During our recent webinar on Reasonable Adjustments, we received several questions via the chat facility that we will address in a couple of blogs over the next few days.
As we mentioned on the webinar, an employer is only under an obligation to make reasonable adjustments if it knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that an employee has a disability and is, or is likely to be, placed at a substantial disadvantage as a result.
If an employee has told their manager that they have a disability then the starting point is that the employer will almost certainly be deemed to know of this too, even if this information is not in fact passed on to anyone else within the business, such as HR/OH, etc. This is supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) statutory Code of Practice, which says, “If an employer’s agent or employee (such as an occupational health adviser, a HR officer or a recruitment agent) knows, in that capacity, of a worker’s or a potential applicant’s disability, the employer will not usually be able to claim that they do not know of the disability and that they therefore have no obligation to make a reasonable adjustment.”
However, all these questions depend on their own facts. The bigger the organisation, the further any given manager may be from any position of real responsibility for the employee....
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