Employers are moving full steam ahead with return-to-office (RTO) strategies, and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has become a growing consideration in how those policies are implemented.
But for many employers, return-to-office initiatives were not implemented with ADA accommodation obligations in mind, and enforcing those policies may pressure-test their ability to manage the interactive process effectively.
RTO policies and ADA obligations
As of 2026, only 6% of employees say they prefer fully in-person work over hybrid or remote arrangements.1 But while remote and hybrid work became the overwhelming preference for employees after the pandemic, some organizational leaders concluded that it jeopardized productivity, collaboration, and workplace culture.
Employers who see in-person work as essential to their organization’s survival understand that a widespread shift back to in-person work will not occur organically. Leaders at these organizations have arrived at formal mandates as the only realistic way to restore regular in-person attendance. Sixty-one percent of U.S. organizations now have some form of RTO policy in place, and of those, nearly half say that they intend to discipline or terminate employees who fail to comply.2
Against that backdrop, the ADA interactive process has become an increasing point of tension. Over half (60%) of HR managers say accommodation requests have gone up for the second year in a row.3
Accommodation requests around RTO policies often cite the effects of commuting, scheduling demands, or workstation conditions on an employee’s ability to perform essential job functions because of a disability. HR leaders also report that mental health-related conditions account for a growing share of RTO accommodation requests.3
Where employers can get off track
Accommodation issues often arise not from the requests themselves, but from how the process is handled.
RTO accommodation requests often begin informally, as conversations with managers. Without clear intake pathways, those conversations may be handled inconsistently or may never reach HR at all. Once that happens, similar situations can lead to very different outcomes depending on the department.
Documentation may also be overlooked until it becomes a problem. Each request, response, and decision must be recorded, along with the reasoning behind it. Job descriptions also carry weight; if in-person attendance is truly essential, that expectation should already be reflected in the stated duties of the role, not added after the fact.
Compliance risk compounds when denials are issued without a demonstrable effort to explore reasonable accommodations. Under the ADA, the EEOC may closely scrutinize whether the interactive process was handled appropriately before a request was denied.
Employers should avoid treating accommodation requests as all-or-nothing decisions. In many cases, there is more room for flexibility than initially assumed. Some resolutions are as simple as adjusted schedules or modifications to the workspace.
The burden of proof in the interactive process
A compliant denial of an ADA accommodation request depends on an employer’s ability to demonstrate undue hardship if a specific employee cannot perform full-time, in-person work.
That standard is defined and fairly narrow, and undue hardship can’t function as a catchall justification for enforcing RTO policies. High-level concerns about productivity or workplace functioning, on their own, are unlikely to meet that threshold.
Claims of undue hardship need to be supported with concrete evidence showing how allowing a particular employee to continue working remotely would compromise operations, administrative workload, safety, costs, or the employee’s ability to perform essential functions.
