The vast gap between how HR thinks about reasonable adjustment and what it actually feels like to wait, explain, and watch it happen slowly.
There’s a term in employment law that sounds protective until you have to live through it: ‘reasonable adjustment.’ Employers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate disability. The principle is sound. The practice is where things collapse.
Reasonable is doing a lot of work in that sentence. HR thinks reasonably about cost, about precedent, about what fits into existing structure. Reasonable means the minimum thing that technically allows you to work, not the thing that would let you actually thrive. Reasonable is calibrated toward what’s convenient for the organisation, not what’s necessary for the person.
From where you sit, ‘reasonable adjustment’ means waiting. Waiting while they gather information. Waiting while they consult with each other about what’s possible. Waiting while they investigate whether some software exists, whether IT approves it, whether there’s budget. Waiting while they have conversations about cost, as if your access is primarily an economic question.
The Machinery of Delay
And after the waiting comes the follow-up. You’ve asked for an adjustment. You’ve submitted documentation. You’ve explained your needs. You’re told it’s being ‘looked into.’ Two weeks pass. No update. You follow up. It’s been handed to someone else, someone new who needs context. You explain again, and in the explaining, the detail dissolves. You follow up a third time. Now it’s in a different department entirely.
The emotional labour here is substantial and entirely invisible. You’re tracking your own request. You’re the one maintaining continuity while the system loses the thread. You’re explaining over and over because people aren’t writing things down, aren’t being clear about who owns what. You’re holding the memory of your need while systems move slowly around you, not out of malice, but out of bureaucratic inertia.
Meanwhile, you’re still supposed to work. Still supposed to perform. Still supposed to manage the thing you asked for help with, except now you’re also managing the frustration of asking for help and being put into a process where things move glacially, where urgency is expressed but pace never accelerates.
When Adjustment Arrives Half-Formed
Then comes the adjustment itself, and often it’s not quite what was asked for. You asked for flexible hours so you can manage pain. You got permission to work from home two days a week, which doesn’t actually address pain management but is presented as reasonable accommodation. You asked for a quiet space to take breaks during overstimulation. You got access to a storage closet, which is quiet but humiliating. You asked for written agendas sent before meetings. You got them, eventually, but inconsistently, often after the meeting has already begun.
HR has checked the box. An adjustment was made. It is, technically, reasonable. The fact that it doesn’t actually solve the problem is subtly positioned as your responsibility. Perhaps you need to be more creative about how you use the accommodation. Perhaps the two days from home is sufficient and you’re just not approaching it right. Perhaps the closet is uncomfortable but you could make it work if you tried harder.
There’s also an unspoken cost to having asked. The moment you request accommodation, something shifts. You’ve been marked. You need something. You’re higher maintenance. You’re probably less productive, right? That logic doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, but it shapes how people interact with you. And so you stop asking for the next adjustment. You manage with less than you need because asking is taxing in ways that go beyond the bureaucratic process.
What Reasonable Actually Requires
Reasonable, if it meant anything real, would be fast. When someone requests an adjustment, a process measured in days, not weeks. Reasonable would mean someone owns the request and follows it through, rather than passing it around until it gets lost. Reasonable would mean the disabled person isn’t responsible for tracking their own accommodation.
Reasonable would mean the adjustment actually addresses the problem, not a symbolic approximation of addressing it. If someone needs flexibility around pain, flexibility should mean they can work at times when pain is manageable, not flexibility within a fixed framework. If someone needs a quiet space, it should actually be quiet and reliably available, not a closet.
And reasonable would mean that asking for an adjustment doesn’t become evidence against you. That your needs don’t get weaponised later. That accommodation is understood as what allows you to work, not as special treatment you should be grateful for. That’s what reasonable would actually look like.