Written in August 2026
Reasonable adjustments – from the other side
When we talk about reasonable adjustments, we only talk about these happening in one direction – the organisation making reasonable adjustments for an employee. We don’t talk about the reasonability of the adjustments neurodivergent employees are making for their employer. In most cases, employing organisations and managers have no idea we’re even making these adjustments!
Although the balance is shifting a little, I still hear testimony from neurodivergent or otherwise disabled people about how their requests for reasonable adjustments were denied, despite those adjustments being actually perfectly reasonable.
Adjustment requests are denied on various bases, many of which are unreasonable. The denial excuse that really gets my goat is “we can’t be seen to be giving someone special treatment”. Reasonable adjustments are NOT special treatment, they are the small changes someone needs to navigate a barrier. Are lifts, ramps and dropped kerbs “special treatment”? No.
Second worst is the denial of an adjustment because the person making the decision doesn’t need that adjustment themselves, and therefore can’t believe that someone actually does.
Working from home, wearing (Loop) earplugs or having flexible start and end times to work around the stress of rush hour traffic are all things that don’t cost a company (much, if any) money, and which can make a significant difference to someone’s capacity for work.
The attitude of “well, the rest of us manage without these adjustments” is utterly narrow-minded. People aren’t all the same. We don’t all need the same thing. I get around perfectly fine without a mobility aid, or a service dog, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the world can do without these things.
What is reasonable?
As a rule, if it
- doesn’t impact productivity
- doesn’t impact health and safety
- is affordable
- doesn’t impact client services
- actually does remove the barrier the employee faces
Then it is reasonable.
Yet unreasonable adjustments are ones we, as neurodivergent people, are expected to make – indeed we are making them – in the workplace, for the sake of others. Many of the things we are required to do to fit into a workplace do impact our
- productivity
- health (especially mental)
- personal budgets
And even create other barriers in our lives we have to navigate.
The impact on me of not being allowed to work from home when making complicated phone or video calls, and having to do that in a shared office, precipitated one of the most serious mental health episodes I have ever had. There were other factors, of course,- many of those were also related to problems at work.
The denial of reasonable adjustments, and the continued demand on me to make unreasonable ones to fit their way of working, nearly ended my life as well as my employment in that role.
Neurodivergent people are continually required to forfeit our wellbeing through the unreasonable adjustments we have to make to be allowed to participate in each aspect of society.
When we ask for this to become a bi-directional process, we are too often treated as if we are asking for something unreasonable without any acknowledgement of the stress we have endured to even be in a position to ask.
Let’s open up the conversation and make this a dialogue that happens in every workplace.