Responding to Work-From-Home Accommodation Requests In a Post-COVID Environment
This blog post was first published by the Illinois State Bar Association in September 2025 in various of its ISBA Section Newsletters, including on Labor & Employment Law.
Requesting to work from home (WFH) as an accommodation under the ADA is not new. Employees have made similar requests under different names like “telework” for decades. What is new is the aftermath of COVID. For many companies, the vast majority of staff worked from home for up to a year or longer, and by many accounts things seemed to basically “work,” though more recently many businesses have reimposed more in-person requirements.
So, how have the period of fully remote work during COVID and subsequent common use of hybrid policies (e.g., 2-3 days in person, 2-3 days remote) affected ADA accommodation requests? When faced with a WFH request as an accommodation (either fully remote or more remote than is permitted under a hybrid policy), is it now harder for employers to argue that in-person work is an essential job function? As the case law continues to develop, the answer appears to be yes – it is harder to make these arguments, and companies should expect more scrutiny and fact-intensive inquiries, especially at the summary judgment stage.
The basic legal framework.
Under the ADA, when an employee requests an accommodation for a disability, the employer and employee are required to engage in the “interactive process” to determine whether they can agree on a reasonable accommodation that makes it (1) possible for the employee to perform the essential functions of the job (with the accommodation), and yet (2) does not cause the employer an undue hardship.[1] If the employee cannot perform the essential job functions with or without a reasonable accommodation, they are not a “qualified individual” entitled to protection under the ADA. And if a requested accommodation causes the employer an undue hardship, it need not be granted.[2] This article looks at how a few recent courts have treated employer claims that in-person work is still an essential job function, despite the prevalence of remote work during and after the pandemic.
The Rise of WFH, Accelerated by COVID
Courts have long held that workplace attendance is a fundamental requirement of most jobs. As the Seventh Circuit explained in Smithson v. Austin: “We have repeatedly held that an employer may require attendance at the job site as an essential requirement of the job.”[3]
But then COVID hit, and tens of thousands of companies sent the vast majority of their staff home for an extended period. Zoom became a household name. In many cases, corporate financials were seemingly unaffected by the switch to remote work, and companies praised the ability of staff to pivot. The talk was that things were never going back to the days of 5 days/week of in-person work, and by some accounts, less than half of US companies now require full-time, in-person work.
More recently, many companies have called workers back onsite closer to 5 days per week, citing loss of team culture, productivity, and more. In so doing, corporate leaders are essentially saying that fully or mostly remote arrangements are not working. But have things been “not working” enough to reestablish or reinforce the notion that in-person work is an essential job function? How have courts addressed the issue?
Earlier this year, the Eastern District of Wisconsin took up the essential job function issue in Bridges v. City of Milwaukee.[4] There, a manager requested to work exclusively from home and/or in a private on-site office (with all work being handled exclusively by phone/video). Eventually, her supervisor discontinued the requested accommodation, finding that her position required direct, front-office supervision of her subordinates.
In denying the employee’s partial summary judgment motion, the Court explained: “Courts have historically assumed that remote work is not a reasonable accommodation, but ‘technological advances have made working from home more feasible. Now, [d]etermining whether a specific job has essential functions that require in-person work has become much more of a case-specific inquiry.’”[5] Unresolved fact issues included whether the essential job functions required being physically present with the staff being managed (as opposed to virtual/phone interactions).[6] The Court also held that relying indefinitely on a co-supervisor to cover any in-person functions was not reasonable, and further cast doubt on the “it worked during COVID” argument: “the fact that many employees were able to work remotely temporarily when forced to do so by a global health crisis does not mean that those jobs do not have essential functions that require in-person work over the medium to long term.”[7]
At least one other court, however, has found COVID in-person workarounds to be potentially instructive for accommodation requests. In Donley v. McDonough, the Court described how during the pandemic, certain supervisors alternated in-person days, and at least one other supervisor managed employees solely by having meetings by phone and meeting in person every two months.[8] Summary judgment for the employer was therefore inappropriate, for “[t]he experiences of past and current workers further raise a genuine issue of material fact as to whether [the plaintiff] could perform the essential functions of her job without being present.”[9]
Similarly, in Cowell v. Ill. Dep’t of Hum. Servs., the Court denied an employer’s summary judgment motion, stating that while “[h]istorically, the Seventh Circuit has held that, in general, working at home is not a reasonable accommodation, . . . with the advent of technology and the Covid-19 pandemic which led to telework advancements, assessing whether in-person attendance is an essential function of a job requires context-specific analysis.”[10] The Court also found that although a manager testified in deposition that “coordinating patient care required staff to meet locally”, the plaintiff’s “job description did not mention coordinating patient care…”[11] Moreover, the Court found that the employer could not counter (for purposes of summary judgment at least) the employee’s testimony that she “routinely worked remotely from her encrypted cell phone,” and “primarily performed the essential job functions of coordinating with outside facilities via phone, email, and other “remote communication methods.”[12]
Takeaways and Practical Tips
While the case law will doubtless continue to evolve on this issue, it does appear that summary judgment in WFH accommodation cases will be harder for employers to obtain in a post-COVID environment. Establishing a clean record of undisputed material facts is always difficult; after 5 years of fully remote and hybrid working models, it may be even more so on the issue of whether in-person work is an essential job function.
The above cases also warrant reemphasizing some of the tried-and-true best practices in this space:
Ensure that written policies on WFH are clearly articulated and consistently applied. There is a natural tendency to leave things flexible or be more lax with certain staff (e.g., star performers), but if these inconsistencies surface in discovery, they may forestall any chance for an employer to prevail at summary judgment (or trial).
Think about how to document and later prove what actually are the essential job functions of a role. Review job descriptions. Including in-person attendance in a job description is not itself dispositive, but both courts and the EEOC consider it as probative evidence alongside other factors.[13]
Follow the interactive process. When an employer denies the accommodation requested without engaging with the employee, the employer risks losing on the issue even if they would have ultimately been correct that the accommodation was not reasonable.
The above steps require careful, proactive work on the front end, often months to years before an issue surfaces. Sometimes a specific employee situation even warrants slowing down or reversing a planned adverse employment action – rarely something HR or supervisors like to hear. But the alternatives (years of litigation, potential adverse verdicts) can be far worse, and it is worth investing the effort on the front end.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/publications/ada-your-responsibilities-employer
[2] Employers can, of course, also make undue hardship arguments when faced with WFH accommodation requests. That is beyond the scope of this article, but for opinions addressing the issue in the somewhat analogous Title VII religious accommodation context, see: Jackson v. NY State Off. of Mental Health, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 79748 (E.D. N.Y. 2024); Langer v. Hartland Bd. of Educ., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 167136 (D. Conn. 2023) (denying motion to dismiss in Title VII religious accommodations case in part because teacher pointed out she successfully taught fully remotely during the pandemic); and West v. Legacy Health, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 171099, at *11-12 (D. Ore. 2024).
[3] Smithson v. Austin, 86 F. 4th 815, 821 (7th Cir. 2023)( (citing several other cases).
[4] Bridges v. City of Milwaukee, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24216, at *16-17 (E.D. Wis. 2025) (quoting Kinney v. St. Mary’s Health, Inc., 76 F. 4th 635, 644 (7th Cir. 2023)).
[5] Id. (quoting Kinney v. St. Mary’s Health, Inc., 76 F. 4th 635, 644 (7th Cir. 2023)).
[6] Id.
[7] Id. at *13-16. This is also consistent with the established principle that employers are not required to hire additional staff as a reasonable accommodation. See Leibas v. Dart, 108 F.4th 1021, 1026 (7th Cir. 2024) (citing Sieberns v. Wal–Mart Stores, Inc., 125 F.3d 1019, 1022 (7th Cir. 1997)).
[8] Donley v. McDonough, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 85903, at *18 (N.D. Ill. 2024)
[9] Id.
[10] Cowell v. Ill. Dep’t of Hum. Servs., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24472 (S.D. Ill. 2024).
[11] Id. at *36-37.
[12] Id.
[13] 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(n)(3); Cowell, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS at *36-37.