Know Your Workplace Rights

Paula: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Chatting With the Experts, where I speak with amazing women from Africa, from the Caribbean, and in the diaspora. Our topic is
Know Your Rights, Keep Your Career, and The Insider’s Guide to Workplace Accommodations.
My guest says you have more workplace rights than you think, and that most employees don’t know how to use them without risking their careers.
She is the founder of Informed Choices Strategy, a workplace rights coaching practice that helps employees navigate accommodation requests, disabilities disclosure, and complex workplace dynamics with confidence and clarity. There’s so much more I can say, but I’ll let her [00:01:00] do that. And with that, I wanna welcome Dr. Allison Butler to Chatting With the Experts.
Allison: Hello, Paula. Thank you so much for having me.
Paula: Absolutely. I know I could have elaborated on your very impressive bio, but that’s why you’re here.
Allison: Yes. Yes, definitely.
Paula: You’ve said that most employees don’t know their rights
Allison: Absolutely. No, it’s so true. I even wanted to start with something most people don’t know about workplace accommodations, and part of that is that I’ve spent over 20 years sitting on the other side of the table, and not just sitting at the table, running the table and teaching about the table.
So yeah, so I, I built my career, um, as both a leader and an educator in the accommodation system, and I served as a director level leader at a private [00:02:00] university, um, and healthcare system where I led the office that I reviewed accommodation requests across thousands of students and employees. Um, I’ve also served as a director of a large online university-
Paula: Mm
Allison: where I built, uh, policies and led teams, um, that served tens of thousands of working adult students, um, nationally, as well as hundreds of employees. Um, I also held a program leadership role at a community college, and I’ve served um, at federal uh, department agencies as a reasonable accommodation coordinator, um, working under human resources.
And I’ve noticed like, throughout my entire administrative career, even at the height of running these offices, I never stopped teaching. So I’m currently an adjunct associate faculty member, and I’ve been in the classroom continuously for years. Uh, That matters because coaching [00:03:00] is, as we know, just teaching one person instead of 30.
So I’m not new at working or helping people understand systems they didn’t write, and I’ve been doing that my entire career. So when I say I know the system from the inside, I don’t just mean I worked inside it. I mean I built policies, I’ve trained staff, I set the standards that other people enforced and taught next generation of professionals how to do the work.
So I hold a PhD in counselor education, a master’s in rehab counseling, and over two decades I served as a certified rehabilitation counselor. And across all these roles in all of those sectors, I saw the same pattern, that employees who got what they needed weren’t the ones with the most severe conditions.
[00:04:00] They were the ones who knew how to ask essentially. So I launched Informed Choices Strategy this year because I decided I was done watching brilliant professionals lose ground in workplace conversations they were never taught how to have. Um, And overall, that’s the work.
Paula: I can hear this pain in your voice because as you said, it’s the strategy of knowing how to ask for what is your right.
Allison: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we were mentioning earlier about the biggest myth.
Paula: Yes.
Allison: This one costs people their careers every single day, and is that asking for an accommodation is a sign of weakness or that is gonna make you a target?
And the truth is, accommodation is a federally protected legal right under the [00:05:00] Americans with Disabilities Act. Um, it’s not a favor, it’s not a perk. It is not something your employer is doing for you. It’s more of a structured, lawful conversation that you would be entitled to have if you’re somebody living with a disability.
And but, you know, here’s why the myth survives. Unfortunately, most employees only see this process when something has already gone wrong.
Paula: Mm.
Allison: And they’re already exhausted. They’re already underperforming because they’ve been masking and pushing through. … They’re already in conflict with the supervisor, and then they ask from the weakest possible position.
And here’s what I want the audience to know is because I led these offices, I can tell you with absolute certainty the strongest performers I encountered as a director and ADA compliance officer were almost always the ones who came to [00:06:00] us early. Not because they were the weakest, but because they were the most strategic.
They protected their careers, their reviews, their bonuses, their promotions. So the reframe I want every working professional listening to take away is, um, is mainly this, that accommodation is not the last resort. It is a performance preservation tool, um, to use it upstream, and that’s the entire game.
Paula: Wow. Wow So, a question I have for you is what exactly is the informed choices framework? Because I think every employee needs to know that.
Allison: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking that. Um, I would say it’s the heart of my coaching. Mm-hmm. The three pillars essentially are disclosure, the actual accommodation request, and then [00:07:00] documentation.
And the order matters more than people realize.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Allison: So for the audience mainly to hear, hear me when I say this, that this is the exact framework I train my own staff, um, to look for when they were reviewing accommodation requests, and it’s the same framework essentially I’ve taught in university classroom for years.
Um, I am now teaching, uh, the working professional the other side of the desk what the people behind the desk are evaluating. Okay. So disclosure um, is about strategy, not transparency. Mm-hmm. Most people think disclosure is binary. You either tell or you don’t. That’s pretty much wrong. So disclosure is more of a spectrum, and you can disclose the existence of a condition without disclosing the diagnosis.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Allison: You can disclose to [00:08:00] HR without disclosing to your manager. You can disclose functionality, meaning you describe the impact of your work, not necessarily the medical details.
Paula: Got you.
Allison: So where you land on that spectrum is the most important decision you’ll make you know, in that entire process.
And then the second piece is the actual request, which is about specificity. Like, I would say the single biggest reason accommodation requests got denied in the offices that I led wasn’t because the request was unreasonable, it was because the request was too vague. So when someone says, “I need flexibility,” that’s not really a request.
Or framing it more so like, “I need to start at [10:00] AM Monday through Friday, and my shift my end time accordingly,” is more of a request. I teach my clients, how to [00:09:00] translate their lived experience into operational language an employer can actually say yes to essentially. And then documentation is all about protection. Everything in writing, every email saved, every conversation followed up with a recap email not because you’re planning to sue necessarily, it’s just because documentation is the difference between he said, she said, and here’s the record um, and documentation ironically is what prevents you from ever needing to sue.
So that’s really the importance.
Paula: So, um, Okay. So if disclosure, you don’t necessarily have to give any medical reason and document- Yes.
Allison: No, no, no
Paula: Uh-huh.
Allison: You do, You do have to have a medical reason. You have to [00:10:00] qualify, but it’s a large, broad range you know, of conditions. Like, there’s categories, like there’s physical, mental health, there’s nervous system conditions, uh, there’s chronic illnesses.
There’s a whole gamut. Mm-hmm. So you do have to have a official diagnosis.
Paula: Oh.
Allison: It’s just that how much … You don’t necessarily need to disclose all the details. Like, like for instance, let’s say you have diabetes. You might not necessarily be taking insulin, so you might not need certain accommodations that you might need if you were taking insulin. So depending on like the level of severity and the impact to you and what you’re requesting, that’s where you’re tying in how the disability’s impacting you at work. But like some people focus on, they just give like their whole MyChart, um- So now it’s clear. … you know, to, for someone to review, and it’s like we don’t need all that information.
You know what [00:11:00] I mean? Um, so I think that’s mainly the difference. Um, Times they think that they give all this information about disabilities or multiple diagnoses thinking they’re gonna get more accommodations, but it’s really specific about tying what your diagnosis is to the functional impact.
So when I was using that flexibility example earlier, a lot of people will say, “I need flexibility because I have ADHD,” or, “I have a chronic illness that, like my medication makes me drowsy. I’m usually drowsy between, I don’t know, [6:00] AM, you know, to [9:00] AM, and come arriving at [10:00] AM to work,” you know what I mean?
Having that flexibility to arrive later and move, and shifting my end time accordingly, you know, is the most effective, um, assistance, you know, accommodation that I would need. So it’s [00:12:00] just kind of changing that, um, instead of just regurgitating everything that your doctor has told you in the course of managing your condition.
No one needs to know all that. It’s just really specific to how you’re impacted at work.
Paula: Okay. And I see why it’s important to have that informed choice framework because… Yes. … There’s a fine line. You need to be guided, in other words.
Allison: Yeah. Right.
Paula: You need that guidance.
Right.
Allison: Exactly. Exactly. And unfortunately, like, you know, depending on, sometimes depending on who you’re working with, so a lot of times it is a HR professional depending on the industry and how large the organization or industry that you’re working in. Um, sometimes it’s somebody who’s a diversity person.
Sometimes it’s … there’s such a range of individuals that might be reviewing this, so that’s why it’s important, ’cause they’re not medical professionals so you don’t need to get deep into the diagnosis per [00:13:00] se. Mm-hmm. It’s just accepting the fact that you do have one, and that how more so you’re impacted.
So like you said, that, I think that’s where my framework comes into play, um, just trying to help guide folks to not over…
Paula: overdiscuss …
Allison: overshare. Yeah.
Paula: Yeah. Got you. So talking about um, HR, you mentioned…
Allison: Yes
Paula: … that HR is not your advocate. Let’s talk a bit about that.
Allison: And I do need to preface this because I want to be very careful here because I have deep respect for all HR professionals.
Mm-hmm. And I have many friends, um, in my network that were top leaders in HR, okay? So … just want as a disclaimer. Um, and grateful for the work that they do. Mm-hmm. Um, but many of them, um, are good ethical people doing hard work. Um, I know because I led the office that worked alongside them. Um, I’ve taught many of them in, [00:14:00] in, uh, trainings over the years.
Um, And I’ve worked under HR as well. So when I s- tell you this next part, I’m telling you from the inside. Mm-hmm. So HR works for the employer.
Paula: Yeah.
Allison: Their job is to protect the organization from risk. So when I was the director, my paycheck was signed by the institution. My job by design was to protect that institution while complying with the law.
So that’s not a criticism, it’s just the job description. And the moment employees understand that, I feel like everything should shift. So when you sit down with HR for an accommodation conversation, you’re not sitting down with like, a neutral party. You’re not sitting down with your advocate per se.
You’re [00:15:00] sitting down with a professional whose duty of loyalty is to the company that signs their paycheck. However, they may be empathetic. They may be personally be on your side, but structurally they’re not your representative, so to speak. So who is your advocate, let’s say? Really you are and, or someone who you’ve hired, a coach, an attorney, sometimes a union rep, you know, depending on your industry.
Um, So that’s the entire shift you know, for Informed Choices Strategy exists to create. So I’m not anti-HR at all. I’m pro you having someone in your corner who’s unambiguously yours. So.
Paula: And that’s where you come into play now.
Allison: Yes.
Paula: You are on the-
Allison: Absolutely
Paula: … employee’s side.
Allison: Absolutely
Paula: You’re not anti-HR.
Allison: Right.
Paula: You are the advocate for the [00:16:00] employee.
Allison: Yes …
Paula: to know their rights.
Allison: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Paula: As a worker.
Allison: Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Paula: All right. Okay, okay. Thanks for making that disclaimer because-
Allison: Of course. Of course. Not ’cause I have too many friends, and I do not need no phone calls after this interview.
Paula: I agree, I agree.
Allison: Yeah. I respect everything they do.
Paula: So there must be a story or a reason that you took on, you became an advocate- Yes … for the employee.
Allison: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s really just informed by my work over the years. Mm-hmm. Um, I, that’s all I can say. Like, I mean, I … It’s just so many times I just see, you know, if I had an opportunity to talk to this person before they started the process, I think they would’ve had a better outcome.
The good thing is is that the process, you know, you can initiate it at any time. You can re-initiate it, you know, at any time, [00:17:00] but it’s just that I feel that uh, it just makes for exhaustion, employee exhaustion, fatigue, and resentment.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Allison: And you know, you know that whole saying, you know, you can build a mountain out of a molehill so I just really wanted to have um, some type of platform that was kind of easily digestible for folks because I never even knew what all this was until I got into the field of this work, and a lot of the ways I entered was through disability services and higher education and serving the college students and everything, and then my work grew into serving the employee side.
But a lot of my training is about supporting you know, individuals with disabilities in the area of job placement and retention um, and just making sure that, you know, everybody has a right to participate and engage and make, make, um, money and, um- You know, be supported in like their professional work environment.
[00:18:00] So that’s really what speaks to why I got into this. And I have a lot of … I’m a ally. I have a lot of family members, a lot of friends. Um, Any of us can enter a disability category at any points in our lives. You know, Some conditions are permanent, some are temporary.
Paula: Yes.
Allison: So it’s something that intersects every identity.
Paula: Absolutely. I mean, as I-
Allison: Yeah …
Paula: As I stay on this earth longer and longer…
Allison: Yep.
Paula: I realize that, yep, things I could do so easily 10 years ago, I have to think twice- Right … uh, you know, now. Uh, I’m-
Allison: Right …
Paula: negotiating things like steps. I’m like-
Allison: Exactly …
Paula: where’s the ramp?
Allison: Exactly.
Paula: You know?
Allison: And nobody um, really talks about menopause and the impact of menopause for us as women when we get through, I mean, you know, we have … There’s certain types of accommodations you can ask for because it can be a disabling condition depending on how severe your symptoms are, and that’s different [00:19:00] from one woman, um, not just a woman, but person, but from one person to the other.
Paula: Uh, Yeah. You’re correct about that. You are so right. So in the same space, you know, now that you are um- the founder of Informed Choices Strategy. I’m looking at things from the other side of the table. Tell us what happens or how do people deal with it when their accommodation request gets denied, you know?
Allison: Mm-hmm.
Paula: What advice can you give? Because that can be painful, and when you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s doubly painful. So I know that stuff can do it.
Allison: Definitely. Definitely. And some people feel like they wasted time and resources. Mm-hmm. So it can, it can get really deep in the weeds. Um, but first, like I cannot stress enough, like a denial is not the end of the road.
Paula: Mm.
Allison: Um, It’s more so the middle, if you wanna reframe that. Um, the ADA actually requires what’s called, um, the interactive process and which means that your employer [00:20:00] cannot just say no. They have a legal, legal obligation to engage you. So to um, explore alternatives and to document why a particular accommodation creates an undue hardship.
If those things, usually those things should be explained when you receive a denial, but sometimes it’s not. And a lot of times it just depends how large your workplace environment is. For smaller offices they might not be as formal. For larger corporations, they’re usually pretty you know, formal, and they might be a little more restrictive.
It also depends on the nature of your job and the work that you do because sometimes, the alternative that they’re providing makes sense for the work environment. It might not be your preference or what you asked for, but you know, if they’re providing an alternative, that is something. Um, But uh, what I usually… so let’s say you’ve been denied. You know, I, I always share three moves to make, right? So move [00:21:00] one, um, ask for the denial in writing. And like I said, these are usually for the smaller organizations if they don’t have like a formal process, but usually the ones that do, you’ll have that in writing, but with the specific reason that most employers will resist this because verbal denials leave no paper trail.
Mm-hmm. So I usually insist politely you know, and professionally, but insist. Um, but then move two, uh, is to propose an alternative yourself. So this is where, like my insider knowledge becomes everything. So employers are required to consider some alternatives, and if they’re denied, i- you know, if they denied your request for like full remote, that’s usually the big thing right now, full remote work, and they propose more of a hybrid schedule, but you do have some in-person activities that you have to come in for.
Um, so let’s say if they denied a specific software, you know, you would [00:22:00] propose a comparable tool. You’re not surrendering, you’re just keeping the interactive process alive. Um, and then move three, I would just say escalate strategically. That might mean going above your immediate HR contact, and it might mean an EEOC, um, complaint.
It might mean a private employment attorney. But here’s why I can coach this with confidence. Like, I have sat in the leadership meetings where the denials got reversed. Um, I know exactly what kind of escalation works and what kind backfires. And so most employees either explode or evaporate when they get a no, so neither works.
So there’s a third path, which is documenting, it’s strategic, it’s persistence, and it’s a path that I coach my clients through every single day.
Paula: Okay. Um, you mentioned an EEOC [00:23:00] complaint. What is EEOC?
Allison: That is the Equal Opportunity Office of Compliance. And, um, yes, so that’s a federal agency. And usually because ADA is a federal mandate, um, some folks usually go through the EEOC complaint process. There’s so many … we can get in the weeds with that, so that’s why I don’t necessarily think that’s the… I mean, that’s usually the last resort. But you have usually, once again, depending on the industry that you’re in and the size of it, you already have an internal EEOC person, so you would reach out to them and start talking through.
Um, like I said, usually those industries that have more formal processes will give you direct contact to your EEOC contact, um, or give that information, let’s say, in your denial to, you know, reach out to them. But usually it’s after, you know, you’ve done some attempts of you know, [00:24:00] requesting accommodation, getting denied, trying an alternative, or maybe if you’re denied for an alternative.
So it just really depends on when you would initiate that, ’cause it’s not necessarily a fun exercise. Everybody’s gonna participate in the way they need to, because retaliation’s one thing that’s covered in the EEOC review. Um, So yeah, it, it just can get really messy, and I think, once again, that’s another process that’s out there, but you just wanna be strategic in the way that you use it.
Paula: Wow. I can see that this is something that not only are you knowledge- very knowledgeable about, but this is something I think you’re passionate about as well
Allison: Yes, very much so.
Paula: That’s one thing I love about what I do. I speak with women who are not only, uh, educating us- Yes … and, um, are inspiring and encouraging us, but they are [00:25:00] passionate about what they do, and you definitely are passionate about this. But we could talk forever. Why don’t we do this? Let’s open up the floor for those who have joined us so they can ask you even more questions, and you can continue educating us on this.
Allison: Oh, wonderful.
Paula: So-
Allison: I love that
Paula: For those who weren’t able to join us today, how can they get in touch with you, Dr. Allison?
Allison: Yes. Oh well, the easiest place to find me, I would say, is my website, and that’s informedchoicestrategy.net.
Paula: Okay.
Allison: And that’s where my workplace coaching lives and where you can join the email list for, um, you know, any like, new newsletters or products that I might be, um, advertising. Um, but also I’m very active on LinkedIn, um, so you, you can just search Allison Butler, um, PhD, and that’s where I share weekly insights from my two decades inside [00:26:00] the system and some of the current clients that I’m working with.
And before I would let you go, like, I would wanna say that, uh, one last thing is that, you know, if there’s one person listening today, uh, who’s been sitting on a workplace situation wondering if they’re sick enough or disabled enough or disabled enough to deserve to ask, I should say, you know, you are, and that the ADA doesn’t have a severity threshold.
It has a substantial limitation threshold. Mm-hmm. And you are allowed to ask for what you need, essentially.
Paula: Thank you for clarifying that because everybody’s-
Allison: Yeah
Paula: … life is worthwhile, and if you-
Allison: Yes …
Paula: are, you know, you have a disability, your life is worthwhile.
Allison: Period. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That is the best way to close it.
Paula: Yes. And for those of you who joined us today and who are listening online, if you’d like to be a guest just like Dr. [00:27:00] Allison Butler has been, please reach out to me on my website, which is chattingwiththeexperts.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me on my business page there, which is Chatting with the Experts.
I am on Instagram, and my handle there is @chat_experts_podcast.
I also am on Facebook. My business page there is Chatting With The Experts, and we have a YouTube channel. Please subscribe to us there. You will find Dr. Allison Butler’s episode there, as well as all the other amazing women who have encouraged, empowered, educated us, just like she has, and inspired all of the women who are just like me and just like you, who need to know this information and this.
And, um, now we will open up the floor to those of you who [00:28:00] are here live with us so that you can get an opportunity to ask her all the questions that I haven’t been able to ask her or forgot to ask. Thank you again, Dr. Allison Butler, for being such an amazing guest. Thank you.
Allison: Thank you, Paula. Thank you so much for your platform and all the work that you’re doing. It is not going unnoticed.
Paula: Thank you.