Each year, I provide the absence and disability management trends I see shaping the workplace for the coming year.

The 2020 trends I identified are still in play — even if significantly changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let us look at them in the rearview mirror and see how this history-altering pandemic impacted the absence and disability landscape in ways I could not have imagined.

Over the years, employers have spent years developing processes and procedures to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), especially around the ‘interactive process.’

With COVID-19, the importance of those processes became even more significant as absence and disability professionals’ ADA workloads increased by 200-300% in some cases.