A friend of mine, I'll call her Rebecca, worked at one of the most recognizable tech companies on earth. You know the one. Beautiful campuses. Chef catered meals. Has spent millions of $$ dedicated entirely to understanding how humans work best together. The years of investment in workplace psychology, office design, and people operations so thorough it spawned a body of literature that business schools still teach. 🏢
Rebecca has a clinical ADHD diagnosis. She disclosed it prior to/close in time to when her company rolled out its 3-2 hybrid RTO model. Rather than protesting the policy she went to the People and office design teams with a specific, reasonable request: “Please don't seat me with my immediate team in the open-office plan.” To be productive and successful back in the office she needed a quieter distraction-less zone. Not a private office or special accommodation telephone booth.
The request went back and forth but in the end couldn't figure out how to give one person with a disclosed diagnosis a different desk. 🪑
Eventually, they fired her.
My read? It was cheaper than redesigning the office plan. Cheaper than creating an exceptions that might spread to other employees. And similar to the reason they started with RTO, cheaper than actually redesigning the systems and operations to be a digital-first company. Unlike companies such as Dropbox, Airbnb, and Atlassian who did this during Covid and have thrived ever since. So as written, their systems + ops have made it structurally impossible for a significant portion of their workforce to succeed.
That's the thesis of this article. Not that companies are malicious. That firing is cheaper than fixing. That’s my 2 asteroid theory and what will kill off many many companies in the next few years. — and right now, nobody has made fixing legally mandatory.
That's about to change.
The Quiet Firing Nobody Is Naming
Before we get to the legal asteroid, let's be honest about what a lot of RTO mandates actually are.
Companies over-hired during COVID. They built bloated organizations on the assumption that the growth curve would hold or that more people means better results. It didn't. But formal layoffs are expensive. Severance, unemployment claims, bad press, the awkward all-hands where the CEO cries. So a cleaner solution emerged: raise the friction level by mandate the office. Nudge the people who won't or can't comply walk out on their own. 🚪
53%
of U.S. companies are already engaging in or planning "quiet firing" tactics — cutting benefits, increasing workloads, mandating additional office days — to push employees toward the exit without a formal layoff.
We saw this in real time with Grindr in September 2023. The CEO announced a proposed 2-3 day hybrid model. Within days, roughly half the staff resigned rather than comply. The company then proceeded with layoffs anyway, but with a significantly reduced severance bill. Whether that was the plan all along is something only the board knows. But the math went in their favor.
A University of Pittsburgh study — led by Mark Ma, analyzing LinkedIn data from millions of professionals across S&P 500 firms — found that RTO mandates triggered a 14% overall turnover spike. Senior and highly skilled employees left at rates of 18–19%. The people most likely to walk weren't disengaged low performers. They were your best people. The ones with options.
That's where the legal exposure begins. 📋
The Case That Should Be Keeping Your General Counsel Up at Night
There are no landmark U.S. cases yet that combine RTO mandates with neurodiversity discrimination. I want to be direct about that. But this type of lawsuit is on the way.
In April 2025, a London Employment Tribunal handed down a ruling that is, in my view, the clearest preview of what's coming.
Autistic employee found himself working in a sensory environment fundamentally at odds with his neurology, and when the company failed to meaningfully redesign his role around that reality, he resigned — and then won
Ciaran Saunders, diagnosed with Autism, ADHD, and depression — worked at Peloton's Covent Garden studio. The environment (loud music, flashing lights, high customer volume) made it significantly more difficult to successfully do his job. He requested adjustments which Peloton agreed to, but then failed to implement. As the studio ramped up, the sensory load became unmanageable. During a restructure, he was offered alternative roles — all still sensory nightmares. He resigned. The tribunal ruled Peloton had failed in its duty to make reasonable adjustments — not because they were hostile, but because they didn't build an environment where someone with his neurology could do his job.
I highly recommend reading the entire court paper linked above. But for the TLDR version here is where things failed:
Peloton lacked a disability policy or mechanism for sharing disability info with line managers
Adjustments made verbally fell through in practice because no one wrote them down
Accommodations provided were removed as a side effect of an unrelated operational change (the spreadsheet), with no one noticing
A months-long delay in getting the OH report (which Peloton requested) that would have given Peloton a better roadmap to provide any help.
Ultimately: a refusal to reassign the employee to a back-office role or provide adequate accommodations won the case.
The key legal phrase from the ruling: this duty arises when an employer knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that someone is disabled.
The Legal Arc: From Wheelchair to Wifi to Wiring
Here's the trajectory I'm watching, and why I think ND+RTO litigation in the U.S. is a matter of when, not if.
Physical disability + RTO. Already decided. Billesdon v. Wells Fargo (July 2024): a 25-year managing director whose team generated $60–64M annually was fired, dressed as "cost-cutting," when he requested to keep working from home due to a physical disability. The jury awarded $22.1 million. The core finding: Wells Fargo didn't work to find a solution for this employee. They applied a blanket policy rather than an individualized assessment of a known, disclosed disability.
Physical disability widening to mental health is happening NOW. EEOC FY2024: disability charges now explicitly including anxiety, depression, and PTSD jumped by 4,508 in a single year, to 33,668 total. Autism-related ADA charges alone went from 14 in 2003 to 488 in FY2023 — a 3,400% increase. They're filing at the district court level and increasingly winning.
Neurodiversity + RTO + wrongful termination. Coming. An ND employee performs well remotely. The company mandates RTO to an open office plan with sensory overload. Or even with poorly run remote companies with mandatory camera-on meetings, constant context-switching is architecturally incompatible with their neurology. So performance drops. They get a PIP which they can’t achieve and they get fired. But the poor performance wasn't the employee's failure. It was the company's failure to provide an environment where that employee could succeed. That's not performance management. That's constructive dismissal dressed in a PIP. And that’s where the next wave of lawsuits companies lose will come from. ND employees never given a chance to succeed and fired because they failed.
The biggest unknown is using RTO for employees to quit rather than get fired. If this is proven (likely by whistleblowers) the game is over. Because once you can show intent to force attrition, you've moved from negligence to something significantly harder to defend. 🎯
Why the Best Remote Companies Won't Be Touched
The companies least exposed to this litigation aren't the ones with the best employment lawyers. They're the ones that accidentally built the right environment before anyone told them they had to.
The best remote-first companies designed operations for digital work. The companies mentioned above like Dropbox and Airbnb completely redesigned their systems + operations during CoVid. To built a digital company where remote works damn well rather than just tolerating it. It just so happens they also accidentally built the organizations with ND employees in mind. Output over presence. Async over synchronous. Written over verbal. Measured on contribution, not visibility.
Those happen to be the exact design choices that make work accessible for ADHD and autistic employees. Fewer forced transitions. No sensory gauntlet. No performance theater. No masking tax burning cognitive resources that should be going to the work itself.
These companies will likely face near-zero RTO+ND exposure. Not because they are lucky but because they never created the conditions for the claim. The right work environment where employees where both happier and more productive was never revoked.
Now contrast that with a company running hybrid or full-time in office, mandatory camera-on daily standups, hot-desking in open-plan clusters, and measuring presence as a proxy for engagement. That company has created a sensory and cognitive environment documented by science to impair ND performance with no accommodation infrastructure to remedy it.
The Peloton ruling didn't say the studio environment was wrong. It said Peloton failed to provide adjustments once they knew that environment was incompatible with one employee's neurology. Scale that principle to an open-plan office of 500 people, 15–20% of whom are neurodivergent. Of which 76% have never disclosed (a future newsletter) and you start to see the shape of the litigation that's coming. 📐
🧠The Disclosure Trap Is a Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Most RTO legal strategies rest on an assumption: if nobody disclosed a disability, there's no accommodation obligation. Simple but wrong.
The reason 64% of neurodivergent employees haven't formally disclosed per the he Understood.org 2025 Neurodiversity at Work Survey. Nuerodiverse employees worry disclosure will negatively impact them at work.
So here's the question courts are going to be asked to answer: if employees won't disclose because employers haven't built the infrastructure to make disclosure safe — whose failure is that?
The ADA's accommodation obligation is triggered by what an employer knew or should have known. An employee who said "I really struggle with the noise in this office" hasn't used clinical language. But they've handed their employer a knowable signal. A manager who dismissed that as complaining rather than escalating it may create legal exposure for the company.
The circular logic of "they didn't disclose so we didn't know" breaks down the moment a court asks: Did you build a culture where disclosure was safe? Did you train your managers to recognize the signals? Did you create an accommodation process employees actually knew how to use?
Most companies haven’t and won’t until the employees start cashing in 🔍
The Hypothesis: It's Coming. The Only Question Is Which Company Becomes the Test Case.
I want to be clear about where we are in the timeline. The ND+RTO have their first instances with the Peloton UK ruling. The EEOC's ADA generation is building its case count but hasn't yet flowed over specifically to nuerodivergency yet.
But the elements are in place:
The legal infrastructure — "knew or should have known," failure to accommodate, constructive dismissal is established and expanding.
The fact pattern — employees who thrived remotely, were mandated back, saw their performance collapse, and were fired or pushed out is widespread and documented.
The scientific foundation — that open-plan offices, sensory overload, and synchronous-first work measurably impair performance for ADHD and autistic individuals is published and citable in court.
The precedent — Saunders v. Peloton, Billesdon v. Wells Fargo, EEOC v. Total Systems Services are being built one ruling at a time, in multiple jurisdictions, moving steadily in one direction.
And the plaintiff population — Diagnosis for Autism and ADHD are skyrocketing yearly. 53% of Gen-Z self identify as neurodivergent. So more of your workforce will place a target on your back if you do nothing.
The first major U.S. case combining RTO, neurodiversity, and wrongful termination will be a landmark. The company it hits won't see it coming. Because right now, nobody's looking for it.
That's exactly what I wrote this newsletter to change. 👁️
Takeaways
Pull your RTO-era PIP files and run a performance-origin audit. For every employee put on a performance plan since your RTO went into effect, answer two questions: were they a strong performer during remote? Did the decline start after the return? If yes to both, you have a potential failure-to-accommodate fact pattern sitting in your HR files right now. This isn't legal advice, it's triage.
Build a one-page manager reference card on informal disclosure. "I really struggle with the noise here." "The open floor makes it impossible for me to concentrate." "I've been really overwhelmed since we came back." These are informal disclosures. Most managers don't know that. Train every people manager in writing, with examples on what informal disclosure sounds like. What they're legally required to do when they hear it, and who to escalate to. This takes a week to build and eliminates one of your largest single points of legal exposure.
Audit whether your RTO design would survive an EEOC examination. The question isn't whether your policy is legal as blanket policies usually are on their face. The question is whether you offer individualized assessment before mandating return or rejecting remote work accommodations. EEOC v. Total Systems Services confirmed that a blanket policy applied uniformly to all employees, without individual review for disability-related needs, is itself the violation.
Design a disclosure process employees will actually use — then measure whether they do. 64% of ND employees fear disclosure will negatively impact them at work. That fear doesn't protect you it just means your accommodation obligations are running undocumented. Build a disclosure pathway with the employees who have disclosed. Ensure the process is clearly communicated in onboarding and in RTO communications. It’s separate from the performance management process, and visibly supported by senior leadership. Then track disclosure rates over time. If they're near 0, your process isn't working and your legal exposure is growing.
This one is a hypothesis. I'm saying it out loud because I think it's correct and because I'd rather the companies reading this have time to prepare than scramble when the first filing lands.
If something here is resonating or if you're sitting on a story that sounds like Rebecca's, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Drop a comment or reply directly.
If you're in HR or legal and you're reading this thinking about your own RTO rollout: 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 makes this a non-issue, the accommodation processes, the manager training, or the disclosure culture, that's exactly what I do. Reach out.