Working hard, working well with reasonable adjustments

Just imagine, you’ve landed the perfect job, you like your colleagues, your office is great, and the role should be an ideal fit for your skills. But instead of going from strength to strength, you’re gradually falling behind. Your manager has started to notice and your confidence is eroding fast. The trouble is that that you’re finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate in meetings, you’re suddenly anxious about saying the wrong thing and you’re forgetting the tasks you’ve been asked to do. It’s beginning to feel overwhelming and recently your employer has asked if there is anything they can do to help. You wish you could communicate exactly what you need but you’re at a loss and wondering if you should just give up.

Life may be feeling hopeless but then you read an article about someone with a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). You read about how the person describes the challenges that they face with time management, and you find yourself empathising with how out of control life can seem. You seek out professional help from a psychiatrist who does, indeed, diagnose you with adult ADHD. You feel relieved, validated, confident once again to know that there is something to explain your difficulties. You go to your manager and confide in her, thinking that she will know what to do. But here comes the second problem, she doesn’t. She still asks you how she can help. You’re left feeling hopeless again.

As a last ditch attempt you search online, ‘what to do at work if you have ADHD’, and up pops the phrase ‘reasonable adjustments’ – ‘a change that must be made to remove or reduce a disadvantage related to an employee’s disability when doing their job’. Now you’re on to something. You search ADHD AND reasonable adjustment, and you find a scientific article describing how people with ADHD can have problems with ‘executive functioning’. So curiously you explore this further. You learn that executive functions are a type of cognition, they regulate your ability to pay attention or recall information in the right moment. You also learn that there are strategies that can help you cope better with these types of cognitive difficulties. One route to getting this support is by seeing a clinical psychologist for a neuropsychology assessment.

At The London Neurocognitive Clinic, we provide a comprehensive neuropsychology assessment service. While our team do not diagnose problems such as ADHD, we do work with people to measure cognition, including executive functions, and dedicate time to understanding, interpreting, and explaining how to work round any of these difficulties. Please get in touch if you’d like to explore this with our experts.