my coworker is having serious memory issues

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
I work in a small office without a typical HR rep. “Mike,” our manager, oversees our company and unfortunately takes a head-in-the-sand approach to anything office drama related.
Our concern is with our office manager, “Michelle,” who has been with our company for 15 years. She oversees our accounting and customer service related matters. Overall she is a great mentor and has taught me a lot. But in the last few months, she seems to be having memory lapses that we feel are more serious than simple brain fog. She is in her early 60’s and in decent health. No obvious health conditions and she’s not taking medications that would immediately explain her symptoms.
Michelle will frequently forget about business conversations from the day before. This causes her to repeatedly ask us about how tasks are being completed. In the beginning, we politely pointed out that it’s been discussed or completed. Now it’s really starting to get annoying because it interrupts our workflow. She randomly misses emails from clients and claims she never got them, even though they are clearly in her inbox. She also repeatedly sends emails to our employees or clients, having no recollection of when it was originally sent. If we point it out, she’ll get defensive and blame it on “brain fog” from being busy.
A couple weeks ago, we all were discussing our lunch plans. Michelle mentioned multiple times that morning that she felt like pizza. We saw her order her lunch and she said she would pick it up after she ran some office errands. When I came back an hour later, she was eating a sandwich at her desk. I asked, “Oh, did you change your mind about pizza?” She looked at me like I was crazy. Shortly after, the pizza place called asking when she was going to pick up her order. She was adamant she did not order anything and she must have accidentally ordered it on their app. Cue the WTH looks.
It escalated the other morning when she got really mad at our IT guy and accused him of “changing” her computer layout. She also couldn’t remember how to log in to our accounting software, something she does multiple times a day. He was quite pissed that she basically accused him of logging into her account without her permission. When he confronted Mike about it, he basically brushed him off and shooed him out of his office.
Mike has been getting complaints from our clients about Michelle repeatedly sending the same email or blanking out about who they are when they call. He will then come out of his office and find something stupid to be mad at instead of addressing Michelle.
Our office is genuinely concerned for Michelle. Neither she nor Mike seem receptive to addressing it. Should we all confront Mike at once? We feel like part of his problem is that Michelle has worked there for so long and he doesn’t want to face the reality of what’s happening. We would like to address this before it seriously affects our business operations.
This is awful — it does sound like Michelle is struggling with serious memory issues and might not be aware of it, or at least not aware of the extent of it.
If Mike knows everything you’ve described here and is declining to act, he’s being horribly negligent, both in his job as a manager and as a human toward Michelle.
My hunch is that he might feel uncertain about what he can do legally or ethically, and probably feels uncomfortable addressing the situation with Michelle. That doesn’t excuse him from needing to do it though — and if he doesn’t know how, part of his job is to find out.
Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, when an employer has a reasonable belief, based on objective evidence, that an employee’s ability to perform essential job functions is being impaired by a medical condition, they can require a medical exam. Requiring medical exams is a serious thing and not something to be taken lightly. The ADA allows it only in situations like this, or others where it’s “job-related and consistent with business necessity.”
After that, the law would require Mike to enter into what’s called an interactive process with Michelle, where they would work with her doctor to try to find accommodations that would allow her to do her job. The Job Accommodation Network has a list of possible accommodations for memory issues .
Mike should start by documenting how Michelle’s memory struggles are affecting her job, and then talking with her about what he’s seeing. He should do this from a place of genuine concern for her , not just the work — although he needs to be up-front about the impact he’s seeing on her work as well. This is a hard conversation to have, but it’s far less kind to ignore what’s right in front of all of you.
And before he does any of this, Mike should talk to an employment lawyer for guidance since you don’t have HR. A lawyer can help guide him through each step.
But it sounds like Mike isn’t going to do any of this without a lot of pushing, and maybe not even then. You certainly could try talking to him as a group — laying out the problem and how serious it is, and how unfair it is to Michelle and the rest of you to pretend it’s not happening. It’s possible that he’ll find it harder to ignore a group of you.
If he still refuses, do any of you have the kind of rapport with Michelle where you could have a compassionate, discreet conversation with her where you explain what you’ve noticed and suggest she talk with a doctor? In a lot of workplace situations this would be an overstep, but I don’t think it would be one here.
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