Accommodations
Act Now: Where to Start?
Where to start?
Reflect on your workplace self-assessment score. What did you learn when you completed the Workplace Self-Assessment Tool? Are you familiar with accommodating employees in general or specifically those with arthritis, joint pain, and back pain?
Review the accommodation process
Do employees in your workplace know how to request an accommodation? Process mapping and communication highlight how knowing the process for requesting an accommodation helps employees feel comfortable starting the process if they need to. Explore if your organization has a designated person or team to address accommodation issues, a formal decision making process for accommodations, and/or a centralized accommodation fund.
Consider Supporting Wellness
If your workplace supports wellness, employees may already have the flexibility and autonomy to adjust their work life to help manage arthritis, joint pain, and back pain. This means you may not receive a request for a formal accommodation. Even with strong support for wellness, employees with arthritis, joint pain, and back pain, may still chose not to disclose.
Did you know?
Employees with rheumatic diseases saw as much as a 50% decrease in job loss after two “job retention” visits with a vocational rehabilitation counsellor. (Allaire, 2003)
Steps you can take to prepare to accommodate employees with arthritis, joint pain, and back pain:
- Learn what arthritis, joint pain, and back pain are and what accommodations are helpful.
- Consider the resources available to you and your employee, e.g., vocational rehabilitation counsellor, ergonomic specialist, The Job Accommodation Network (JAN).
- Review the process for requesting an accommodation and ask yourself the following questions: Does the process work? Do people know about it? Is there anything we should improve?
- Is your medical documentation form easy for health care providers to complete? Does it include enough detail to understand an employee’s restrictions as well as what is needed to appropriately accommodate them? If not, see the Supporting Employee Success tool in the Tools and Resources section for some ideas
Health care providers who directly deal with employment issues:
- Vocational Rehabilitation Counsellors (VRC) evaluate the work situation, identify problems, suggest accommodations, provide career planning, and suggest resources to help both the employee and the employers.
- Ergonomists contribute to the design and evaluation of systems to make them compatible with peoples’ needs, abilities, and
- Occupational Therapists (OTs) are also trained to do workplace ergonomic assessments. While ergonomists have more of a system level focus, OTs focus more on person level solutions.
Who is involved in the accommodation process?
Finding a suitable accommodation primarily involves you and your employee. Other people who may be involved include HR, the employee’s union (if applicable), and workplace health and safety representatives who can assist in finding your employee an appropriate accommodation.
Collaborative communication, consultation, and the involvement of all relevant decision-makers helps to ensure the employee is appropriately accommodated.
The employee's role in the accommodation process
Your employee is a key player throughout the accommodation process. The employee needs to:
- Request the accommodation. It is helpful if they come prepared with some suggestions for accommodations that will help them. This can include ideas for accommodations, costs associated, and the minimum accommodation needed.
- Obtain sufficient medical information to support their need for an accommodation.
- Talk to you about any concerns with the suggested accommodations.
- Agree on a communication plan, including who and how much they would like to tell about their arthritis, joint pain, or back pain and how to check-in with them.
- Let you know if there are any changes in their functional capacity and if there have been any amendments to the recommendations from their medical team.
The employer's role during the accommodation process
The best way to identify and have clarity around the roles when an accommodation is requested is to have a process that outlines your role, your employee’s role, and the roles of anyone else who may be involved. Below are some examples of what you may need to do when an employee requests an accommodation:
- Connect with the employee and appropriate health and safety or ability advisor to review options for accommodation.
- Develop an accommodation plan.
- Communicate with all involved parties (e.g., HR, the union, the benefit provider, ability advisors, etc.).
- Educate other employees about the accommodation and the “duty to accommodate” while still being respectful of your employee’s privacy.
- Remember, the employee doesn’t need to disclose their medical condition, only their limitations.
- Monitor the accommodation. If necessary, meet with your employee and the accommodation team if there are issues or concerns that cannot be resolved.
Communicating with co-workers
As an employer, you may have gone to great lengths to ensure that your workplace accommodates employees living with arthritis, joint pain, and back pain. However, it is important to remember that it is also your responsibility to ensure that your other employees are also accommodating. Co-workers may not know that their colleague has a medical condition, or may know, but not understand, the impact it can have. Therefore, they might think that they have to pick up the slack for them (which may or may not be true) or that their colleague is receiving special treatment. A potential, unintended consequence of accommodating an employee with health concerns is the response of other employees. How and what to communicate with others needs to be considered and planned for from the beginning. Check out the Communication pages suggestions for communicating with co-workers.