My Employee With Dyslexia Isn’t Meeting Targets. What Do I Do?
*Merchant v BT · NeuroRich · Listen. Learn. Lead.
Monday morning. An employee’s output has dropped.
Not dramatically. Not overnight. But over six weeks, the written reports are shorter, the documentation is patchy, the text-heavy tasks are taking longer than they used to. You’ve noticed. Your manager has noticed. Someone has to do something.
So you do what the framework says. You open a performance conversation. You set targets. You log the meetings. You issue the written warnings. You follow every step.
Eighteen months later, a tribunal finds against your organisation.
Not because you didn’t follow the process. Because you followed it correctly — and the process was never designed to ask the one question that would have changed the outcome before it started.
This is Merchant v BT.
Mr Merchant was a BT employee with dyslexia. His performance dropped in written output, text-heavy processes, and documentation-intensive tasks. His manager noticed. The performance management process opened. It ran correctly.
What nobody asked, at any point, was whether the work he was struggling with was the work his dyslexia made substantially harder. Whether the role design was creating a barrier. Whether a different way of working would have unlocked the performance that was clearly available — he’d been doing the job before any of this started.
The tribunal found for the claimant on reasonable adjustments grounds.
The process was followed correctly. The outcome was still discriminatory. That is the part that nobody tells you in performance management training.
THE DRIFT
Here is how eighteen months of doing the right thing produced the wrong outcome.
Week 1. Output drops. Manager notices. Nothing is said yet — it might resolve itself.
Week 3. It hasn’t resolved. Manager decides this is a performance problem. Makes sense. Output is below standard. That is what a performance problem looks like.
Week 4. Performance conversation. Documented. Targets set. All correct.
Week 8. Targets not met. Second conversation. More documentation.
Week 12. Formal warning. Process escalating.
Month 6. Dismissal.
Month 18. Tribunal.
At no point between Week 1 and Month 18 did anyone stop and ask: is there anything about how this role is designed, or how we’re asking this person to work, that is creating a barrier to the performance that was previously available?
Not because anyone was negligent. Because the performance management framework doesn’t contain that question. It contains: notice the gap, set targets, log the conversations, escalate if not met. It does not contain: pause before you start any of that, and ask whether you’re looking at a capability problem or a barrier problem.
Nobody refused to ask. Nobody decided not to ask. The framework simply didn’t prompt it. And by the time anyone might have thought to ask, the process had been running for months and the tribunal clock was already ticking.
THE SCRIPTS
Four people were involved in this outcome. None of them made a decision that felt wrong at the time.
The manager. Noticed the performance drop. Opened the process. Followed every step correctly. Would have said, if asked, that they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do. They were right. They were also missing the question that the process had never given them.
The performance framework. Designed to establish process. Not designed to prompt curiosity at the moment of decision. Does what it was built to do — creates consistency, documents evidence, manages the gap between standard and output. Does not ask: before we measure the gap, did we check whether the measurement is fair?
The People team. Knew about the dyslexia. Saw the process running. Did not insert the barrier question at the moment it was needed — possibly because it wasn’t visible that the question was missing, possibly because the process looked correct, possibly because nobody had built a prompt that fires before the framework activates.
The organisation. Applied the same standard to everyone. Believed this was fair. A standard applied equally to everyone is only fair if everyone starts from an equal position. A dyslexic employee asked to perform text-heavy, documentation-intensive tasks to the same standard as a non-dyslexic employee does not start from an equal position. Equal treatment, in this case, produced unequal outcomes. And the Equality Act has a specific view on that.
Which one do you recognise yourself in?
If you’re a manager, it’s probably the first one. You followed the process. You did what you were trained to do. And somewhere in the middle of it, a question that would have changed the outcome was never asked — not by you, not by the framework, not by anyone.
THE QUESTION
The question nobody asked in Merchant v BT:
“Is there anything about how this role is structured, or how we’re asking this person to work, that is creating a barrier to the performance that’s otherwise available?”
That question does two things.
First, it separates two completely different problems that look identical from the outside. A capability problem — where the employee genuinely lacks the skill or knowledge to do the job — and a barrier problem — where something in the environment is preventing performance that exists. They both show up as underperformance. They require completely different responses. Running a capability process on a barrier problem is not just ineffective. Under the Equality Act, where a disability is relevant, it is unlawful.
Second, it creates a record. The record that a tribunal looks for is not the one showing the process ran correctly. It is the one showing this question was asked, considered, and answered — before the process started. That record, in Merchant v BT, did not exist.
The question takes three minutes. You can ask it before any performance conversation. You do not need a diagnosis. You do not need HR in the room. You just need to pause, before the framework activates, and ask it.
Is there anything about how we’re asking this person to work that is creating a barrier?
If the answer is no — proceed, with the record showing you asked. If the answer is yes, or possibly, or you don’t know yet — you are not in a performance process. You are in a reasonable adjustments conversation. Those are different things and they require different next steps.
THE CLEAN DECISION
What happened in Merchant v BT: Performance drops. Manager notices. Framework opens. Targets set. Warnings issued. Dismissal. Tribunal. Finding for claimant. Eighteen months. Legal costs. Reputational exposure.
What three minutes would have changed: Manager notices performance drop. Before opening the process, asks: is there anything about how this role is structured that is creating a barrier? Identifies that the underperformance is concentrated in written output, text-heavy tasks, documentation — the exact tasks dyslexia makes harder. Reasonable adjustments conversation happens. Written instructions provided in alternative format. Speech-to-text software sourced. Output recovers.
No process. No tribunal. No eighteen months.
The performance that was previously available — before whatever changed — came back, because the barrier was removed rather than the person being managed out through a framework that was never designed to see it.
Three minutes. Before the framework activates. That is the gap between these two outcomes.
LEAD
If you’ve been in a Merchant v BT situation — if you’ve opened a performance process on someone and something felt off, or if you’re in one right now and you’re not sure whether you’re looking at a capability problem or a barrier problem — the free ANCHOR scenario tool is the fastest way to find out what you might be missing.
Put in your real scenario. Three minutes. No sign-up. No cost.
It will show you the considerations you might have missed, the invisible factors beneath the surface, and whether what you’re looking at reads as a capability problem, a barrier problem, or something in between.
Then take it to your People team. Not as a problem — as information.
“I ran this on the situation with [name]. It flagged a few things worth discussing before we go further.”
That conversation is the one Merchant v BT needed. It is cheaper to have it before the process starts than after the tribunal clock is running.
→ Try the free scenario tool: ruth-ellen.com/anchor/handle-escalations
Is your People team reading the full case analysis of Merchant v BT — including what the Equality Act specifically required before the process opened, and the four things that need to be in place before the next performance process starts?
Share this with them: ruth-ellen.com/insights/merchant-v-bt-performance-management-reasonable-adjustments
NeuroRich™ · Listen. Learn. Lead. · Decision-making support for people managers. ANCHOR™ · Decision Receipts for People Teams · ruth-ellen.com/anchor