For two years, a company has watched requests for workplace accommodations climb, particularly around mental health and flexible work arrangements. Some managers are highly flexible. Others hold strictly to in-office expectations. Employees have started to question whether the decisions are fair, and leaders are worried about precedent, culture, and legal risk. That is the scenario host Rebecca Taylor put to Alisa DiBeasi, CHRO at PHINIA, on HR Voices.

The usual fix is one rule for everyone. Alisa made the case against it. PHINIA has more than forty locations worldwide, with some people in the office one day a week and others on site six. No single schedule fits them all. What she described instead is a model built on conversation, reciprocity, and councils that employees run themselves.

Why One Rule for Everyone Breaks Fairness

Alisa started with the workforce, not the policy. Before HR revamps a guideline, she said, it has to “understand the situation in your workforce.” That means knowing where people are located, what each role requires, and what employees need to be at their best.

A rule that puts everyone in a role on the same hours is what Alisa called a “peanut butter spread,” and her verdict was that it does not work. In her words, “not every role needs to be sitting in a desk or cubicle or on the line.”

The uniform rule mistakes sameness for fairness, which is where the difference between equity and equality matters. Applied to roles that have little in common, one rule creates the unfairness it was written to prevent.

How Flexibility Runs in Both Directions

A blanket rule also fails the employer. PHINIA is a global organization, and it asks its people to travel and to take late-night calls. Alisa’s position is that a company asking for that kind of give should offer some in return.

She counts herself among the people who need it. With three kids, two dogs, a husband, and a big job, she told Rebecca, “I need the flexibility as well.” A morning appointment might be followed by a late call with her Asia region.

Flexibility does not always mean less time in the office. Younger employees have told her they “want to be in more than less,” because two days a week does not teach them how to act like the colleagues they hope to become. Gallup’s May 2025 survey found that fully remote work is least popular with Gen Z. Only 23 percent of remote-capable Gen Z employees prefer it, compared with 35 percent in each older generation.

What Actually Works

Map the Workforce Before Writing the Policy

Asked where a People team should start, Alisa described what PHINIA did. It talked to its people. It held more fireside chats and sit-down conversations in small, private settings, “not just at a town hall once a quarter,” and went out to locations to sit down with employees. That is a culture of listening built site by site.

It also asked talent directors, HR partners, and the benefits team what the incoming claims showed. What counts as best practice somewhere else, Alisa noted, is not automatically best practice at PHINIA.

Give Managers a Baseline and a Sniff Test

Rejecting one rule is not the same as having no rules. PHINIA keeps guidance for when a request arrives, and Alisa’s team works each one through with the leader, the employee, and legal. Rebecca added that managers new to a reasonable accommodation request tend to choose whatever sounds safest, even if that means answering “sure, whatever you want to do.”

Alisa’s test is reasonableness. She asks whether the request is unreasonable and whether a company of PHINIA’s size can afford to manage it. The ADA regulation works the same way, describing an informal, interactive process with the individual and weighing an employer’s size and financial resources in judging undue hardship.

Her example of a failing request is someone who can only live at a seaside resort in an isolated town for their health. That would not pass “the sniff test.” PHINIA, she said, has not seen that kind of abuse.

Build Wellbeing Councils That Employees Lead

Mental health is its own category, Alisa said, and it is still taboo in some places. About a year before we recorded, PHINIA started wellbeing councils to address it. Roughly thirty of its sites have one, staffed by line employees, salaried staff, managers, and executives.

PHINIA already has an employee assistance program, and Alisa is clear that the councils are something else. They are led by employees trained to offer support and coaching to a colleague, a manager, or a leader.

Alisa’s reasoning is that there is “no book that tells you how to handle” an employee’s severe depression, or a child’s. The councils share resources and run lunch and learns, and sometimes the help is a walk. The company could “policy it up,” she said, but it is “not the right time for us.”

Where Employee Relations Fits

Once fairness complaints arrive, the scenario becomes an employee relations question. Alisa heard “a lot of angst” in it, from leaders nervous about making the wrong call. “Our job as an HR partner is to make sure our leaders have the right information to make the right decisions,” she said.

The role has limits. HR people are not doctors, Alisa said, but “we know who to ask,” whether that is a suicide prevention hotline, a domestic violence hotline, or a community resource.

Rebecca put the standard plainly. People need different things at different times, and the response has to be fair and consistent. Teams that run accommodation requests through one documented workflow can show why two employees received two different answers. Without that record, case-by-case judgment can look like favoritism.

Frequently Asked Questions About Fair Flexibility Decisions

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Alisa DiBeasi’s framing comes down to two verbs. “You just have to ask. You have to listen,” she said, and listening does not require a diagnosis. HR Voices has covered that restraint before, in the case of a manager who suspects ADHD.

Nobody at PHINIA was appointed to build any of this. The councils exist because employees, in her words, “see a need, feel a need, and can do something better with it.” After more than thirty years in HR, she knows what it is like to lose someone to mental health when the resources never reached them.

Fairness at scale is not one rule applied to everyone. It is the same care applied to each request, with the reasoning written down.

See how AllVoices helps People teams keep accommodation decisions consistent and documented.