An employee with a documented anxiety disorder asks to work from home full-time as a medical accommodation, and HR approves it. Three months later, her manager calls her remote performance inadequate and wants her on a performance improvement plan, or PIP. Host Rebecca Taylor brought the case, which HR Voices calls The Accommodating Conflict, to Sara Birmingham, Chief People Officer at Shutterstock. The request looks routine. Sara’s first observation was that three months is not long.
The scenario asks HR to settle four things: whether the PIP can proceed, whether the accommodation created performance barriers, whether the manager’s evaluation is objective, and how to keep the plan from being characterized as adverse action. Sara’s answers kept moving the spotlight from the employee to how she had been managed since the arrangement changed.
Why a PIP Request After an Accommodation Deserves a Closer Look
Most PIP requests start from trust. A manager says someone is not performing, and HR works the process with them. Sara drew a line at this one. With an accommodation approved three months earlier, she said, “blind trust on this one would be risky.”
Bias is the reason. Sara pointed to bias about people who work remotely and bias about people who have accommodations, and either can shape a manager’s read of performance. In SHRM research on remote work from 2021, 67 percent of supervisors of remote workers admitted to considering them more easily replaceable than onsite workers, and 42 percent said they sometimes forget about remote workers when assigning tasks.
The legal exposure sits on top of that. EEOC enforcement guidance on retaliation treats a request for reasonable accommodation as protected activity under the ADA. A PIP that reads as a response to the request can become a claim of retaliation for protected activity.
Sara then does homework the employee never sees. She checks whether the manager has put others on PIPs, how remote teammates are performing, and what engagement survey data says. Rebecca would add trends in exit interviews from people who resigned under that manager.
How Three Months Remote Becomes a Re-Onboarding
Rebecca asked whether three months is enough to judge. “Typically no,” Sara said, though it depends on the role. A sales role with no sales or a job with missed daily deadlines can be judged in that window. Where the work has no strict deadlines that can be measured objectively, three months is “probably not enough.”
Rebecca called the stretch “basically an onboarding period.” Sara added that the employee no longer sits next to someone she can ask, and gets less daily contact from her manager.
Sara’s example is a manager who complains the employee never got back to them. Before, the employee walked by the manager’s desk. That expectation no longer fits, which is why performance management for remote workers requires a different approach.
Federal guidance points the same way. EEOC technical assistance on performance standards holds an employee with a disability to the same production standards as anyone else in the job, so reasonable accommodation under the ADA never lowers the bar. It also tells employers not to assume that an unsatisfactory rating means the accommodation is not working. The standard stays; the conclusion has to be earned.
What Actually Works
Turn the Refusal Into a Coaching Plan
Sara does not tell the manager no. She sits them down and explains that HR has not seen enough, over enough time, to agree the employee is underperforming. Then the talk moves to what the manager expects, and to whether the employee is failing or only working differently from the team.
From there it is coaching, and Sara brings in the manager’s own manager so HR is not the only support. It has worked when the manager leaves saying, “I think I can do some things differently that might make this work.”
Hold the First Conversation With Both People in the Room
Rebecca described managers who say they cannot give feedback to an employee with anxiety for fear of making it worse. Sara has seen it numerous times. “They actually stop talking to the employee,” she said, usually with good intent.
The fix is a brokered conversation. Sara sits both down early to agree on the words for when something is not working: “this is how you bring it to me. This is how I bring it to you.” An AllVoices webinar argues that accommodations do not have to be complicated once managers have the language.
Measure the Saves Nobody Sees
Rebecca pointed out that no people analytics dashboard shows PIPs prevented by a good conversation. Sara’s count would be the employee relations situations resolved before they reached an investigation, a PIP, or a termination. She calls them saves, as in “how many saves did we have here.”
Earlier in her career, Sara tracked successful PIPs, the ones that did not end in termination. A few years ago her team also replaced the label underperforming with “approaching success.” Saves and successful PIPs belong beside turnover and engagement in the HR metrics a People team reports.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Rebecca asked whether HR should document a PIP request it turned down. Sara’s answer was “not formally,” though her team’s employee relations system would probably hold some record. Rebecca would log it, so the history exists if that manager asks again.
Managers are often unhappy with the outcome, Sara said, because they think HR is blocking them. Rebecca wants the plan itself to stop being weaponized, the subject of an HR Voices episode on PIPs that follow a complaint.
Rebecca noted that we built a review step for this at customers’ request, where a manager submits a PIP in one workflow for documenting PIPs and HR decides whether it moves ahead.
Frequently Asked Questions About PIPs After an Accommodation
Typically not. Sara says it depends on the role. Sales results, daily deadlines, and customer complaints can be judged in three months, but work without strict, objective measures usually needs longer.
Yes, when the evaluation is objective. EEOC technical assistance holds employees with disabilities to the same production standards as peers, but a plan that looks like punishment for the request invites a retaliation claim.
Start with the manager. Sara looks at the manager’s history with PIPs, how remote teammates are performing, the employee’s track record, engagement survey data, and whether the manager was trained to lead remotely.
Keep giving it. Sara has watched managers go silent for fear of making anxiety worse, which leaves the employee with nothing. She recommends an early conversation where you agree how each side raises concerns.
It is the rating label Sara’s team adopted a few years ago in place of underperforming. It names the two or three things to work on and promises help with them.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Sara Birmingham’s framing puts one test ahead of the PIP paperwork. HR has to ask whether the employee has gotten “a fair shot,” and a team that skips the question is, in her view, not doing its job properly.
That test also answers the assumption she most wants to challenge, that HR sides with the manager by default. Undoing it is hard work, she said. It starts with requests like this one, where the PIP is a signal about how someone was managed, not a verdict on the employee.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams review PIP requests in one consistent, documented process before a plan ever starts.
