EEOC guidance clarifies when telework is a disability accommodation

monday.com says most teams spend three days a week together in the office, but a request to work from home can be more than a scheduling preference. Remote work can be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA when an employee cannot successfully perform the job on-site and the role, or part of it, can be done remotely without undue hardship.

What the EEOC says telework really is

The EEOC’s “Work at Home/Telework as a Reasonable Accommodation” guidance dates to 2003 and still sits on the agency’s disability-reasonable-accommodation resources page. The core rule is direct: an employer does not have to offer telework to every worker, but if it does offer telework, employees with disabilities must have an equal opportunity to participate. Employers may need to waive eligibility rules or modify telework policies when those rules block a worker who needs remote work and can do the job that way.

A hybrid policy is a business policy; an accommodation request is a legal question. Managers who treat them as the same thing risk turning a flexible scheduling decision into a disability compliance problem.

Where companies slip up

Employers are expected to respond expeditiously to accommodation requests, engage in a flexible, interactive discussion with the employee, and assess the request case by case for undue hardship. That means telework cannot be handled by a blanket “yes” or “no,” or by a copied standard that ignores the actual job duties. It also means the paper trail matters, because the decision should reflect the specific role, the specific limitation, and the specific remote arrangement being considered.

For managers, the easiest mistakes tend to come in four places:

• treating a telework request as a reward instead of a disability accommodation
• relying on eligibility rules without checking whether an exception is needed
• assuming one team’s in-office cadence fits every role
• skipping the interactive process and deciding too quickly

This is especially important in roles where most of the work already happens in docs, tickets, calls, and workflow tools. In those settings, the question is whether the employee can perform essential functions without being forced on-site.

Why monday.com's own model makes the issue sharper

monday.com says it offers a hybrid work model, with flexibility to work wherever employees do their best work the rest of the time. That makes the gap between ordinary hybrid scheduling and a disability-related accommodation especially important for people managers. The company can set a general rhythm for teamwork and still have a separate obligation to evaluate telework when a disability requires it.

The company’s accessibility statement, last updated March 20, 2026, says “Web Accessibility is at the core of our company values.” It also says monday.com is working toward WCAG 2.1 AA compliance and compatibility with assistive technologies including JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, ZoomText, and Braille displays.

Why the timing matters now

The EEOC’s February 11, 2026 federal-sector FAQs on telework accommodations under the Rehabilitation Act have given the topic fresh visibility, and rising return-to-office mandates have pushed more workers to request telework accommodations under the ADA. Private employers often look to the same standards when they evaluate whether remote work can be a reasonable accommodation. That makes the EEOC’s older telework guidance useful again, especially for companies that had begun to treat hybrid work as settled territory.

monday.com’s scale adds another layer. The company filed its 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F on March 13, 2026, and Revelio Labs estimates monday.com had 3,079 employees in 2025, up from 2,363 in 2024 and 1,833 in 2023. As headcount grows, accommodation decisions have to stay consistent across teams, geographies, and managers who may interpret hybrid rules differently.

What workers and managers should carry forward

For employees, the key is to frame telework as a role-specific accommodation request when a disability makes on-site work impractical. The request should connect the need to the job functions you can still perform remotely, because the EEOC’s standard turns on whether the role can be done off-site without undue hardship. For managers, the lesson is to slow down enough to separate the business schedule from the legal analysis.

The safest internal habit is simple: document the request, discuss it promptly, evaluate the essential functions, and decide whether an exception or policy change is needed.