So, your employee wants to keep teleworking after pandemic

Q         Our employee has filed an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) request with her psychiatrist to work from home permanently. Do we have to accommodate her? She already has performance issues, and no one else on her team is a permanent remote employee.

A   You must provide a reasonable accommodation to an employee with a disability only if it allows her to perform her “essential job functions” and doesn’t pose an undue hardship to the company. “Essential job functions” mean the “fundamental” duties of the position the individual with a disability holds or is seeking. An “undue hardship” exists if the accommodation causes you “significant difficulty or expense.”

If the employee isn’t able to perform her essential functions or your business suffers an undue hardship, the requested accommodation isn’t reasonable, and you aren’t obligated to provide it. It’s important to note, however, an accommodation that would have posed an undue hardship before the COVID-19 outbreak may not pose one in the postpandemic workplace. For instance, you may not have had the technological capabilities to let her work from home prepandemic, but now she can reasonably perform her essential job functions remotely.

Conversely, however, you may have temporarily waived her performance of one or more essential job functions during the pandemic to let her work remotely until it was safe to return. You have no obligation to permanently waive her performance of the function or refrain from restoring it once it’s safe to return to work.