After the offer · Hiring chair
The accommodation request
A new hire just asked for something. This is a process with a name, and it is easier than you fear.
Your new hire writes: 'To do my best work I would like to request written summaries of verbal assignments and a flexible start time within a one-hour window.' What the law expects now is called the interactive process, which is a formal name for a cooperative conversation: understand the need, explore options, land on something reasonable. Most accommodations cost little or nothing.
Your reply: “How do you respond to the request?”
Prompt, cooperative, focused on the work. That is the interactive process done well, and notice what you did not ask for: a diagnosis. Accommodations run on function, not medical detail. Where documentation is genuinely needed, HR requests it narrowly and confidentially, and it never routes through the team. Two accommodations like these cost approximately nothing and are the difference between a hire who performs and one who struggles quietly.
Documentation has a lawful place when disability or need is not obvious, but as an opening move for two low-cost requests it converts cooperation into gatekeeping and teaches your newest employee that asking costs. Proportion is the principle: trivial accommodations, trivial process. Save the documentation machinery for requests where it genuinely matters, and route it through HR, never the supervisor.
That sentence undoes the yes. An accommodation is not special treatment, it is the adjustment that makes equal performance possible, the same category as a monitor stand or a left-handed setup. Say the plain yes. The pattern you actually want to encourage is people telling you what they need to do great work.
Now you, out loud
Draft your default first reply to any accommodation request, so your real one is written by calm you instead of surprised you.
One way it can sound
“Thank you for telling us what you need to do your best work. I want to get this right, so let me connect with HR on the details and come back to you by Friday. Is there anything about your first week specifically we should set up now?”
Say it to the mirror, a friend, or the wall. Nothing here records, transmits, or stores anything. That is a promise built into how this site works.
Keep these
- The interactive process is a cooperative conversation with a legal name, not a legal trap.
- Function, never diagnosis. Narrow documentation, through HR, only when genuinely needed.
- The employees who ask for what they need are showing you how they succeed. That is a gift, not a burden.