This email in 30 seconds: Masking, the sustained cognitive effort neurodivergent individuals put into appearing neurotypical at work, is not a soft issue. It directly reduces the capacity of the people you are paying to think for you. Research shows 63% of neurodivergent employees have masked at work, with significant negative effects on performance, mental health and retention. This newsletter makes the commercial case for reducing the masking burden, and tells you the one thing that makes the biggest difference quickly.
Hello Reader,
There is a cost sitting inside most organisations that does not appear on any budget report. It is not absenteeism. It is not turnover, although both are downstream of it. It is the cognitive overhead neurodivergent employees carry every single day just to function within environments that were not built for them. That overhead has a name. It is called masking.
Masking is not the same as being professional. It is the sustained, effortful process of monitoring your expressions, filtering your words, suppressing your natural communication style and scanning constantly for judgement. It runs in parallel with the actual job. And that parallel processing has a cost that lands directly on performance.
Think of it this way. If a neurodivergent employee is spending 30% of their cognitive load on appearing neurotypical, you are not getting 35 hours of thinking from someone you are paying for 35 hours. You are getting approximately 25.
That is not a culture problem. That is a capacity problem.
What the data actually says
A UK study of over 600 neurodivergent workers found that 63% had masked at work, and that masking had a considerably negative impact on anxiety, stress, exhaustion, fatigue and mental health.
Those outcomes do not stay contained. They show up in sickness absence, in presenteeism, in the slow erosion of performance that managers notice but struggle to name, and eventually in attrition. Replacing a disengaged employee is expensive. The costs of recruitment, onboarding and lost institutional knowledge are well documented. What is less often discussed is that masking is the upstream driver accelerating that cycle in exactly the group of employees an organisation can least afford to lose.
There is also something worth naming that is harder to quantify. Masking does not just drain energy. It suppresses the very thinking styles organisations say they want access to. When everyone is required to conform to one behavioural template, the pattern recognition, the risk sensing, the unconventional problem-solving that neurodivergent thinkers bring gets filtered out before it ever reaches the room.
The behaviours that feel safe and professional to senior leaders are often the very filters that stop them accessing the thinking they claim to value from diverse talent.
A word on nuance
Unmasking is not simply telling people to turn up as themselves and trusting that will be fine.
Two thirds of neurodivergent employees in the UK report fearing discrimination at work. Masking, in many environments, is a rational protective response to a genuine risk. Asking someone to stop masking without changing the conditions that make masking necessary is not inclusion. It is exposure.
The goal is not to abolish masking. It is to reduce the need for it. The commercial question for leaders is not "why won't our neurodivergent employees be more authentic?" It is "how much of our people's cognitive capacity are we comfortable burning on camouflage instead of work that actually moves the needle?"
What actually makes a difference quickly
Organisations invest heavily in engagement surveys, leadership development programmes and innovation initiatives. Most of those interventions operate downstream of the problem.
Reducing the masking burden is a lower-cost lever with direct impact on those same metrics. Here is where to start.
- Train your line managers first. Not a one-off awareness session. A structured conversation about what masking looks like, how to create the conditions where it is less necessary, and how to have a disclosure conversation without making it about the manager's comfort. Managers are the single biggest variable in whether a neurodivergent employee feels safe enough to work at full capacity.
- Build psychological safety before you build a policy. A process without the culture to support it is paperwork. Neurodivergent employees are watching what happens to the first person who discloses. That moment sets the precedent for everyone else.
- Make adjustments visible and normal. When adjustments are positioned as something extraordinary, they signal that difference is a problem to be managed. When they are part of how your team routinely works, the masking burden drops across the board.
If you want to understand how this applies to your specific organisation, that is exactly what a Neurodiversity Clarity Session is for. It is 90 minutes, practical and focused on your context. You can book directly at here.
Until next week,
Tania
Founder, PegSquared
P.S. The data on masking has been available for years. The issue is not awareness. It is that most organisations do not have a structured way to act on it. That is the gap I work in.
P.S.S Did you see the new Recruitment Champion Training programme from PegSquared and Diversita? Cohort one - starts in June - and is open for booking now. Find out more and secure your place at recruitment.pegsquared.co.uk
