased approach. For employees with ADHD in particular, overwhelming them with too many changes at once can be counterproductive. Implement adjustments systematically, allowing time for adaptation and learning. This staged approach is itself a reasonable adjustment, recognising that change management for neurodivergent employees may need to be handled differently.

Reasonable Adjustments: Separating Needs from Feasibility

A Critical Distinction

The term “reasonable adjustments” conflates two separate considerations that should be kept distinct in your thinking and documentation.

Adjustments refers to what the person needs to perform their role effectively. This is a factual determination based on the individual’s barriers and the requirements of the role.

Reasonable addresses whether it’s feasible for your organisation to provide those adjustments. This is where business and legal questions come in: the cost and resources required, the impact on business operations, health and safety considerations and whether the adjustments would actually overcome the barriers. This is where your judgement as an HR professional comes into play.

Keep these concepts separate in your analysis and documentation. First establish what adjustments are needed, then separately assess whether each is reasonable in your specific circumstances. Read our comprehensive guide to reasonable adjustments.

Exploring All Options

Before concluding that adjustments aren’t reasonable, consider phased implementation of changes, alternative approaches to achieve the same outcome, redeployment to a different role that’s a better fit and modifications to the role itself. The question isn’t just “can we make this adjustment in this role” but “can we enable this person to contribute effectively somewhere in the organisation”.

Review and Monitor Progress

After implementing adjustments, establish a structured review process. A three-month checkpoint allows you to assess what’s working, what needs refinement and what additional support might be needed. In many cases, you’ll see significant improvements even at this early stage. Adjustments may need tweaking as circumstances change or as the employee develops new strategies, so ongoing refinement is normal and expected.

Set realistic expectations. Workplace needs assessments can produce rapid improvements. Some organisations see positive changes even before formal reports are completed, based on initial conversations and quick-win suggestions. The improvements can be dramatic when barriers are properly identified and addressed.

When Performance Management Can Continue

You can proceed with performance management, potentially leading to dismissal, only when you have thoroughly explored and understood the barriers, implemented all reasonable adjustments, given adequate time for those adjustments to take effect and reviewed and refined the adjustments based on expert advice. You must be able to document and defend why any recommended adjustments could not be implemented and you need to confirm that redeployment is not a viable option. Only if performance remains below acceptable standards despite all of the above can you reasonably continue with formal performance proceedings.

This is not a “get out of jail free card” for the employee. It’s a structured, legally defensible process that protects your organisation while giving the employee a genuine opportunity to succeed. Learn more about managing conduct and capability issues with neurodivergent employees.

The Reality: Adjustments Often Transform Performance

In practice, workplace needs assessments conducted during performance processes frequently result in dramatic improvements. When barriers are properly identified and addressed then many employees not only return to acceptable performance but excel in their roles.

This isn’t surprising. These individuals often have valuable skills and experience. They’ve simply been working with unidentified barriers that prevented them from demonstrating their full capability. Remove or reduce those barriers and you often discover the high performer who was there all along.

Your Professional Approach: The HR Perspective

As HR professionals our role in these situations is to protect the organisation from legal risk through proper process, support managers to handle these situations constructively, enable employees to perform to their potential and balance competing interests fairly and professionally. These objectives aren’t in conflict, proper process serves all of them.

Conclusion

When an employee discloses neurodivergence during a performance process then you’ve got an opportunity to understand the real causes of performance issues and implement targeted solutions that may quickly resolve problems. You have the chance to retain valuable experience and knowledge, demonstrate good employment practice and protect your organisation from legal challenge.

The key is following a structured approach:

1. pause the process
2. properly assess the barriers the employee faces
3. implement appropriate adjustments
4. review progress objectively
5. and only then - if necessary and after all reasonable steps have been taken - continue with formal performance management

This approach isn’t just legally sound, it’s good business. The cost and disruption of recruitment and replacement far exceeds the investment in proper assessment and adjustment. In most cases, you’ll find that once barriers are understood and addressed then the employee you were concerned about becomes a valued, productive member of your team.

Need expert guidance on neurodivergence in your workplace? As a qualified neurodiversity consultant and workplace needs assessor with 20 years of HR experience, I provide workplace needs assessments, HR training, manager training on understanding neurodiversity and strategic guidance on managing neurodivergence at work. Contact Silk Helix to learn how we can support your organisation in creating an inclusive, high-performing workplace.

Article last updated: 15 February 2026