Managing reasonable adjustments: the complete guide
Ryan Hoare · Founder, TryMosaic · Last reviewed
This hub is part of our complete guide to reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010.
See also: Reasonable adjustments tribunal cases: what they turn on.
Adjustments are a process, not a pile of favours
Most organisations do not fail at adjustments because they refuse them. They fail because nothing holds the process together. A request arrives in one manager's inbox and an agreement forms in a meeting nobody minuted. The chair gets ordered, or does not. The manager changes, and the arrangement quietly evaporates. Nobody can say how many adjustments exist across the organisation, how long requests take, or what was refused and why. Each individual decision may have been made in good faith; the organisation as a whole cannot show any of it.
Treating adjustments as infrastructure means accepting that the duty under the Equality Act 2010 is operational, not just legal. The law says what must happen; infrastructure is how it happens the same way every time, for everyone, regardless of which manager they report to. That is the difference between an employer that supports the people who ask loudest and an employer that supports the people who need it.
The lifecycle every adjustment should follow
A workable adjustments process has five stages, and every one of them produces a record as a by-product. First, capture: the request in the employee's own words, through a route that does not depend on the manager relationship. Second, discussion: what the barrier is, what would remove it, and what advice is worth getting, from occupational health or Access to Work. Third, decision: what is agreed, what is refused and why, with reasons written at the time. Fourth, implementation: a named owner, a due date, and something that fires when the date passes, because an agreed adjustment that never materialises is worse than a refusal. Fifth, review: a date on which someone checks the adjustment still works, because roles, teams and conditions all change.
None of this requires software. All of it requires structure. The honest question, worked through in the guides below, is at what size and complexity a spreadsheet stops being structure and starts being risk: spreadsheets do not chase owners, do not follow employees across teams, do not protect sensitive health information well, and do not produce an audit trail anyone can rely on.
Why the record is the point
The same record that makes the process run day to day is also the evidence that the duty was met. If a dispute ever reaches an employment tribunal, the case will turn on documents made at the time: the request, the meeting notes, the reasoned decision, the proof of implementation. Employers who run adjustments as infrastructure produce that record without doing anything extra; employers who run adjustments through inboxes reconstruct it afterwards, badly. Our tribunal cases hub covers what that looks like from the other end, and it is the best argument for getting the process right before anyone needs it.
What is in this guide
The guides below cover the commercial and operational side of adjustments end to end. Three cover choosing tooling: what adjustment management software should do, how to evaluate reasonable adjustments software before you buy, and the honest build, buy or configure comparison for workplace adjustments software. Two cover running the process: tracking adjustments through their lifecycle, and recording them so the record stands up. Three give you working documents: a full adjustments policy template, a workplace adjustment plan template, and an adjustment passport template, each usable as-is and each honest about where a static document stops and a system starts.
Start with the page closest to your current problem. If requests are scattered and nothing is tracked, start with tracking. If you are being asked to prove the process works, start with recording. If you are comparing vendors, start with the evaluation guide, and then put the same questions to us.
This guide is general guidance, not legal advice. For advice on your specific obligations, speak to an employment law specialist or ACAS.
Every guide in this topic
If you are evaluating vendors, book a short TryMosaic demo and put the questions above to us first.
References
Frequently asked questions
What does managing reasonable adjustments involve?
Five stages: capturing requests through a reliable route, discussing the barrier and options, deciding with recorded reasons, implementing with a named owner and due date, and reviewing on a date. Each stage should produce its record as a by-product of doing the work.
Do we need software to manage adjustments?
Not at every size. Structure is what matters: owners, dates, reasons, and a record that survives manager changes. The practical question is when spreadsheets and inboxes stop providing that structure, which the software evaluation guides in this cluster work through honestly.
What goes wrong most often in adjustments processes?
Four failures recur: refusals without recorded reasons, agreed adjustments never implemented, adjustments lost when managers change, and delays that function as refusals. All four are process gaps rather than legal judgements, and all four are preventable with structure.
Why does record-keeping matter so much?
Because the record is both the process and the proof. Day to day it keeps implementation moving; if a dispute reaches a tribunal, the contemporaneous record of requests, decisions and implementation is what the case turns on. A process that produces the record automatically protects everyone.
Where should we start?
With the guide closest to your current pain: tracking if requests are scattered, recording if you need to evidence the process, the evaluation guide if you are comparing vendors, or the policy and template pages if you are formalising the process for the first time.
Published · Last updated · This guide will next be reviewed by .
TryMosaic is the system of record for workplace adjustments under the Equality Act 2010.