The Statements Your Managers Are Trained to Ignore

In my 15+ years of team/company leadership work not one employee ever sat me down and said “I’d like to invoke my rights under the ADA.” Not once. Not even close. I’ve tirelessly worked to up-skill as a leader to build an environment that every employee felt comfortable speaking with me. Whether about work or life, I’ve tried my best to improve every direct hire’s work experience. My team has shared struggles about finances, work-life balance during the CoVid lockdown, and more. But nothing even close to invoking legal rights or protections.

What I did hear during my career: “The meetings are killing me.” “I can’t think straight in that office.” “The only way I get real work done is after everyone logs off.” Different words, same message. And for years, like most managers, I filed those comments under “venting” and moved on. 🤷

Here’s why that reflex may get expensive. In the UK, employment tribunal cases citing neurodiversity hit 517 in 2025, up roughly 95% in five years . ADHD-related decisions up 8.5x, from 6 in early 2020 to 51 in early 2025, per analysis by law firm Irwin Mitchell. Companies won't move on conscience. They’ll start moving on legal exposure first, employee retention second

This piece is about two specific groups of your employees. The group with a clinical diagnosis who don’t self identify (31% of neurodiverse employees), and those who don’t (yet) have a diagnosis.

A quick note on the latter before you start thinking you’re in the clear if there’s no diagnosis in hand NOW. I’m going to specifically focus on Autism diagnoses having gone through this process for my son in the past year.

Significant wait time

Across the world in wealthy countries there's a significant backlog in diagnoses. There simply aren’t enough qualified professionals to do them.

So as you can see from a few of the examples, there’s a significant waiting period for a diagnosis. And in some countries, wait times even through private clinics can take a while. My personal experience was about 8 months between submitting the application requesting a diagnosis and having the finalized report.

Significant cost

Across the world, doing a diagnosis through public health systems can take years. So many people, like myself, turn to the private clinics. However, depending on where you are in the world doing a diagnosis privately can cost up to thousands of dollars. I can say it cost me ~$3,000 for the diagnostic process for my son.

So the TLDR version of the opening is ND diagnosis currently take a long time and come with a pretty decent cost. Which can certainly impact an employee going for an official diagnosis and receiving one while employed.

Here's the thing I have to be honest about, because every law firm write-up dances around it: there is currently no clean line for when an employer "should have known." The legal tests globally tend to use the same deliberately fuzzy phrase. “The duty bites when you "knew or ought reasonably to have known." Nobody can hand you a bright 🚨. So far most of the cases fall on the side of the employer but there are those that award the employee.

On one side, a bare self-label can be enough to put you on notice. In a 2025 Employment Appeal Tribunal case, a teacher repeatedly referred to herself as an "aspie." She was dismissed for misconduct and only formally diagnosed with autism 20 months after she left. Even so, the UK’s Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) held those "aspie" references "ought to have put the company on notice that the employee might have ASD." No diagnosis. No formal disclosure. A nickname was enough to start the clock ⏳

On the other side, the duty has real limits, and employers do win. Employers still win where the employee genuinely hid the condition (in the A Ltd v Z case, an employee concealed depression and schizophrenia behind other reasons for her absences). The EAT found no specific knowledge, because reasonable inquiries still wouldn’t have surfaced what she was determined to keep hidden. In Cox v Essex Fire, the employee said he was bipolar but refused to let his employer contact his doctors. The EAT held the employer couldn’t reasonably have known. “A failure to make inquiries” is not the same as “you should have known.”

There isn’t “a label = liability” or “odd behavior = liability.” It perhaps will be, “was there a signal a reasonable employer should have connected, and would asking have actually revealed it?” The ambiguity is the exposure.

Going forward, the smart move isn’t trying to find the line or hoping it isn’t crossed. It’s to build systems that make the line irrelevant or more clearly defensible.

Group 1: the diagnosed who’ve said nothing. CIPD’s 2024 Neuroinclusion at Work report of 1,047 employees and 1,003 senior managers, found 31% of neurodivergent employees hadn’t told their line manager or HR. The same report says why: 44% called it private, 37% feared stereotypes, 34% pointed to stigma, 29% worried about their career. That’s not apathy. It’s a rational risk assessment about job success and career trajectory.

Group 2: the undiagnosed — a far bigger number. Adult diagnosis rates for ADHD and autism run well below actual prevalence, especially for women, people of color, and anyone who masked early. They can’t disclose a diagnosis they don’t have. But they feel the friction daily and can describe it out loud constantly. 💬

Neither group says the clinical words. But both are talking. A single grumble is noise i.e. “too many meetings this week, some weeks are just brutal.” The signal has two fingerprints: it’s recurring, and it ties the struggle to the environment or the system, not to one bad week:

This is just venting. It’s an employee handing you a diagnosis of your how your company operates.

The US framing only sharpens this: the EEOC’s guidance is explicit that an employee “does not need to mention the ADA or use the phrase ‘reasonable accommodation’” to put you on notice. ✅ No magic words. No diagnosis.

“Neurodivergent” isn’t a clinical diagnosis or a legal category. It’s an umbrella term, and the law knows it. Protection under the UK Equality Act doesn’t hinge on a diagnosis. It hinges on whether an impairment has a substantial, long-term effect on day-to-day activities. In Stedman v Haven Leisure [2025] EAT 82, a tribunal first decided a job applicant with ADHD and autism wasn’t “disabled” enough to be protected; the EAT overturned it. Ruling that if just one day-to-day activity is substantially affected, he’s covered. And “there is no need for a medical diagnosis.” The diagnosis is evidence; it was never the gate.

And as detailed towards the top of the newsletter wait time + cost impact a company’s practical reason “just go get diagnosed.” In Cox, the tribunal’s instinct was that the employee should obtain a formal diagnosis. Questions remains even if a company suggests getting a diagnosis. Who covers the cost of the diagnosis and what if the employee can’t financially afford it? Does this protect the company? And if a diagnosis can take months to years, what happens during that interim period?

If your legal team thinks this is a UK quirk, correct them. 🌍 The same principle is baked into US, EU and other national laws. Currently most of the cases won by an employee were focused on a company’s lack of accommodation. Though the data says, when an employee does self identify, many/most companies to attempt to make accommodations.

In the US, the ADA protects an impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. No formal diagnosis required. Liability can attach simply because an employer acted on a perceived impairment (a Nashville jury hit an employer on exactly that theory in EEOC v. West Meade Place in 2022). The EEOC’s enforcement energy is on failure-to-accommodate. Which is precisely where “no accommodation” quietly becomes “termination.” If you were on notice of a diagnosis, didn’t accommodate it, then fired someone for the very performance problems the missing accommodation caused, you’ve stacked a failure-to-accommodate claim on top of a discriminatory-discharge one. Yes, this is currently where self identification has happened. The question is to what extent it will expand into the other.

In Canada, the “duty to inquire” goes furthest of all. When an employer knew or ought to have known of a link between a performance problem and a possible disability, it must ask before disciplining. An explicit exception to the employee’s duty to disclose (Calkins v Broadview Homes, 2023).

Since you can’t pin the legal line, try to remove the trigger instead. Universal design beats the formal accommodation process every time, because nobody has to disclose, name anything, or work up the courage to ask.

📚 Train managers on noise vs. signal and how to respond. Recurring language tying focus, productivity, or sensory overload to the environment is signal. The reply is “tell me more about what’s getting in your way,” never “let’s talk about your performance.”

📜 Implement an signal intake & escalation SOP.

At minimum it should define:

🧠 Implement a neurodiversity training & up-skilling SOP with an owner.

At minimum:

🏢 If you're bringing people back to an office:

Be realistic. You don’t need rebuild the entire office like Cisco did (though it’s a great idea). Convert one large conference room into a designated quiet zone. Think of your local library (if anyone remembers those). Provide noise-canceling headphones with new hire welcome packages. Let people take calls from a calmer space. If “I can’t focus in the office” is a recurring line, the room is the bug, not the person.

🌍 If you’re remote:

Cap meeting load and protect real focus blocks as a default, not a perk. Most employees do their best work when able to focus deeply. So look at how to move from sync to async communications. Precisely because the synchronous day is hostile to focus. So fix the day.

This newsletter post was intentionally written to raise questions as the data simply isn’t there yet. And what we’ve seen so far, will likely change in the future.

If you're in HR or the C-Suite and ever thought or contemplated that it’s better to ignore 🙈 🙉 🙊 , reply directly or share it with whoever needs to see it. Sometimes the conversation that changes a policy starts with an article.

And if you want help building the infrastructure that gives every employee an equal opportunity to be productive and a super star whether in the office or remote, reach out.