Anyone can ask for reasonable adjustments from their employer. Reasonable adjustments are changes that your employer can make to make your job easier for you. This makes it easier for the employee to do their tasks, and is also more effective for the employer.

To find out more about reasonable adjustments, I interviewed Sophie Burns, a job coach at United Response. I learned a lot through this interview and I found it very interesting to learn about how reasonable adjustments are used to support people with learning disabilities.

Examples of reasonable adjustments

Reasonable adjustments have helped me with work as they’ve made it easier for me to get tasks done. I have my tasks split into small parts so I can easily track where I am up to on a task. This makes big tasks easier for me to work on. My work have done autism training meetings and e-learning courses about autism awareness and I also ask for the questions in advance in interviews so I can plan my answers without being put on the spot.

Sophie shared the reasonable adjustments used by some of the people she supports:

  • Creating a quiet area for those who are sensitive to noise
  • Adjusting the lighting for those who are sensitive to light
  • Allowing to wear headphones if it is a noisy environment
  • Changing the height of a desk for someone who doesn’t like to sit down all day
  • Changing the size of the monitors or setting up multiple monitors for people who have issues with vision
  • Job carving
  • Having a difficult task removed from someone’s job description
  • Changing work hours to accommodate hospital appointments within the working hours
  • Changing how they are trained on a task such as screenshots of a task, for example if it’s an admin task
  • Increased one to one support or extra supervision
  • An informal chat instead of an interview
  • Work trials where they could do some days on the job
  • Asking for the interview questions in advance

Who can ask for reasonable adjustments?

Anyone can ask for reasonable adjustments from their employer. Reasonable adjustments are changes your employer can make to make work easier for you. It is important to consider that even if one person has reasonable adjustments, it doesn’t mean they will need them for the full time they work there. Some of the people who were supported by Sophie needed reasonable adjustments for the first few weeks then no longer needed those adjustments.

To find out what reasonable adjustments someone needs, their United Response job coach will talk to the person to see what adjustments they had in the past that were useful. They will also try to talk to previous employers as well as family and tutors in education, to see what learnings can be transferred over to the workplace. If an intern is struggling with something the job coach will try different methods to find out what adjustments are helpful and if they work, take them forward into the workplace.

Why are reasonable adjustments important?

Reasonable adjustments are important because they help employees be productive. This makes it easier for the employee to do their tasks, and it is also more effective for the employer.

When a United Response job coach mentions reasonable adjustments to employers, they sometimes think that it will be a big hinderance and cost them a lot of money. This isn’t necessarily the case. Employers will be given training to explain what reasonable adjustments are, and real life success stories of how even the smallest reasonable adjustments can benefit the person and the employer (because someone works more productively with reasonable adjustments!)

Who funds reasonable adjustments?

The employer normally pays the cost for reasonable adjustments that are needed. However, sometimes this is covered by Access To Work which is the Government’s scheme that provides employers with a grant for people with learning disabilities to help them start or stay in work. If they couldn’t get the grant from Access To Work, that’s when the employer needs to find out if it is a reasonable request.

For example, if it was a small business and the reasonable adjustment was IT equipment that cost a lot of money they can say that isn’t a reasonable adjustment for them to make and try to find other ways to support the individual.

Reasonable adjustment success stories

Sophie explained that the adjustments to the recruitment process have made the most significant positive difference on people she supports. One of her interns interviewed with companies that all used a scoring system and hadn’t been successful. The job coach spoke to the employer and asked for any alternatives they can give such as a more informal chat. That adjustment helped them get the job and made them feel more relaxed as answers were much more natural and they didn’t feel pressured.

Comfort breaks also help a lot. For example, someone Sophie supports who works with spreadsheets had a 5 minute break for every 10 columns they completed which repeated throughout the day. The employer was finding them doing more than triple the amount of work because of the regular breaks.

  • Nolan Barratt is a media contributor for United Response