How should supervisors respond when an employee shows signs of mental illness at work? It’s a delicate situation that needs to be handled exactly right. Follow these guidelines to help ensure that you do what’s best for the employee, for the organization and for co-workers.
Most managers know about the ADA and understand that they must try to accommodate workers who have disabilities. But the ADA is complex and loaded with rules that managers and supervisors need to understand. In this Quick Take you will learn the definition of a disability; what the 'interactive process' is; why employees don’t have to specifically ask for an 'accommodation'; what you should know to determine whether you need to engage in an 'interactive Process' and the three things you must ALWAYS do once you’ve determined that an employee has made an accommodation request.
Most people in the workplace know you can’t discriminate against employees just because they’re disabled. Certainly supervisors are aware of this. But what a lot of people don’t know is that disability law extends its protection to employees who aren’t disabled, but have relatives or friends who are. The ADA calls this 'association discrimination'. In this Quick Take, you’ll learn: how to recognize situations that involve disability association discrimination; what you have to do in such situations and what you don’t have to do; and how disability association differs from ordinary employee disability.
The ADA protects employees who are disabled because they are 1) alcoholics; 2) recovering alcoholics; or 3) recovering drug addicts. The law prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on such disabilities. But generally speaking, the law DOESN’T stop an employer from disciplining or even terminating these employees for misconduct or poor performance. In this Quick Take you will learn how anti-discrimination law applies to employees who are disabled because of substance abuse problems, what you can and cannot do in applying performance standards to such disabled employees, and the most important insight to keep in mind to help you handle issues involving employees and substance abuse.
It’s true that the ADA protects employees from discrimination. This means that you can’t treat employees who are disabled – or who you regard as disabled – different than other employees. Yes, the ADA requires that you make 'reasonable accommodation' whenever possible, but it does NOT excuse performance deficiencies. In this Quick Take, you’ll learn the most important thing to remember when evaluating employees with disabilities, what reasonable accommodation is and how it affects the evaluation process and three things you DON’T have to do when reviewing workers protected by the ADA.
