Reasonable adjustments by role

Start from the barrier, not the job title

Adjustment guidance written for a desk job does not help much on a ward, a forklift or a building site. The guides in this cluster take the opposite approach: for each kind of work, they start from the barriers the work actually creates, then walk through the adjustments that address them and the constraints that actually apply.

The gap this cluster fills is a practical one. A warehouse supervisor who receives an adjustment request has usually never seen one before, has no list of what tends to work on a pick floor, and is quietly worried about safety rules, fairness complaints and peak season. A ward manager has the same conversation with different constraints; so does a site foreman, a restaurant GM and a transport planner. Generic guidance tells all of them to be supportive and consider each case on its merits, which is true and useless. What each actually needs is a short list of the adjustments that suit their kind of work, the constraints that really do apply, and the trap their sector most often falls into. That is what each role guide provides.

Two principles run through all of them. First, the legal duty does not switch off in safety-critical or customer-facing work; safety and service shape how you adjust, not whether. Second, in higher-turnover sectors, recording adjustments properly matters more, because every handover is a chance for support to vanish.

The role guides

• Warehouse and logistics: rotas, pick rates, mechanical aids and the physical environment.
• Retail: shift predictability, seating, breaks and the shop floor.
• Driving roles: working within licensing and medical fitness rules, and what redeployment means when driving stops being possible.
• Clinical and NHS: adjusting within safe staffing, rotas, on-call and supervision.
• Hospitality: unpredictable rotas, sensory load and high turnover.
• Construction: adjusting inside site safety law, PPE and physical demands.

What managers in any role can do today

• Treat every request as the start of a structured process: capture it, discuss it, decide with reasons, implement with an owner, review on a date.
• Check what Access to Work can fund before assuming a cost is prohibitive; assessments, equipment and support workers are all in scope.
• Record what is agreed somewhere that survives your own departure. Informal arrangements are the first casualty of turnover.

Principles that hold across every role

Reading the role guides side by side, the same shape emerges everywhere. The barrier, not the diagnosis, is the working unit: two people with the same condition may need entirely different adjustments in the same job, and the same adjustment may serve entirely different conditions. The constraint, whether that is patient safety, licensing law, site regulation or a service rush, defines how you adjust rather than whether you do. And the adjustment that is not recorded does not really exist, because it cannot survive the next rota change, manager move or contractor handover.

The role guides also share a bias worth naming: they favour adjustments to how work is arranged over purchases. Rota predictability, task reallocation, written routines, pre-agreed breaks and clear communication channels appear in every guide because they address the most common barriers at near-zero cost. Equipment matters, and Access to Work can fund a surprising amount of it, but in most roles the arrangement changes do the heavy lifting.

Finally, none of these guides treats redeployment as failure. Where a specific role genuinely cannot be adjusted around a barrier, considering suitable alternative work is part of the duty, and sector experience transfers better than organisations expect. The pattern to avoid is the binary one, where a role either works exactly as designed or the person exits. Almost everything useful happens between those poles.

This guide is general guidance, not legal advice. For advice on your specific obligations, speak to an employment law specialist or ACAS.