A manager made a clean decision in under ten minutes. Here’s what she did differently.
He mentioned it on a Thursday.
Not formally. Not in a meeting. Not in an email with HR copied in. He said it at the end of a 1:1, the way people always say the thing that matters most — quietly, almost as an afterthought, already half-standing to leave.
“I don’t know if this is even a thing, but — the open plan is really getting to me. I can’t concentrate. By 2pm I’ve got nothing left.”
He said it like he was apologising. Like admitting the office was too loud was the same as admitting he couldn’t do his job.
And this is the moment.
Right here. This exact second. This is the decision point that determines whether this becomes a clean decision or a tribunal case file eighteen months from now.
What Most Managers Do
Most managers hear “the open plan is getting to me” and their brain runs one of four scripts:
Script 1: Minimise. “Yeah, it’s noisy for everyone. You get used to it.” The employee hears: my experience doesn’t count. He stops mentioning it. He starts masking. Three months later his performance dips and nobody connects it to this conversation.
Script 2: Defer. “Let me speak to HR about that.” The manager sends an email. HR adds it to a list. Someone suggests an Occupational Health referral. The referral takes six weeks. OH recommends adjustments. The recommendations sit in someone’s inbox. Four months pass. Nothing changes.
Script 3: Sympathise. “I totally get it — I struggle with noise too. Have you tried noise-cancelling headphones?” The employee now has to solve his own problem with a suggestion that may or may not work, while the manager feels helpful without having done anything structural.
Script 4: Freeze. “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” Then silence. The manager doesn’t know what they’re allowed to do, what requires a formal process, or whether this counts as a disclosure. So they do nothing. And nothing, as always, is the most expensive decision a manager can make.
All four scripts have something in common. In none of them does the manager do the one thing that would have made a difference: act, right now, in the room, and write it down.
What This Manager Did Instead
Her name doesn’t matter. What matters is what she did in the ten minutes after he said “the open plan is really getting to me.”
She didn’t minimise. She didn’t defer. She didn’t sympathise. She didn’t freeze.
She asked one question.
“Is there anything about how we’re set up here that I could change this week to make it easier for you?”
Look at what that question does.
It doesn’t ask him to diagnose himself. It doesn’t ask him to name a condition. It doesn’t ask him to fill in a form or wait for an assessment. It focuses on the environment — “how we’re set up” — not on him. And it puts a timeline on it: “this week.” Not “at some point.” Not “when OH gets back to us.” This week.
He paused. Then he said: “Honestly? If I could work from the quiet room on the days I need to do deep focus work — Tuesdays and Thursdays — that would change everything. And maybe if I could wear headphones without people thinking I’m being antisocial.”
Two things. A quiet room twice a week. Permission to wear headphones.
No cost. No procurement. No six-week OH referral. No policy review. No committee.
She said: “Done. Let’s try it from next Tuesday. I’ll book the quiet room for you on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next month, and I’ll mention to the team that headphones are fine for focus work — for everyone, not just you. We’ll check in after a month and see if it’s working. Sound good?”
He nodded. He looked relieved. Not because the solution was complicated. Because someone had actually done something.
The whole conversation took ten minutes.
Then She Did the Thing That Separates a Good Manager from a Clean Decision
She documented it.
Not because HR told her to. Not because she was covering herself. Because documentation is the thing that protects the employee, the manager, and the organisation — and it’s the thing that almost never happens after informal conversations.
Here’s what she wrote. It took three minutes:
Date: [Thursday’s date] Employee: [Name] Context: End of regular 1:1. [Name] mentioned difficulty concentrating in open plan environment. Described feeling depleted by early afternoon.
Discussion: Asked what changes to our setup might help. [Name] requested access to quiet room on Tuesdays and Thursdays for deep focus work, and permission to use headphones during concentration periods.
Action taken: Booked quiet room for Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next four weeks. Will normalise headphone use for the whole team during focus time. Review scheduled for [date one month from now].
No formal referral requested or required at this stage. [Name] did not disclose a specific condition and was not asked to. Adjustments are based on workplace environment, not medical need.
Next review: [date]
Read that last line again. “Adjustments are based on workplace environment, not medical need.”
That’s the sentence that changes everything.
She didn’t wait for a diagnosis. She didn’t need one. She didn’t ask “do you have a condition?” or “have you been assessed?” or “should we do an OH referral?” She responded to what he actually said: the open plan is getting to me. And she solved the environment problem.
If he does have an underlying condition — ADHD, autism, anxiety, sensory processing differences, anything — this note becomes the evidence that the organisation responded promptly and appropriately at the first indication of a barrier. If a formal process happens later, this is the document that shows the manager didn’t wait. She acted.
And if he doesn’t have a diagnosed condition? If the open plan is just hard for him because open plans are hard for a lot of people? The adjustments still make sense. A quieter space for focus work and permission to wear headphones aren’t medical interventions. They’re good management.
The documentation protects everyone either way.
Why the Documentation Matters More Than the Adjustment
I study tribunal cases. Hundreds of them. And the pattern is always the same.
It’s never that the organisation didn’t care. It’s rarely that the adjustment was expensive or complicated. It’s almost always that one of two things happened:
Nobody wrote it down. The conversation happened. The manager said something supportive. Maybe they even made a verbal agreement. But six months later, when things have escalated, there’s no record. The employee says “I told them in June.” The manager says “I don’t remember the specifics.” The tribunal sees a gap.
Everybody waited. The manager referred it to HR. HR referred it to OH. OH sent a questionnaire. The questionnaire came back with recommendations. The recommendations went to the manager. The manager wasn’t sure how to implement them. Another email to HR. By the time anything happened, it was four months later, the employee’s performance had been flagged, and someone had started a capability process for the very thing the adjustment was supposed to prevent.
The manager in this story did neither of those things. She acted in the room and she wrote it down the same day.
That’s a clean decision.
The ANCHOR Method in Ten Minutes
What this manager did — probably without knowing it — was the ANCHOR decision-framing method in real time:
A — Awareness. She recognised this as a decision point. Not admin. Not a complaint. Not something to “keep an eye on.” A moment where her response would determine what happened next.
N — Notice. She noticed what was invisible. He was apologising for having a need. He expected to be dismissed. The default response (“yeah, it’s noisy for everyone”) was right there, ready to come out of her mouth. She caught it.
C — Consider. She asked the question she didn’t know she needed to ask. “Is there anything about how we’re set up that I could change this week?” — not “what’s wrong with you?” or “should I refer you to OH?”
H — Hear. She listened to his actual answer. Two things. Quiet room. Headphones. She didn’t add complexity. She didn’t ask for more information than she needed. She heard what he said and took it at face value.
O — Outline. She framed the action. Booked the room. Normalised headphones for the whole team. Set a review date. Simple. Immediate. Reversible if it doesn’t work.
R — Record. She documented it. Three minutes. Clear, factual, focused on the environment. Protected him, protected her, protected the organisation.
Ten minutes from disclosure to action. Three minutes to document. No OH referral. No four-month delay. No grievance. No tribunal.
The Question You Should Be Asking
If you’re a Head of People, an HR Director, or anyone responsible for how managers make people decisions in your organisation, here’s the question:
How many of your managers would have made the same decision this woman made?
Not “would they have cared?” — of course they care. Not “do they know the policies?” — they’ve done the e-learning. Not “are they good people?” — they are.
Would they have asked that specific question, in that specific moment, and documented it that same day?
If the answer is “some of them” or “I’m not sure” or “probably not,” that’s the gap. And the gap is costing you more than you think.
Every open plan office in the country has someone sitting in it right now who mentioned something three months ago that nobody acted on. Someone who’s masking. Someone whose performance is about to dip. Someone who’s going to leave — and when they do, the exit interview will say “personal reasons,” and nobody will connect it to the conversation that went nowhere in September.
What I Built to Close the Gap
The ANCHOR Manager Development Programme is a six-module programme that teaches managers to do what this woman did — instinctively, consistently, at every decision point.
Not one good conversation. Every conversation. Not when they’ve had time to prepare. In the moment.
Three phases. Nine steps. Ninety days.
Recognise — see the gap, map the defaults, understand what they’re costing. Reframe — replace defaults with structured questions, practise until the words feel natural. Lead — embed the practice, sustain the quality, prove it’s working.
The programme builds the capability. The ANCHOR tool sustains it after I leave the room. The dashboard proves it’s working — escalations down, clean decisions up, measurable.
All programmes invoiced directly. A conversation first — because that’s the whole point.
That manager made a clean decision in ten minutes. It cost nothing. It protected everyone. And it started with one question: “Is there anything about how we’re set up that I could change this week?”
What would your managers have said instead?
Listen. Learn. Lead.
Ruth-Ellen Danquah is the creator of the ANCHOR™ Manager Development Programme and the NeuroRich™ newsletter. She has delivered over 600 leadership programmes to global organisations across financial services, gaming, insurance, FMCG, and the cultural sector. She writes weekly about the gap between good intentions and good decisions at NeuroRich on Substack.
