A common misconception is that accommodating employees means accepting lower output. The correct approach is to maintain the same performance, attendance, and safety standards for everyone, but to provide different tools and methods—the accommodations—to help employees meet those standards.
Leaving accommodation decisions to individual managers introduces personal bias, fear, and legal ignorance, creating massive risk. The solution is a standardized process where managers immediately escalate any disability-related issue to a trained, centralized HR team.
Non-disabled employees closely observe how their company handles disability accommodations. Fair and supportive processes create psychological safety for the entire workforce, boosting retention as employees see a potential safety net for their own future needs.
An employee's performance drop is rarely due to a single cause. A manager should systematically investigate four distinct areas: Communication (do they know *what* to do?), Training (do they know *how*?), Motivation (do they *want* to?), and Circumstances (is something *blocking* them?).
In a supportive culture, managing underperformance starts with co-authored goals upstream. When results falter, the conversation should be a diagnostic inquiry focused on removing roadblocks. This shifts the focus from the person's failure to the problem that's hindering their success, making tough conversations productive.
Companies that for years claimed remote work or flexible schedules were unreasonable for disabled employees instantly implemented those exact policies for everyone during the pandemic. This exposed that the barriers were never about feasibility but about corporate willingness and systemic ableism.
The belief that people fail due to lack of will leads to blame. Shifting to 'people do well if they can' reframes failure as a skill gap, not a will gap. This moves your role from enforcer to helper, focusing you on identifying and building missing skills.
Salaried, remote professionals can often self-accommodate. The disability employment crisis is concentrated among lower-wage workers whose jobs require physical presence and are subject to more rigid management, as 90% of accommodation requests come from the lower half of the pay scale.
Companies wrongly assume accommodating disabilities is expensive, but most solutions cost under $300. The true financial drain comes from legal fees, consultant costs, and lost productivity resulting from managers making biased, fear-based decisions instead of seeking simple solutions.
When implementing a new productivity system, success depends more on team comfort than on the tool's advanced features. Forcing a complex platform can lead to frustration. It's better to compromise on a simpler, universally accepted tool than to create friction and alienate team members.
If an employee makes an error while following your instructions, the instructions are flawed, not the employee. This approach shifts the focus from penalizing individuals to improving systems. It creates a better training process and a psychologically safe culture that values feedback.