Reasonable Adjustments for Return to Office and Hybrid Working
Return-to-office mandates are colliding with something most policies never planned for: for many disabled and neurodivergent employees, working from home was never a perk. It was the adjustment that made the job possible.
Under the Equality Act 2010, UK employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments where a workplace practice puts a disabled employee at a substantial disadvantage. A blanket "everyone back, no exceptions" policy is exactly the kind of practice that duty applies to.
Why blanket RTO policies create risk
- Homeworking or hybrid working can itself be a reasonable adjustment: tribunals have made clear that requests must be considered individually, not dismissed by policy.
- Refusing an adjustment request without a documented, case-by-case assessment is one of the most common routes to a failure-to-adjust claim.
- Decisions scattered across email threads and one-off manager conversations leave no record of what was considered, agreed, or refused, and no defence if challenged.
What a fair return-to-office process looks like
The employers getting this right aren’t abandoning office attendance. They’re handling exceptions properly: a clear route for employees to request an adjustment to the policy, a structured conversation about what’s reasonable, and a record of the outcome.
Common adjustments in a return-to-office context include continued or partial homeworking, adjusted attendance days, quieter desk locations, reserved parking, staggered start times to avoid rush-hour travel, and phased returns after absence.
How TryMosaic helps
TryMosaic gives you one workflow for every adjustment request your RTO policy generates. Employees document what they need and why, managers respond and agree what will be actioned, and HR gets an audit-ready record of every decision, including the ones where the answer was no, and the reasoning behind it.
That means consistent decisions across teams, no requests lost in inboxes, and evidence that your policy was applied fairly if a decision is ever challenged.