Mental health or physical disabilities that deal with the duty to accommodate

Remember, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has a ton of incredibly helpful information relating to accommodation in the workplace on their website. It’s a valuable resource and is often overlooked. Another valuable resource? A really good employment lawyer!

Don’t bury your head in the sand

Pretending nothing is wrong isn’t going to help you. Turning a blind eye to patterns of behaviour that would alert a reasonable person to the fact that additional inquiries should be made will not help you. Some of the more common flags would be:

Talk to the employee. Share your observations and let them know your concerns. Ask if there’s anything the matter and whether they need help. Point them to your accommodation policies (which, depending on the size of your organization, are or will soon be required under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (“AODA”) and encourage them to come to you if they require support.

Be proactive

Once a need for accommodation has been identified, it’s important for you to understand the employee’s functional limitations. Basically, what can the employee do without help, what can the employee do with help, and what the employee can’t do. Understand what help the employee requires and how you can best provide that help. Ask how long the accommodation will be required and when you can expect the employee to be back up to 100%. Ask your employee to update this information frequently.

Park the skepticism

Employees are entitled to request accommodation. Employers must assume such requests are made in good faith and proceed on that basis. Although I appreciate that many are the times when employees request accommodation when they are being performance managed, there is no benefit to challenging the legitimacy of their request at the outset. Or at any other time during the accommodation process. Approach all requests for accommodation the same way.

What do you know about mental health and disability accommodations?

If you are interested in learning more about Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) or how to make accessibility a natural part of your business through the application of Corporate Social Responsibility, please contact Sandra Broekhof @ 416-579-1035 orsandra_broekhof@sympatico.ca