Designing workplaces where disability is part of organizational design
Examining how workplace systems, accommodation processes, and organizational practices shape access, participation, and retention for disabled employees.
Many organizations approach disability primarily through individual accommodations rather than examining how workplace systems, performance expectations, and organizational practices shape access and participation more broadly.
Accommodation processes are part of that larger organizational design. Too often, they inherit the same assumptions about productivity, pace, flexibility, and performance that produced the barriers in the first place. As a result, employers lose workers they have already invested in.
Why The Interactive Process Breaks Down
In many organizations, accommodation processes are formally compliant but functionally unreliable. Requests stall, narrow too quickly to a single option, or end without identifying an effective accommodation. These outcomes follow from how the process is structured.
Many systems are built around evaluating a proposed accommodation rather than conducting a structured search for effective accommodations. Employees are expected to propose specific solutions before the organization meaningfully engages. Medical documentation is often used to validate those proposals, even where the relevant questions concern workplace design, operational flexibility, or how work is organized in practice.
Requests are frequently evaluated one at a time, and when a proposal is rejected, responsibility often shifts back to the employee to suggest an alternative rather than continuing as an employer-led search. This narrows the range of options considered and treats denial as a stopping point rather than part of an ongoing process.
These patterns are reinforced by broader organizational systems. Workplace policies, performance expectations, and standard ways of organizing work shape both what accommodations are considered possible and how often accommodations are needed in the first place. Where flexibility is built into how work is structured and evaluated, fewer barriers require individual modification.
How I Work
I examine how accommodation processes function in practice, including how requests are initiated, how information is gathered and evaluated, how responsibility is allocated, and how decisions are made and revisited. I also examine the broader workplace systems that shape how work is organized, evaluated, and made accessible.
Based on that diagnosis, I work with organizations to redesign both accommodation processes and the surrounding workplace structures that shape whether disabled employees can participate and perform effectively in practice.
I bring 24 years of experience as a philosopher working on ethics and disability, along with direct experience navigating accommodation processes as an employee.
Nature of Engagements
Engagements are diagnostic and advisory. I do not handle individual complaints or serve as legal counsel. My role is organizational analysis and design.
How to Engage
Many organizations first encounter this work through my speaking, including conference presentations, workshops, and keynotes.
I’m currently also doing a small number of advisory engagements and process reviews with organizations seeking to improve how their workplace systems and accommodation processes function.