It’s very frustrating to me when I hear or read about how employers are accommodating their sick or injured employee. There’s a right way to do this, and then there’s the lazy way.
Let’s start with the lazy way – since it seems to happen all too often.
When a worker provides restrictions or limitations, it’s so easy to pull them out of their job and out of their department and place them somewhere else in the organization. Easy for the company and easy for the case manager. However, is it easy for the worker? Is it the right thing to do? What benefits are made in this instance?
The correct way to accommodate an injured/ill employee is to modify and/or alter their pre-illness/injury position, and make the accommodation in their own job, and in their own department. This takes a bit of work however and in our busy work schedule, some are more apt to take the quickest way to make the accommodation happen. I can guarantee you in the end, this is the long way to a regular return to work and will pose many barriers as you go along. More times than not, I find employees take longer to get better and longer to return to their pre-disability position, along with a feeling of abandonment in these types of accommodation. No one is happy. Not the employee, not the co-workers and not the management team.
The best way to accommodate into their own position is to ensure you are extremely familiar with the employee’s job – get out of your office and go and look at the job! If possible, do the job yourself. If this isn’t possible, ask other workers that perform the job, and at the very least, involve the injured/ill employee in the arranging of modified work in his/her own job. And yes, he/she can do it, in most cases. Obviously there is always some extenuating circumstances that may prevent this from happening, but in most cases, the employee will recover much quicker doing a portion of his/her own job, with his/her own co-workers and own supervisor and/or manager to oversee his/her work.
If, as a case manager, you don’t have the skills to dissect the pre-injury position into tasks, and then attach physical demands to each task, then ask for some professional help from either a physiotherapist, occupational therapist, occupational health nurse, kinesiologist, or other trained professional to assist you in this endeavor. It is a crucial component of the accommodation process to thoroughly understand which tasks an injured/ill employee can perform with the documented limitations provided, without finding an alternate job for them to perform.
Once you take an injured/ill worker out of their own comfort zone, their ability to recover quickly has been lost. They need the support of their colleagues and the normalcy of their pre-disability job to assist in the recovery process. Without this, the recovery is unnecessarily prolonged and costly.
Lucie M.H. Fournier RN, COHN(C), BA (Psych)
Founder/Workplace Health Strategist
With over 30 years of experience in disability management, and a return on investment on average of 1:7, Fournier disAbility & Health provides customized and results oriented services in Absenteeism Management including Attendance, Sick Time/Short, Long Term Disability, and WSIB claims for employers across Ontario.
Expertise in 5 distinct niches of disAbility management include:
1. Complex claims management resolution
2. Mental health claim return to work & accommodations
3. Advanced level training for internal claims manager to make a significant impact on the health of the employee and wealth of the organization
4. Transitional Leadership when moving to & from a 3rd party disAbility Management company
5. Sensitive claims & disAbility management of professional staff, such as HR, health team, and/or executives such as supervisors, managers, directors
