Conflict Involving Neurodivergent Employees: The Visibility Loop

What employers can do

Different exists – celebrate it

Every workplace carries a set of unwritten rules about what a competent colleague looks like. Eye contact of roughly the right length. Small talk on the way into the meeting. Visible enthusiasm. A tone that reads as warm rather than blunt. None of it is written down, none of it appears in a position description, and almost none of it is absolutely necessary to get the work done.

Start by separating what the job requires from the way the role is usually performed. Ask of any complaint whether it is about the work or about the manner. Missed deadlines, unilateral changes to scope and poor communication on shared projects are about the work itself, and they can be addressed on their own terms. However, lack of small talk, a flat delivery, no eye contact in the team meeting are complaints about cultural conformity.

Where the organisation has cultural requirements of employees, make them explicit. People who do not absorb them by osmosis are not helped by everyone pretending they do not exist. Explicit expectations, clear feedback and stated norms take a layer of guesswork away from everyone.

There is a method for doing this well. Brené Brown argues that values mean nothing until they are operationalised into observable behaviours, specific enough to teach and to hold people to. Simon Sinek makes the same point about the language: write them as verbs rather than nouns, because a verb describes something a person can actually do. Not “collaboration”, but the two or three things you mean by it.

Then, importantly, ask yourself whether you can justify this as a requirement of the work, rather than a preference about how the work looks? This is why guidance on neuroinclusive job advertisements warns employers off vague requirements like “strong communication skills” or “the ability to work in a team” and tells them to say what is actually needed or leave it out.

Birkbeck calls this neurodiversity gain. When an organisation redesigns how it works so that it suits neurodivergent people, the whole workforce benefits. In their 2026 data, being able to shape your own role, tasks and relationships was the strongest driver of engagement they measured, nearly four times more important than psychological safety.

Organisations need to actually walk the talk. When an organisation runs an awareness day, puts up a poster, and changes nothing about how meetings run or how performance is judged, the loop still continues.

Make flexibility the default rather than a reward for disclosure

Look at the adjustments your organisation has granted over the last two years. Flexible start times. A quieter desk. Noise cancelling headphones. Agendas circulated before the meeting and a written summary after it. Permission to keep the camera off. Then ask which of those would cause any harm if they were simply available to anyone who wanted them.

For most of the list the answer is none. Where an adjustment would help anyone who asked for it, requiring a diagnosis seems pointless and singles individuals out for ‘special’ treatment, which emphasises difference in a negative way. It also places all the responsibility on the individual rather than the organisation.

Kalmanovich-Cohen and Stanton argue that baseline support should not depend on disclosure at all, with flexible scheduling, quiet spaces and accessible communication available to anyone without having to give a reason. The Neurodiverse Safe Work Initiative makes the same point about the diagnose, disclose, prove, adjust model. It is reactive, it is individualised, and it puts all the risk on the worker.

This is not an argument for abolishing named adjustments. Some people may need something beyond the default for reasons connected to disability. A named adjustment is documented, agreed and legally protected, and when something later goes wrong it gives you the context to work out what happened.

However, in many cases, opening up flexibilities to everyone creates benefits for the organisation as a whole, not just the employee with a particular request.

Where disclosure is still needed, make it easier

Professor Amanda Kirby asked her LinkedIn audience whether they disclosed their neurodivergence at work in Neurodiversity 101: Reveal it all. Just over half said they sometimes disclosed, and that it depended. Her respondents described waiting for a signal from the employer before saying anything and not knowing what would happen next if they did.

Kirby also objects to the word disclosure itself, and she is right to. It implies something was being concealed. The person was managing a risk, not running a cover-up. Telling us what you need describes the same act without the accusation built into it.

Four things make disclosure easier:

1. Say what happens next, in writing. Who sees the information. What it is used for, and what it will never be used for. Where it is stored. Whether it follows the person when they change roles. Most policies are silent on all five, and silence reads as risk.

2. Separate the support conversation from the performance conversation. Where the only reliable route to an adjustment runs through a performance process, disclosure will always be reactive and will always look tactical.

3. Train the managers. In Birkbeck’s 2023 research, employers named the absence of disclosure as their main barrier. By the 2026 report, they described the main challenge as lack of manager understanding, named by 64 per cent of employers.

4. Let senior people go first. Kirby’s respondents described leaders talking about their own neurodivergence as the thing that changed what everyone else believed would happen to a person who became visible. Psychological safety is the strongest protector against burnout in the Birkbeck data, and the largest single driver of career satisfaction. It has not improved across three years of the survey.