ADA

Joe HR

An employee has requested an accommodation due to taking a medication which she says puts her into a deep sleep. She claims to have trouble waking up in the morning, thus causing her to be late. She is late at least 4 out of 5 mornings. Her work schedule was 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. As an accommodation, we changed her work schedule to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We did this four days ago and she has been every day since the change in schedule. As an aside, she also lives 50 miles away from the office.

So far we have not taken disciplinary action against her for the late arrivals. We are waiting for her to return her ADA request form before we decide whether or not to take any disciplinary action. She also missed two complete days. When she called in she did not mention anything about her alleged medical issue.

Her supervisor issued disciplinary action yesterday for those absences and she came down to HR quite irate and saying she should be covered whether she is late or if she does not come to work at all, because all of her absences are due to her medical issue. We do not believe that a reasonable accommodation is to allow an employee to come to work whenever they wish. It is our contention that we made a reasonable accommodation by adjusting her work schedule to allow her two additional hours to sleep off the effects of the medication, but we do not believe we should excuse half or full day absences as a reasonable accommodation.

If anyone has had any experience in this area, we would appreciate your input.

Whatever

We had a similar situation. We made the accomodation of allowing the employee to start work two hours later. However, ee continued to be late and blamed her medication. We asked her to supply from her doctor a medical reason why she couldn't take her medication earlier in the evening and therefore go to bed earlier. We, also, asked if the dosage could be adjusted. Her attendance immediately improved. She had to give up watching Jay Leno.