![]() ![]() ![]() What has changed during the pandemic is the volume and type of accommodation requests many employers are receiving, as well as the status of the requestor. If it is established that an employee has a disability, the employer must explore possible accommodations with the employee, implement them, and then monitor the chosen accommodation. If medical information and response to inquiry indicate a severe COVID-19 experience, the employee should be deemed to have a disability warranting reasonable accommodation. Instead, the disability determination associated with a COVID-19 diagnosis will depend on the severity of the employee’s symptoms. A COVID-19 diagnosis is not, in and of itself, a disability, giving entitlement to reasonable accommodation. The employer still must recognize the accommodation request, then appropriately solicit information to determine whether an employee has a disability. In the era of COVID-19, the process for arriving at a reasonable accommodation has not changed. When an employee with a disability makes his or her need for a reasonable accommodation known to the employer (unless the need is obvious), the employer should engage the employee in the interactive process to arrive at a reasonable accommodation that will permit the employee to perform his or her essential job functions. A disability is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity or a history of a substantially limiting impairment. The ADA applies to employers with over 15 employees and prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities. When faced with record numbers of accommodation requests or when attempting to resume onsite operations while a significant proportion of employees seek to remain offsite, what is an employer to do? 1. However, for businesses and organizations whose work requires employees to be primarily onsite, the recent surge in requests for remote work accommodation proves a substantial impediment to resuming operations. Typical office settings long have adapted to a majority of workers working remotely. As a result, in some workplaces, accommodations are exceptions that have begun to rival the rule. With fears of COVID-19 looming large, droves of employees, disabled and non-disabled alike, have been seeking accommodations, most often in the form of remote work, to isolate themselves from others. Accommodations are no longer exceptional arrangements made to assist a handful of workers with disabilities. ![]()
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