How To Put Reasonable Adjustments In Place (and choose the right ones)

How to put reasonable adjustments in place (and choose the right ones)

When an employee discloses ADHD, autism or dyslexia and asks for reasonable adjustments, the instinct in most HR teams is to ask one question straight back. What would help? It feels like the responsible thing to do. It usually is not the place to start.

Because getting reasonable adjustments right involves two separate jobs and most organisations only ever do half of one. The first is working out which adjustments will genuinely help. The second is making sure those adjustments are actually put in place and stay in place when work and people change. Skip the first and you fit the wrong adjustments. Skip the second and you agree the right ones then never deliver them.

This article sets out both halves and how they fit together. One is a method for finding the right adjustments. The other is a process for putting them in place in a reasonable timescale. You need both. As awareness of what good employers do keeps growing, doing only half is far more likely to be challenged than it ever used to be.

Why is a slow response to adjustments such a risk now?

Awareness has changed. Employees, managers and the public understand far more about what employers are supposed to do than they did even a few years ago. Understanding of neurodiversity has grown enormously too. A slow or defensive response to an adjustment request or knowledge of a disability is recognised for what it is much more readily than it once was.

The duty itself is not new. It has sat in the Equality Act 2010 for years and it is a duty that applies right from the recruitment stage. What has changed is the level of scrutiny. In May 2026 a cross-party Work and Pensions Committee proposed a mandatory two-week deadline for employers to respond to adjustment requests, after its Disability at Work report heard that 82 per cent of requests took more than four months to put in place and some took over a year.

Four months is a very long time to a person who is struggling. Every day someone is without the adjustments they need is a day they spend in an environment full of barriers that can feel hostile. I know employers who routinely take that long. In my experience they don’t delay on purpose, it starts with not knowing what to do, months spending figuring it out and then once adjustments are planned they bounce around departments for input. The employee is living it every day in the meantime, they’re struggling with the barriers, they know they’re not performing at their best.

A hostile environment is not only a figure of speech here. Under the Equality Act, harassment includes conduct that has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment related to a person’s disability. Tribunals have found that an employer created an environment which violated an employee’s dignity even where there was no intention to do so. So a drawn-out failure to act does not only risk a claim for failure to make reasonable adjustments. Depending on how it is handled and how long it runs, it can feed claims of discrimination arising from disability or harassment too. It also wears the person down while it drags on, which is the part the law is least able to put right afterwards. I’ve seen the delays in adjustment implementation suddenly turn into managing long term absence.

The first thing most employers get wrong

Before any process, there is one habit we need to break. When someone tells you about a condition or asks for adjustments, do not simply hand the question back to them.

It is completely normal for someone not to be able to tell you what would help. They may have only just been diagnosed. They can feel the friction in their day without being able to identify what is causing it. And they often have no idea what is even available to ask for. So “what adjustments do you need”? feels like pressure rather than support.

That is often where the four-month delay begins. The employee cannot specify, the employer decides there is nothing concrete to act on and the request goes nowhere. The problem for employers, the duty to provide reasonable adjustments in a proactive one, the duty sits with the employer to find and make the adjustments. The answer is not to push harder for a wish list. It is to start with understanding. The most useful question I know is this one:

Help me understand how this affects your work, day to day

No judgement, no asking them to prove the diagnosis, no asking them to solve it for you. Just curiosity. Once you can see where the friction actually sits, you are in a position to do something about it.

We don’t have to rely just one the employee here, spot the patterns in their work, the patterns in feedback you’re giving or hearing for the team, this is where you’ll find the barriers.

How to find the right reasonable adjustments

This is the method I use in assessments and teach in training. Five steps, in order, which I call the SHAPE Method™: Spot, Hold, Assess, Plan, Evaluate.

• Spot the friction. Before you reach for any solution, map where the friction sits across the person’s working day. Resist prescribing from the diagnosis label alone. When someone tells me they have ADHD, I cannot leap to “do this and this”, I have to see where the day actually breaks down.
• Hold the conversation. This is where the curiosity question does its work. You are trying to understand how the condition affects them in practice, not to test whether they can evidence it.
• Assess the environment. Environment is the single biggest lever you have, particularly for neurodivergent people. Look at the physical space (open plan, the lighting, the noise, how close someone sits to a busy kitchen), the tools they use and the way their day is structured. One person needs to sit against a wall to focus. Another finds the same desk under-stimulating and unworkable. You can only judge this from the individual’s point of view and it is often where the quick wins appear.
• Plan the adjustments. There is rarely one big fix. More often there are many small things and it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the difference. So prioritise. Start with what will help most and fastest then sequence the rest over time so the person is supported through the change rather than buried by it.
• Evaluate and evolve. This is a cycle, not a one-off. Review what you put in because something that looked sensible on paper may not work in context. And remember that adjustments which work today can stop working tomorrow. A software update can throw someone for days. Life changes too, whether that is menopause symptoms on top of ADHD or having children changing what your old strategies can do. This tells you what will genuinely help. You can see the same thinking applied to one condition in this guide to adjustments that help employees with ADHD.

How to make sure the adjustments actually get put in place

Working out the right adjustments is a big part of the challenge and it’s a challenge HR departments are facing more and more often. A repeatable process for ensuring adjustments are put in place reduces the anxiety of staring at a blank page and not knowing where to start.

• Recognise when the duty starts. This is the point most employers miss. An employee does not have to make a formal request and there is no form they have to fill in. The duty arises as soon as you know or could reasonably be expected to know that someone is disabled and likely to be at a substantial disadvantage. If a manager has noticed someone struggling or a diagnosis has come up in passing, the clock is effectively running, request or no request. Record what you knew and when.
• Respond promptly and talk rather than rule. Do not treat it as a flat yes or no. As the Business Disability Forum has pointed out, adjustment decisions are too often “a straight yes or no rather than a discussion” about what else might remove the barrier. Most barriers have more than one possible answer.
• Decide and record it properly. If you are agreeing, write down what, who and by when. If you are saying no, document why: whether you accept the person is disabled, whether there is a substantial disadvantage, your reasons and what advice you took first.
• Give every adjustment an owner and a date. “We’ll sort the software” is where adjustments get lost. Name the person responsible and the deadline they are working to.
• Tell everyone who has to act. The line manager, IT, facilities, payroll if it affects hours. An adjustment that nobody operational knows about is not in place, however firmly it was agreed.
• Diarise the review. This is the point where the two halves of the work join up. None of this is glamorous. It is also the part that protects both your employee and your organisation.

How do the two halves fit together?

These are not two separate exercises. The first decides which adjustments to make. The second makes sure those adjustments happen and keep working. They meet at the planning and review stages because a plan is only worth anything if someone delivers it. A review is how you catch the adjustments that have slipped or stopped helping.

How a workplace needs assessment does both

A Workplace Needs Assessment is the structured version of finding the right adjustments. Someone independent maps the friction across the working day, assesses the environment properly and produces a prioritised set of recommendations, sequenced so they support the person rather than overwhelm them. You can see what happens during a workplace needs assessment if you want to know how that works in practice.

It also builds in the discipline that employers are being pushed towards. The recommendations are clear and documented, so everyone knows what was agreed and why. And I always build in a review at three months, so you can see what is working, change what is not and show that you acted. If the timing of a request is ever questioned, that record is exactly what protects you.

If you have an employee whose adjustments you want to get right and keep on record, a workplace needs assessment gives you both the right recommendations and a reliable way to put them in place. If you would rather talk a situation through first, you can book a free consultation.