Educate the Lawyers & Judges
This is the final step. If you educating yourself and educating management doesn’t work, then you need to keep moving. Keep educating. Get the allies you need to get the accommodations you deserve.
I wish I could say that this is the easiest step. It’s not. The lawyers are usually not there waiting for you to knock on their door. They usually are only interested in listening to you when you get in front of a judge.
You need to do your homework and make sure that the case is presented as good as you can get it by the time you get there. This means getting a good investigation and having strong, well-formed claims.
It also means having an advocate who can help you get there. It starts before you even request an accommodation. Get your medical professionals on board. Understand what you need and what the agency can do to provide it. Understand what is not going to work before you request it.
Then be ready to be pushy. Don’t allow them to delay. Don’t allow them to conduct an interactive meeting through a completely one-sided discussion. Management has to work with you, not against you.
Here’s Your Five-Step Plan to Get Started
I have a 5-point plan for fixing reasonable accommodations. Not all of this may apply to your situation, but some of it will.
1. Ask for the right accommodations. I work with my clients to figure out what the right accommodation is for their situation. We connect your actual job requirements and duties to the restrictions that your medical conditions present, and consider a variety of potential workarounds (that is, accommodations) that you can request. Do it right. Don’t hide it. Be up front about what you want and why you want it. This can solve a lot of problems down the road.
2. Work with your doctors. Doctors typically don’t understand what your day-to-day work requirements are. You need to help them understand what it is that you need to do your job, and what not. If you can’t lift 20 pounds or stand for more than 30 minutes without making things worse, the doctor needs to be able to say that. I help draft documents for your doctors to review and edit to ensure that they are being specific about what your restrictions are in the most helpful way possible.
3. Engage in the interactive process. Management doesn’t know how your disability impacts you the way that you do. Sometimes you have to explain that. Sometimes you have to explain what the requirements for disability accommodation are. Sometimes you have to be (legally) threatening. Everyone in management is trained to treat everyone equally. This avoids charges of favoritism or worse. But the ADA requires management to treat people with disabilities differently. It’s not a common situation. This can be difficult for management to grasp, so you may need to educate them.
4. File an EEO Complaint. If all of that doesn’t work, you have to go to the barricades. But you don’t want to take this step until you’re sure that you’ve crossed all of your T’s and dotted all of your I’s. At this point, you need to be sure all of your loops are closed. If not, the Agency will figure that out and exploit it in litigation. You don’t want that. You want to have the strongest case possible before filing a complaint. After the complaint, it is much harder to fix any issues.
5. Mediate early and often. Once you get to mediation, the Agency will often engage legal. This means someone who knows something about these kinds of cases, and is willing to be educated, gets involved. Agency attorneys can have a lot of pull and can be quite persuasive. The key is for you to persuade them first.
Is this important? Well, that depends. Does your disability potentially affect your performance? What happens if you don’t get the accommodation you need? Will it get harder or easier in the future?
The answer to the last question is almost always that it gets harder. You need a standing desk now, but in six months the pain could be so bad you need to take situational telework, then full-time telework. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the first one takes almost nothing to get, and the last one can take months full of threatening emails and painful days at work.
This plan I laid out above works. I know because I’ve seen it. It works if even if you eventually need disability retirement. It works if you ultimately need to litigate. And it works for employees because it puts the lowest cost resolutions first. You shouldn’t have to pay to make the Agency do the right thing. But waiting and then paying a lawyer thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars to litigate a tough case is almost never the right solution.
I am here to help. As I like to tell people, this is my day job. I shoulder some of the burden. All of those questions get answered like ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ You have someone to call. I love doing this work. Because I get to help people.
If you are still interested in working with me, just reach out. We can figure out a plan that works right for you. And figuring this out as soon as you can is worth it to protect your future.
Don’t wait. Get the help you need. Find someone who understands your situation and what you need for reasonable accommodations.