As awareness of ADHD in the workplace continues to grow, many HR and People teams are finding themselves navigating increasingly complex situations.
An employee raises repeated concerns. Relationships with colleagues become strained. Communication begins to break down. Managers feel challenged, while the employee feels unheard.
At what point is this a workplace conflict issue?
At what point might neurodiversity be contributing?
And how should employers respond when the answer is potentially both?
A recent NHS England tribunal explored exactly these questions. While the claimant’s disability discrimination claims were unsuccessful, the judgment offers several valuable lessons for employers about managing workplace conflict, understanding ADHD, and avoiding assumptions when neurodiversity is part of the picture.
Lesson 1: Not Every Workplace Conflict Involving ADHD Is Disability Discrimination
As awareness of ADHD in the workplace continues to grow, many HR and People teams are finding themselves navigating increasingly complex situations.
An employee raises repeated concerns. Relationships with colleagues become strained. Communication begins to break down. Managers feel challenged, while the employee feels unheard.
At what point is this a workplace conflict issue?
At what point might neurodiversity be contributing?
And how should employers respond when the answer is potentially both?
A recent NHS England tribunal explored exactly these questions. While the claimant’s disability discrimination claims were unsuccessful, the judgment offers several valuable lessons for employers about managing workplace conflict, understanding ADHD, and avoiding assumptions when neurodiversity is part of the picture.
Lesson 1: Not Every Workplace Conflict Involving ADHD Is Disability Discrimination
One of the most important takeaways from this case is that the presence of ADHD does not automatically mean that every workplace disagreement, grievance or interpersonal challenge is linked to disability.
This is a particularly important point for HR professionals who are often trying to balance competing priorities. On one hand, organisations have legal obligations under the Equality Act and a responsibility to create inclusive workplaces. On the other, managers still need to manage performance, resolve conflict and maintain professional standards.
The tribunal accepted that the claimant had ADHD and other disabilities. However, it did not accept that every issue raised throughout the dispute arose because of those disabilities.
For People teams, this highlights the importance of avoiding assumptions in either direction. Neurodiversity should never be dismissed as irrelevant, but nor should it become the default explanation for every workplace challenge.
The focus should be on understanding the specific workplace impact of an individual’s condition rather than making broad assumptions based on a diagnosis alone.
Lesson 2: Communication Differences Can Quickly Become Employee Relations Issues
One of the strongest themes running through the judgment was communication.
Many neurodivergent employees report being described as direct, intense, overly detailed or challenging at various points in their careers. In some cases, these descriptions reflect genuine communication differences. In others, they reflect a mismatch between individual communication styles and workplace expectations.
The difficulty for employers is that communication issues often present as employee relations issues long before anyone recognises them as potential neurodiversity issues.
A manager may perceive repeated questioning as resistance to decisions that have already been made. An employee may believe they are seeking clarity or highlighting risks that others have overlooked.
Similarly, an employee who sends detailed emails outlining concerns may view themselves as thorough and transparent, while colleagues experience the same communication as confrontational or overwhelming.
Once these different interpretations become embedded, workplace conflict can escalate surprisingly quickly.
For HR teams, this highlights the importance of supporting managers to understand how neurodiversity may influence communication styles and workplace interactions before relationships begin to deteriorate.
Lesson 3: Managers Need Confidence, Not Clinical Expertise
One of the recurring challenges organisations face is that managers often feel they need to become experts in ADHD before they can support neurodivergent employees effectively.
In reality, most managers do not need clinical knowledge. They need confidence.
Confidence to have conversations about support and to explore workplace barriers. Confidence to distinguish between capability, conduct, communication differences and disability-related impacts.
The NHS case highlights how easily situations can become complicated when managers lack the confidence to navigate these conversations early.
By the time formal grievances, appeals and disputes emerge, positions are often entrenched and relationships have become more difficult to repair.
This is why manager capability remains one of the most important aspects of any neuroinclusion strategy.
Lesson 4: Curiosity Is Often More Effective Than Assumptions
One of the most valuable lessons for HR and People professionals is that workplace conflict rarely has a single cause.
When situations become difficult, organisations often look for simple explanations. An employee may be labelled as difficult, resistant to feedback or unwilling to move on from an issue. Equally, once ADHD becomes known, there can be pressure to attribute every challenge to neurodiversity.
Neither approach is particularly helpful.
The tribunal serves as a useful reminder that effective people management requires curiosity.
Rather than asking whether a situation is purely a conduct issue or purely a disability issue, employers should focus on understanding the broader context. This includes exploring communication styles, workplace pressures, management approaches, support needs and organisational factors that may be contributing to the situation.
This approach supports better decision-making while also reducing legal risk.
Lesson 5: Early Intervention Matters
Perhaps the biggest lesson from this case is that situations involving neurodiversity, workplace conflict and employee relations rarely appear overnight.
More often, they develop gradually through a series of misunderstandings, frustrations and unresolved concerns.
By the time a formal grievance or tribunal claim emerges, the underlying issues have often been present for months or even years.
For HR teams, this reinforces the value of early intervention.
Providing managers with neurodiversity training, encouraging regular conversations about support needs, offering workplace needs assessments and creating psychologically safe environments can all help identify issues before they escalate into formal disputes.
What HR and People Teams Should Take Away From This Case
The NHS England tribunal highlights a challenge that many organisations are currently grappling with: how to support neurodivergent employees while still managing conflict, communication issues and workplace expectations effectively.
The answer is not to avoid difficult conversations. Nor is it to assume every workplace challenge is unrelated to neurodiversity.
Instead, the focus should be on understanding workplace impact, building manager confidence and approaching situations with curiosity rather than assumptions.
For HR and People teams, that is often where the most effective neuroinclusion strategies begin.
