What HR should consider about remote work accommodations for disabled employees

Since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has sought to limit remote work accommodations for federal employees, including disabled workers, for whom telework is an accommodation.

Private employers may want to think twice before following suit, according to Rachel Shaw, author of The Disabled Workforce: What the ADA Never Anticipated.

She sat down with HR Brew to discuss what employers should consider about accommodations, and why her book is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it in 2017.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

They need to understand: How do you do it? How do you do the disability interactive process? [HR pros] are responsible for knowing, okay, what do I do when someone has a disability, requests an accommodation, is missing a lot of work? What do I do so that I comply with the obligations of the law, but also so that I have a management group that thinks, “I know what I’m doing,” that “I support the company’s bottom line,” that it’s a culture-driven organization?

Someone needs to give me a practical program that I can implement every single time, whether it’s workers comp, personal leave, psychological, neurological, whether it is work from home…That’s what I developed.

What are your thoughts on the federal government’s handling of remote work accommodations?

Here’s why remote work is such a difficult and an important conversation for employers to have. There was really only one group of worker, that really disabled worker, that benefited during Covid…This group of employees that were, for the first time in their working adult life, they’re like…“I have energy. I’m getting to the end of my work day, and I can actually make dinner, and I don’t have to take the extra pain meds, because I push my body to the limit.”

For that work group, the minute their employer said, “Okay, never mind, come back”...and they asked for accommodation, they got lumped in with the other group […] What has happened in this disability space is there are people who are absolutely lying about needing to work, medically, remotely…and then there’s a group of people who legitimately need it…and they—medically—hugely benefit, and what happens is employers are struggling with not grouping them all together, and they see this whole group as liars, cheats, and stealers.

I teach HR practitioners: You get to feel your feelings, but you’re not psychic, and, if you are psychic, call me, because I’m hiring psychics. You have no idea who is legit and who’s not…Your job is not to make your organization happy. Your job is to comply with the law, and to do it in a way where you’re seeking data.

It’s saying, “Okay, is there a medical need? What are their functional limitations? Can they do their entire job remotely? And are there any alternatives that are just as effective?” And, if not, you’ve got to let them work from home as a reasonable accommodation.

Your book was published in 2017. Can you speak to its relevance today?

When I wrote the book in 2017, we were not talking about remote work. We were talking about parking spaces, and we were talking about orthopedic injuries, and we were talking about offices, and we were talking about schedules, but we were not talking about remote work. But, it still works.

Employers are struggling, and HR needs to be, we need to be, the most powerful person in the room, even if we’re invisible. We need to own our power and stop bad decisions being made based on emotions, which is what a lot of organizations are doing. And, we need to have really good process, so that emotion doesn’t guide decision-making, but our process is guiding decision-making. That’s how we keep organizations safe, and we protect employees and our culture.