The need to fit in and be ‘neurotypical’ can come at a significant cost to neurodivergent people and their workplaces. Many people with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and other cognitive differences can use up so much energy and effort to mask their natural behaviors and personalities that it can negatively affect mental health, productivity, turnover rates, and more.
While you can assume that masking neurodivergence can result in professional success, there’s a risk of these long-term costs for individuals and workplaces:
Decreased Creativity
Working from hot desks and private offices in Melbourne and other parts of the world can go a long way toward creativity. You can work with different people every day or retreat to the privacy of a solo office when you need to concentrate.
However, these innovative workspaces can only help so much when you mask your neurodivergence in the workplace. You may work so hard to blend into your workplace culture that you are not as creative as you could be.
It’s common to experience cognitive overload, where you’re less able to access your creative thinking and problem-solving skills. You might also not feel able to fully participate in team discussions in case you’re perceived as different.
Mental Health Challenges
Spending each day in the workplace suppressing your natural thoughts and feelings will eventually take its toll. Many neurodivergent people masking who they are around their colleagues experience mental health challenges.
Appearing neurotypical is unsustainable and exhausting, leading to burnout. You may also experience anxiety and depression because suppressing your authentic self can make you feel isolated.
Workplace Turnover
If a business doesn’t create an inclusive working environment for its neurodivergent employees, high turnover rates can be expected. However, there are many possible reasons for this.
Neurodivergent employees may feel misunderstood and not supported, so they disengage from their jobs, feel dissatisfied, and eventually leave. They can also choose to leave because masking their true selves becomes exhausting and overwhelming.
Neurodivergent employees leaving a workplace can negatively impact managers and company owners, who lose their unique perspectives and strengths and the benefits they bring.
Reduced Productivity
While ill health and dissatisfaction can contribute to productivity loss in the workplace, masking neurodivergence can also. Masking results in cognitive overload, which can cause employees to be less focused and efficient at work. This can make them less valuable to their employers and cost more to retain.
Talent Loss
Neurodivergent people have a wide range of talents that can be highly valuable to workplaces. They can recall patterns, understand complex mathematical problems, and visualize objects in three dimensions. Their creativity, accuracy, and visualization talents are unmatched.
As a result, when neurodivergent employees experience burnout from masking and choose to leave a workplace, they take their talents with them.
Reduced Self-Esteem
A loss of self-esteem can be a saddening consequence of neurodivergent employees feeling like they need to hide their true selves. They may think that who they are is unacceptable and that they’re not good enough. After maintaining a false persona for so long, they can also carry around the constant fear of being found out.
With very little self-esteem, employees can limit their own opportunities for positive feedback, suppress their personal growth, and increase their social isolation from not forming genuine workplace connections.
Masking neurodivergence can feel like a coping strategy, but it can greatly affect the individual and the business they work within. There can be great value in building a more inclusive workplace if it means avoiding some of these hidden costs above.
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