There is a particular kind of performance review that a surprising number of neurodivergent professionals could recite from memory without having read it. It goes roughly like this: “Technically excellent. Struggles with communication. Needs to work on stakeholder management. Has difficulty with ambiguity.” Sometimes there’s a reference to “not being a team player,” which is corporate for “does not perform the social rituals we have decided indicate trustworthiness.” Occasionally there’s a note about “inconsistency,” which means the person was extraordinary on Tuesdays and genuinely struggling to function on Thursdays, and nobody thought to ask why.
The review is filed. The employee is told to work on it. They attend a workshop on communication styles that was designed for people whose communication difficulties are strategic rather than neurological, which is a bit like sending someone to a workshop on walking when the issue is that they have one leg significantly shorter than the other. They try harder. The next review says roughly the same thing, perhaps with slightly different vocabulary.
Eventually one of two things happens. The person leaves, voluntarily or otherwise, carrying a story about themselves that the workplace wrote and they accidentally agreed to. Or they stay, and they master the performance of neurotypicality to a degree that impresses everyone and quietly hollows them out, and they wonder why they’re exhausted all the time when they’re so obviously good at their job.
Here is what’s actually happening, stated plainly enough that a performance review committee might conceivably understand it if someone left this article on their desk. Workplaces are not neutral environments. They are environments that were designed, largely without conscious intent but with considerable thoroughness, around a particular set of neurological assumptions. Meetings are the primary mode of information exchange, despite the fact that real-time verbal processing under social pressure is a specific skill that varies enormously across the population. Open-plan offices are the default physical environment, despite the fact that sensory regulation in a space with no acoustic separation requires ongoing effort that comes directly out of the cognitive budget available for actual work. Performance is assessed via annual reviews and line management relationships, both of which require the kind of consistent, warm, politically attuned social navigation that burns through an AuDHD brain’s available resources approximately three times faster than it does everyone else’s.
None of this was designed to exclude neurodivergent employees. It just does, reliably and comprehensively, in ways that look from the outside like individual failure rather than systematic design flaw. Which is convenient for the workplace, if we’re being honest about it.
The research on this is not subtle. Studies consistently show that neurodivergent employees report higher rates of workplace stress, more frequent job loss, and significantly lower rates of disclosure to employers than to clinicians, primarily because the experience of disclosing and subsequently being managed rather than accommodated is common enough to have become a considered risk calculation rather than a straightforward conversation. A 2021 study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that autistic adults in employment were three times more likely to be underemployed relative to their qualifications than their neurotypical peers. Not because the qualifications weren’t real. Because the gap between what they were capable of and what the environment allowed them to demonstrate was never accounted for in the job description.
What this means, practically, is that the question “why can’t you just…?” is the wrong question. It’s always been the wrong question. The right question is “what does this environment assume, and are those assumptions actually necessary for the work, or are they just what we’ve always done?” These are not the same question, and the distinction between them is the difference between an organisation that keeps losing its most interesting employees to burnout and misery, and one that has figured out that brilliant and difficult-to-manage in the current system are sometimes the same person viewed from different angles.
The neurodivergent employee is not the problem. The gap between their wiring and the workplace’s unexamined assumptions is the problem. Closing that gap is not charity. It is, rather boringly, just good management. The organisations that have worked this out tend to be considerably more interesting places to work, and considerably more capable of retaining the people who are genuinely good at the actual job rather than the performance of the job.
If you’ve spent a career being technically excellent and somehow continuously almost-but-not-quite, this is for you. The review was wrong. The question was always wrong. What was right was the thing you kept doing despite everything, which was the actual work.
References
Hedley, D., Uljarević, M., Cameron, L., Halder, S., Richdale, A., & Dissanayake, C. (2017). Employment programmes and interventions targeting adults with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Autism, 21(8), 929–941.
Linden, M., & Milchus, K. (2014). Self-disclosed disability and workplace accommodation outcomes. Work, 48(4), 661–669.
Morris, R., Bauminger, N., Agam-Ben-Artzi, G., & Golan, O. (2021). Barriers to employment and experiences of workplace discrimination among autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51(4), 1408–1421.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Neurodiversity. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
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