Questioning What’s ‘Reasonable’: Work Design and Disability
By Ky Teasdale.
The Equality Act 2010 requires 'reasonable' adjustments for workers with disabilities. The phrasing asks what the employer can reasonably do, not what the employee reasonably needs to function. As a legal test, this is sensible. As a moral one, it makes companies reactive, anticipating workforce needs only to conform to a legal framework. The consequences are visible in employment outcomes.
The cost shows in the disability employment gap: 47.2% of disabled people are out of work, against 17.5% of non-disabled peers (DWP, 2026). Before assuming this is about will or limitation, disabled people out of work are a third more likely to want a job than non-disabled people in the same position, and move into work at less than a quarter of the rate (DWP, 2026). Disability discrimination claims appear in 16% of Acas conciliations, up from 9% in 2022-23 (Kelleher, 2025). These figures reflect barriers beyond motivation alone. Having worked with this population, trust that it's an unquestionably diverse and untapped resource waiting for industry to make space.
What the 2010 Wording Assumed
In 2010, the adjustment process was hardware and process based. Workstation assessments, ergonomic equipment, screen readers, phased returns, occupational health referrals, and the EAP link. The subtext was firm: the job is fixed, the person is adjustable.
This reflected the broader employment logic at the time. Job descriptions were largely fixed, and flexible working was treated as an exception. Reasonable adjustment therefore meant adapting the individual to fit pre-defined roles, rather than adapting roles to fit individuals.
The Assumption for Employees With Disabilities
In the last 16 years, the adjustment concept has barely moved. For disabled employees, the operational default remains a fixed job description with accommodations grafted onto it, despite documented friction.
The TUC found 82% of disabled workers waited four months to over a year for adjustments, with 55% rejected outright or partially (Trades Union Congress, 2025). A DWP audit of Access to Work cases found documented employer-employee adjustment discussions in only 10% of files reviewed (House of Lords Public Services Committee, 2024). Together these indicate a system where adjustments are delayed, partial, or absent.
The same organisation that would offer a non-disabled employee a stretch role, internal move, or redesigned remit to retain them defaults, for disabled employees in equivalent retention cases, to occupational health and an ergonomic chair.
This appears operationally in practice. I have been the coach paid out of the client's own pocket, because "we provided the bigger screens and reserved desk, but coaching is more of a development thing".
The register also assumes the constraint is stable. The fixed adjustment model assumes capacity does not fluctuate. Roughly one in three working-age disabled people in the UK has a condition where the primary constraint is energy rather than function (Hale et al., 2021); one in five working-age people overall report a work-limiting condition (DWP, 2026).
An employee whose week varies cannot be supported by an adjustment fixed at the level of an average week. The average does not exist for them. They pace, time annual leave around predictable bad patches, and volunteer for days they can deliver. The cognitive load of self-management runs alongside the cognitive load of the job (Hale et al., 2021).
No reasonable salary should expect a person to work to the point of sustained pain and exhaustion. Society pushes that expectation with apparent ease, and workplaces operate inside it. Changing what employers ask of disabled bodies is one of the few available routes to change the wider culture.
To the line manager, what the employee absorbs looks like inconsistent performance. To the employee, it looks like the cost of staying employed. Both are looking at the same thing and naming it differently.
What the Profession Has Built
The adjustment process starts from the wrong question. It asks how to adapt the person to perform a fixed role. A more productive question is how the role can be adapted to achieve the same outcome. Once the outcome becomes the fixed point, the design of the role itself becomes open to reconsideration.
Business Psychology has spent more than two decades developing frameworks for exactly this kind of role redesign.
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Job crafting describes how employees modify the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of their roles to better align with their strengths (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).
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The Flex Plus model from King's College London takes this a step further, identifying three practical dimensions through which work itself can be redesigned: worktime autonomy, location, and task redesign (Hale et al., 2025).
These are not disability interventions. They are evidence-based approaches to designing work around outcomes rather than assuming there is only one valid way to perform a role.
Approaching a Change
The upstream opportunity is in hiring. We start by letting go of schemes like Disability Confident, which operate as a tick-box, self-assessed vanity exercise aimed at bridging the bare minimum of accessibility in the hiring process, while leaving the structure of the role untouched. Existing infrastructure still leads with a fixed role and seeks the person to fit its mould. Only once you've got the job and signed the contract can flexible arrangements typically be entertained.
An approach that has been proposed is role-shadowing during the application process, allowing both sides to assess and create a fit that tessellates the peaks and lulls of the role. This shift from post-contract accommodation to pre-hire negotiation is not new; it was anticipated in the concept of ex-ante i-deals (Rousseau, 2001), which advocates bargaining personalised work arrangements at the point of hiring rather than relegating them to reactive, post-appointment adjustments.
If we step back and look at how current systems operate in practice, NHS Workforce Disability Equality Standard data shows disabled staff are 2.04 times as likely to enter formal capability proceedings as non-disabled colleagues (NHS England, 2024). This is not evidence of reduced capability; it reflects how variability in performance is currently absorbed by formal HR mechanisms rather than accommodated in design.
The same issue extends into how work is managed more broadly. Job crafting can be built into assessment design, performance management, organisational inclusion evaluation, and job design as the default starting point. In current systems, performance management frameworks especially tend to treat variance as a defect in the person rather than a feature of the work.
The issue is not a lack of models but the refusal to treat them as the default in hiring and job design for disabled people.
Conclusion
The problem was never people and it was never reasonable adjustments. It is a problem of design.
Work is treated as fixed, and disabled people are required to adapt to it. Any resulting ‘reduced capacity’ is a function of misalignment between fixed job design and variable human performance, not a limitation located in the individual. The system turns variability in how work is done into friction, then formalises that friction through process.
This is not a disability issue. It is a design failure.
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Author Note: Limitations
This analysis is constrained by its reliance on UK-based evidence from 2023–2026, meaning its application to jurisdictions with differing legal frameworks remains speculative. Furthermore, the synthesis of job crafting and pre-hire shadowing as a selection tool is a conceptual proposal; while grounded in established theory, it lacks longitudinal empirical validation as a direct remedy for the disability employment gap. Finally, this model assumes a level of role discretion and managerial maturity that may not be present in highly standardised or safety-critical operational environments.
About the Author
Ky Teasdale is a Certified Business Psychologist (MSc), executive coach, and coaching supervisor, and serves as Corporate Member Concierge for The Association for Business Psychology. His work sits at the intersection of practice, judgement, and access, shaped by years working with and advising leaders, coaches, and organisations on real career and decision-making challenges. Alongside applied work, Ky completed his MSc examining how skills are interpreted and evaluated in early-career recruitment, with particular attention to how socioeconomic background shapes interpretation within selection decisions.
References
DWP. (2026). The employment of disabled people 2025. Department for Work and Pensions. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/the-employment-of-disabled-people-2025/the-employment-of-disabled-people-2025
Hale, C., Hoque, K., & Geiger, B. B. (2025). Realising the potential of Flex Plus working for disability inclusion (CSMH Report No. R012). Economic and Social Research Council.
Hale, C., Kate Hardy, & Jo Ingold. (2021). I already have a job: Energy Limiting Chronic Illness, Social Inclusion, Employment and Social Security. Chronic Illness Inclusion / Leeds University Business School. https://chronicillnessinclusion.org.uk/our-work/elci-benefits-and-employment/
House of Lords Public Services Committee. (2024). Think Work First: The transition from education to work for young disabled people (HL Paper 12). UK Parliament.
Kelleher, J. (2025). Disability discrimination update: Why tribunals are scrutinising employers more closely. People Management. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1949911/disability-discrimination-update-why-tribunals-scrutinising-employers-closely
NHS England. (2024). NHS Workforce Disability Equality Standard 2024 data analysis report. NHS England. https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-workforce-disability-equality-standard-2024/
Rousseau, D. M. (2001). The idiosyncratic deal: Flexibility versus fairness? Organizational Dynamics, 29(4), 260–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0090-2616(01)00032-8
Trades Union Congress. (2025). Disability pay gap means disabled workers effectively stop earning from today. https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/tuc-disability-pay-gap-means-disabled-workers-effectively-stop-earning-today
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work. The Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/259118