When considering a request for a reasonable adjustment, use this checklist to guide your decision-making process.
Key Principles
1. Main Goal: Your primary goal is to keep people in work if possible and to reduce or remove any disadvantage a disabled worker faces.
2. Objective Test: The test for what’s reasonable is an objective one, not what you personally think.
3. Flexibility: It’s acceptable, and sometimes necessary, to treat disabled people more favourably than non-disabled people.
4. Effectiveness: The adjustment must be effective. If it doesn’t help the disabled worker, there’s no point in making it.
5. Multiple Adjustments: One single solution might not be enough; you may need to implement several adjustments that work together.
Factors to Consider
- The disabled person themselves is the primary expert on their own condition and what would be effective to be able do their job successfully. So ideally talk to them. If not them, with their consent, talk to a relative or partner.
2. Seek Professional Advice: In most cases, you’ll be expected to seek advice from an Occupational Health Advisor. Their expertise can provide objective, evidence-based recommendations on the substantial disadvantage, impact on work and what is reasonable.
3. Effectiveness: How well will the adjustment remove or reduce the disadvantage?
4. Practicality: Is the adjustment easy to implement?
5. Cost: How much will it cost to make the adjustment?
6. Organisational Resources: What are the resources and size of your entire organisation, not just your specific branch?
7. Impact on Others: What will be the impact of the adjustment on other employees or customers?
8. Available Support: Is there financial or advisory support available from organisations like Access to Work or charities?
9. Health and Safety: You can consider health and safety risks, but this must be based on a proper risk assessment, not on assumptions.
Contextual Considerations
1. Nature of the Job: You don’t have to change the basic nature of the job.
2. Employment Situation: The adjustments you make may differ depending on the situation. For example, you may be expected to make more permanent or costly changes for an existing long-term employee than for a job applicant attending a one-hour interview.
3. Organisational Size: Larger organisations may be expected to make certain adjustments, like redeployment or flexible working, more easily than smaller ones.
4. New Role: Reasonable adjustments can include supporting the employee into a new role within the organisation.
Final Steps
1. Document the reasonable adjustments agreed and ensure they are in HR records but also accessible to successive line managers. Check out Reasonable Adjustment passport schemes https://www.tuc.org.uk/disability-passports-what-reasonable-adjustments-passport
2. Mandatory Action: If an adjustment is deemed reasonable after considering all factors, you must make it happen..
3. If in any doubt, money spent getting proper advice on what to do is a better investment than money spent on a dispute, even if you win
4 .Disputes: If there’s a disagreement, an Employment Tribunal is the only body that can ultimately decide whether an adjustment is reasonable.
As always, if you need guidance or training on all aspects of Equality law compliance do contact me on audrey@audreyludwig.com