That's not someone's meditation app. That's a real employee's moment-by-moment internal monologue 🧠 — running on a loop through a routine Monday standup while she's also trying to take notes, track the conversation, and figure out whether she's making too much eye contact or not enough.
She is doing two jobs simultaneously.
This is called masking — and if you lead an organization of any size, there's a very good chance it's happening across your team every single day, costing you focus, output, and people. Surprised? There's an equally good chance nobody's told you about it, because the people doing it have gotten very, very good at making it invisible.
What Masking Actually Is (Hint: Not a Vibe)
The academic literature calls it "camouflaging." The people living it call it masking. Either way, it means the same thing: the effortful, often exhausting suppression of neurodivergent traits — ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia — in order to present as neurotypical in a neurotypical world.
The key word is effortful. This isn't someone quietly adjusting to the room. This is a second operating system running in parallel to the actual work 💻. Dr. Laura Hull at UCL, one of the leading researchers in this space, described masking as a three-stage process: the drive to fit in triggers a cascade of masking behaviors, and those behaviors come at a consistent cost — exhaustion, threats to identity, and over time, burnout. As one of her study participants put it: "It's mentally exhausting constantly having to be something else."
That participant could be your best engineer. Your highest-rated customer success manager. The person who never misses a deadline and also never, ever tells you what it takes to get through the day.
Here's what makes masking tricky for organizations: it is designed to be invisible. A 2023 study published in PLOS ONE found that masking had become "automatic" and "second nature" for many neurodivergent adults — meaning even trained managers often can't detect it. And in many cases, the person doing the masking may not fully recognize it themselves until they get a late diagnosis and suddenly the last 20 years of exhaustion makes sense.
The Six Behaviors Running in Your Employees' Heads
Masking isn't one thing. It's a cluster of specific cognitive and behavioral strategies that researchers have catalogued in detail. Think of these as the six tabs always open in the background 🖥️:
📝 Script preparation
Hull et al.'s research identified scripting as one of the core compensatory strategies autistic adults develop — a "rehearsed one-liner," a prepared talking point, a conversational safety net deployed to navigate each interaction. Hours before meetings rehearsing what to say. Meticulously drafting and re-drafting a 30-word Slack message. The cognitive overhead is real.
✋ Stim suppression
Consciously suppressing self-stimulatory behaviors — hand-flapping, rocking, pen-clicking, vocal stims — because they're not "office appropriate." Sitting on hands during meetings. Switching to "acceptable" stims nobody notices. The suppression of natural self-regulation is not neutral. It consumes resources.
👁️ Eye contact performance
Forcing or faking eye contact that doesn't come naturally — in job interviews, one-on-ones, and client calls. Research has found that eye contact can actually activate the amygdala (the brain's threat response) in autistic individuals, making it genuinely distressing, not just uncomfortable. So next time you score someone as "lacking confidence" in an interview, ask yourself what you were actually measuring. I've noticed and being transparent, have tried correcting my son from doing this while on zoom mentoring calls.
👀 Reaction monitoring
A state of constant hypervigilance — scanning every face in the room for signs that something landed wrong. Replaying conversations afterward. Hull et al. describe autistic adults developing "different personas or characters to use during social situations," each calibrated for a different context. That's not flexibility. That's overhead 📊.
🙋 People-pleasing
Agreeing to every request. Never pushing back on a deadline. For many neurodiverse employees, this is the fawn response — a trauma-adjacent coping mechanism where appeasement becomes the default. As Carmen Irace, an AuDHD advocate, put it: "After enough 'fix yourself' messages, your brain stops waiting for feedback and starts pre-complying. You don't just people-please. You people-predict."
🎭 Social mimicry
Carefully studying colleagues' humor, email sign-offs, Slack emoji patterns — then deploying a learned copy. Researchers identified 38 distinct camouflaging behaviors in a single study. One participant: "Since my diagnosis, I have tried to appear less quirky... I just mean in the way I dress myself." Another: "Be as cooperative, as friendly, as undemanding and as amenable as possible." These aren't personality traits. They're learned performances.
Put these six behaviors together and run them simultaneously, across an entire workday, in an open-plan office 😬. That's the tax. Every day. For years.
The Structural Villain: Your Managers Have No Idea This Is Happening
Here is where the business problem gets serious. An estimated 15–20% of your workforce is neurodivergent. And the data on what your organization is actually doing about it, is not great.
Read those numbers again slowly. Three in four neurodiverse employees aren't telling you. Half your managers would rather not hire them in the first place. And fewer than one in three organizations has done anything to prepare those managers.
That's not a diversity and inclusion problem. That's an organizational design failure — and the bill is coming due in ways that look like attrition, burnout, disengagement, and productivity loss that you can never quite explain.
Neurodivergent employees are 45% more likely to report feeling exhausted at work compared to their neurotypical colleagues (CIPD/Uptimize, 2024). 51% have taken time off due to their condition (City & Guilds, 2025).
Masking is not a personal choice. When the environment is designed to penalize authenticity, masking is a rational survival strategy. When 20% of neurodiverse employees report discrimination after disclosing, and 16% have had job offers rescinded (Zurich UK, 2024), the math isn't hard. They don't tell you because telling you isn't safe.
Remote Work Didn't Solve This. But It Showed Us What Could.
Here's something interesting that happened during the pandemic 🏠. Hundreds of thousands of neurodivergent employees suddenly got to work from home. Nobody planned this as an accessibility experiment. But it became one anyway.
LifeLabs Learning found in a 2022 study that neurodivergent employees spent 30% less energy masking when working from home.
As Dr. Kerry Magro, a board member at the National Autism Association, put it: "Having the ability to turn off your video camera is wonderful. To have the opportunity to talk and not have to worry about maintaining perfect eye contact is another huge benefit."
And Shringar Pangal, an autistic product marketer, described what happened when she moved to async written communication: "Suddenly, and for the first time ever, I'm being praised for my communication skills."
Let that one land for a second. First time ever. After years 🙁.
Now here's the important distinction. What most of us experienced during COVID — people stuck at home, improvising on webcams, kids in the background, no playbook — that is not what I mean. That was chaos with laptop access. That was not remote work.
Real digital-first work looks completely different. It's what companies like GitLab, Buffer, Help Scout, and Todoist have been building since day one — async-first cultures, documentation over meetings, written decision-making, outcome-based performance measurement. And it's what Atlassian, Dropbox, and HubSpot have built for distributed teams who actually mean it.
What real digital-first work has that COVID remote didn't
✓ Async-first communication — reduces scripting demands, gives processing time
✓ Written, documented decisions — eliminates improvised social performance
✓ Outcome-based performance — measures what you produce, not how you perform
✓ Psychological safety built into systems — not dependent on manager discretion
Real digital-first work is 90% of the answer for neurodiversity inclusion. The remaining 10% is real: video calls with cameras on still create masking demands, async tools can pile up, and some employees genuinely benefit from in-person structure. But here's the core claim: companies that have mastered digital-first work have accidentally built the most neuroinclusive operating model that exists.
When the second asteroid hits — the wave of neurodiverse Gen Z talent entering the workforce — those companies will have the infrastructure to catch them 🎯. The rest are going to wonder why their best hires keep leaving
What Unmasking Unlocks
These aren't heartwarming anecdotes. These are performance numbers 📈.
You're not getting a different employee. You're getting the same employee with less cognitive overhead. That's the whole point.
What To Do With This
Start with manager training.
Not a DEI checkbox — actual training on what masking looks like and how workplace design either increases or decreases its cognitive load. Organizations like Zavikon, auticon, Uptimize, and Genius Within all offer programs built specifically for this. Fewer than one in three employers does this today. Be one of them.
Build a disclosure system, not just a disclosure policy.
If 76% of your neurodiverse employees aren't telling you, ask why. The data on why is specific: privacy concerns (44%), fear of stereotyping (37%), fear of stigma (34%). Those aren't excuses. Those are signals about a systems failure.
Here's the real problem: most organizations have no infrastructure for what happens after someone discloses. Only 36% of managers have received any training on how to respond to disclosure (CIPD, 2024). 68% of ND employees don't know what accommodations they're entitled to. 51% don't know who to talk to.
A disclosure policy says: "You can tell us." A disclosure system answers the five questions an employee needs answered the moment they do:
The 5 Questions a Disclosure System Must Answer
Who will have access to this information? Is there a written, employee-controlled protocol? Who is told — direct manager only? HR only? Does it require explicit consent to share further? "HR handles it" is not a system. That's hope.
What exactly can we offer you? Not a blank "what do you need?" — a concrete accommodation menu: async-first communication, camera-optional meetings, written agendas 48 hours in advance, flexible hours, screen-on/screen-off policy, noise-cancelling equipment, extended deadlines for written deliverables
How has your manager been trained to respond? The moment after disclosure is make-or-break. A manager who quietly starts documenting performance or shifting assignments — with no training — creates exactly the harm they're trying to avoid.
How will your performance be evaluated going forward? Most ND employees are assessed partly on neurotypical social performance metrics: "executive presence," "culture fit," "likability." These are masking tests, not productivity metrics.
What does your path to promotion look like? When two candidates have similar productivity stats, the one with better social rapport almost always wins. That's not edge-case bias — it's structural. Are there criteria-based promotion processes that remove the relationship variable?
If an employee disclosed their neurodivergence to HR today, could you hand them a document that answers all five of those questions? If not — that's the gap. Not the courage to disclose. The infrastructure to receive it
Take async seriously — not just as remote policy, but as neuroinclusion infrastructure.
Async-first work models reduce scripting demands, eliminate improvised social performance, and give neurodiverse employees the processing time they need. This isn't a perk. It is structural accessibility.
Stop treating "not masking" as unprofessionalism.
If someone stims during a meeting, doesn't maintain eye contact, prefers text over verbal, or has a communication style that reads as "flat" or "blunt" — that may not be what you think it is. The employee who seems a little weird in the hallway but produces extraordinary work in structured contexts is probably showing you their actual self. That's worth more than the polished social performance you've been rewarding.
Ask the question.
Not "do you have a disability" — but "what does your best work environment look like? What gets in the way of your best work?" These are questions any good manager should be asking everyone. For neurodiverse employees, they open doors that many have never been invited to open.
The masking tax is real 💜. It's well-documented, it's measurable, and it's sitting on your team's capacity right now. The question is whether you're going to keep paying it — or whether you're going to build the kind of organization where your best people don't have to.
I'd love to hear what brought you here. Reply directly — I read every message.
If this resonates, share it with a CEO or HR leader in your network. The conversation needs to start somewhere.
And if you're past the conversation stage and ready to actually build the systems — reach out. That's exactly what I do.