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We were inspired by a recent issue of Hebba Youssef’s ‘I Hate It Here’ newsletter from earlier this week. The gist of it went something like this:
Talk to any HR leader right now and you'll hear some version of the same thing: the job has gotten too big.
That's not a complaint. It's a diagnosis. The scope of what HR owns has expanded dramatically — hiring, firing, benefits, compliance, culture, DEI, manager development, workforce planning, AI strategy, change management, and whatever urgent thing just dropped in the Slack channel. The scope keeps growing. The headcount rarely does.
Meanwhile, the pace of organizational change has become relentless. Reorgs, layoffs, pivots — HR finds out first, carries it alone for a while, designs the plan, sits in the hard conversations, and then is expected to emerge fine on the other side. And underneath it all, every function has a competing claim on HR's time: finance, legal, ops, communications, managers, employees — simultaneously, urgently.
We think about this a lot. Because tucked inside that impossible scope is one of the most legally consequential, emotionally sensitive, and administratively brutal processes a people team manages: workplace accommodations.
An employee reaches out. They need an accommodation — modified schedule, ergonomic equipment, remote work, something. From that moment, the HR team is legally required to engage in an “interactive process” — a documented, good-faith dialogue to find a reasonable accommodation. The ADA requires it. Doing it badly creates real legal exposure.
Here's what “doing it” looks like at most companies:
This is not a niche problem, nor is it intentional. But it's happening at companies of every size, in every industry. And it sits squarely at the intersection of everything making the HR job feel impossible:
Scope: Accommodations require HR to be simultaneously fluent in disability law, medical documentation, confidentiality requirements, and manager communication — often with zero dedicated headcount.
Pace: Requests don't come on a schedule. They arrive in the middle of everything else, often involving employees who are already struggling, with legal timelines ticking in the background.
Interconnectedness: Every case pulls in HR, legal, the manager, sometimes facilities, sometimes IT — while HR is the one thread holding it all together and keeping it confidential.
Software alone doesn't fix broken processes. A new tool that digitizes a bad workflow is still a bad workflow. What helps is a system designed around how this work should be done. For accommodations, that means:
Intake that protects everyone. Most accommodation forms ask the wrong questions — diagnoses and medical histories that shouldn't be in a case manager's hands. The right question is "how do your limitations affect your ability to do your job, and what would help?" That's what matters legally. Intake structured around function and work impact protects both the employee and the employer.
Medical verification that isn't a guessing game. HR professionals are not clinical reviewers. Asking them to evaluate whether a doctor's note is sufficient — for FMLA, ADA, state leave — creates liability. What should happen instead: documentation goes to qualified reviewers who produce a non-confidential summary for the case manager. They get what they need. The PHI stays protected. The decision is defensible.
A case file that actually exists. If the interactive process lives in email, it doesn't exist in any way that helps when legal comes asking. Everything needs to be in one place — time-stamped, organized, searchable.
Automated communication HR doesn't have to babysit. Status updates, documentation requests, follow-up surveys — these can run automatically. The case manager stays in the loop without manually touching every notification.
Here's what the process looks like when it runs through Disclo:
Some accommodation cases are genuinely hard — medically complex, legally fraught, emotionally charged. HR will always own those conversations, and that's right. What Disclo removes is the administrative weight around them: the email archaeology, the documentation chaos, the manual status updates, the guesswork on whether a doctor's note is sufficient.
"I used to dread every accommodation request because I knew it was going to create weeks of work I couldn't track. Now I can see everything, the employee knows what's happening, and when it's done — it's actually done."
– Actual Disclo customer
The scope, pace, and interconnectedness of the HR job are structural problems that require structural solutions — not platitudes about doing more with less.
But accommodations? That's one process that is measurably harder than it needs to be. It's one of the highest-stakes things HR manages — legally, relationally, reputationally — and one of the most under-resourced. The gap between how it's usually done and how it should be done is real, and it's closeable.
Hebba is right: Sometimes this job can feel like way tooooo much. Disclo won’t take accommodations off your responsibility list, but we’ll handle the workflow — the most time-consuming and detail-critical part — so that you can focus on the work that actually requires you.
The job of HR has never been bigger, faster, or more tangled up in every corner of the business. Here's one place where the burden can actually get smaller.
We were inspired by a recent issue of Hebba Youssef’s ‘I Hate It Here’ newsletter from earlier this week. The gist of it went something like this:
Talk to any HR leader right now and you'll hear some version of the same thing: the job has gotten too big.
That's not a complaint. It's a diagnosis. The scope of what HR owns has expanded dramatically — hiring, firing, benefits, compliance, culture, DEI, manager development, workforce planning, AI strategy, change management, and whatever urgent thing just dropped in the Slack channel. The scope keeps growing. The headcount rarely does.
Meanwhile, the pace of organizational change has become relentless. Reorgs, layoffs, pivots — HR finds out first, carries it alone for a while, designs the plan, sits in the hard conversations, and then is expected to emerge fine on the other side. And underneath it all, every function has a competing claim on HR's time: finance, legal, ops, communications, managers, employees — simultaneously, urgently.
We think about this a lot. Because tucked inside that impossible scope is one of the most legally consequential, emotionally sensitive, and administratively brutal processes a people team manages: workplace accommodations.
An employee reaches out. They need an accommodation — modified schedule, ergonomic equipment, remote work, something. From that moment, the HR team is legally required to engage in an “interactive process” — a documented, good-faith dialogue to find a reasonable accommodation. The ADA requires it. Doing it badly creates real legal exposure.
Here's what “doing it” looks like at most companies:
This is not a niche problem, nor is it intentional. But it's happening at companies of every size, in every industry. And it sits squarely at the intersection of everything making the HR job feel impossible:
Scope: Accommodations require HR to be simultaneously fluent in disability law, medical documentation, confidentiality requirements, and manager communication — often with zero dedicated headcount.
Pace: Requests don't come on a schedule. They arrive in the middle of everything else, often involving employees who are already struggling, with legal timelines ticking in the background.
Interconnectedness: Every case pulls in HR, legal, the manager, sometimes facilities, sometimes IT — while HR is the one thread holding it all together and keeping it confidential.
Software alone doesn't fix broken processes. A new tool that digitizes a bad workflow is still a bad workflow. What helps is a system designed around how this work should be done. For accommodations, that means:
Intake that protects everyone. Most accommodation forms ask the wrong questions — diagnoses and medical histories that shouldn't be in a case manager's hands. The right question is "how do your limitations affect your ability to do your job, and what would help?" That's what matters legally. Intake structured around function and work impact protects both the employee and the employer.
Medical verification that isn't a guessing game. HR professionals are not clinical reviewers. Asking them to evaluate whether a doctor's note is sufficient — for FMLA, ADA, state leave — creates liability. What should happen instead: documentation goes to qualified reviewers who produce a non-confidential summary for the case manager. They get what they need. The PHI stays protected. The decision is defensible.
A case file that actually exists. If the interactive process lives in email, it doesn't exist in any way that helps when legal comes asking. Everything needs to be in one place — time-stamped, organized, searchable.
Automated communication HR doesn't have to babysit. Status updates, documentation requests, follow-up surveys — these can run automatically. The case manager stays in the loop without manually touching every notification.
Here's what the process looks like when it runs through Disclo:
Some accommodation cases are genuinely hard — medically complex, legally fraught, emotionally charged. HR will always own those conversations, and that's right. What Disclo removes is the administrative weight around them: the email archaeology, the documentation chaos, the manual status updates, the guesswork on whether a doctor's note is sufficient.
"I used to dread every accommodation request because I knew it was going to create weeks of work I couldn't track. Now I can see everything, the employee knows what's happening, and when it's done — it's actually done."
– Actual Disclo customer
The scope, pace, and interconnectedness of the HR job are structural problems that require structural solutions — not platitudes about doing more with less.
But accommodations? That's one process that is measurably harder than it needs to be. It's one of the highest-stakes things HR manages — legally, relationally, reputationally — and one of the most under-resourced. The gap between how it's usually done and how it should be done is real, and it's closeable.
Hebba is right: Sometimes this job can feel like way tooooo much. Disclo won’t take accommodations off your responsibility list, but we’ll handle the workflow — the most time-consuming and detail-critical part — so that you can focus on the work that actually requires you.
