While the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that an employer provide a disabled employee a “reasonable accommodation,” it is important to keep in mind that an accommodation need only be “reasonable”—and need not be the one preferred by the employee in question. This is the principal message of the recent decision in Keyhani v. The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, No. 17-3092 (E.D. Pa., June 21, 2019).

Project Manager Injured at Work

Tanya Keyhani is a project manager in the University of Pennsylvania's Design and Construction Department of Facilities and Real Estate Services. In this role, Keyhani serves as, essentially, a general contractor for building projects at Penn. This required, in part, inspecting project construction sites and participating in various staff and project meetings, according to the opinion.

In early December 2015, Keyhani tripped on a sidewalk at work and fell to the ground. After a short absence from work, she was cleared to return without limitations. In early January, however, Keyhani reported concussion-like symptoms and received the first of a succession of physician notes recommending that she could work two-to-three days per week at Penn and could work the remaining days from home. While Keyhani worked this schedule for a couple of weeks while awaiting final approval from Penn, she was eventually informed that, while she could limit her work week to three days per week, she would not be permitted to work from home on those days when she was not physically at work. Penn contemporaneously provided Keyhani with Family and Medical Leave Act forms and explained that any FMLA leave “would need to run concurrent with any workers' compensation [for which she had applied].” Keyhani was also told that “she would need to exhaust all available paid time off and sick leave prior to taking unpaid FMLA leave.”

Over the next six months, Keyhani received a succession of notes that permitted her to work at Penn three days per week, while working from home the other two days per week. Penn maintained its position that Keyhani would not be permitted to work from home—although she was permitted to wear sunglasses and noise-cancelling headphones while at work. Her FMLA leave was approved and Keyhani used her allotted sick leave, paid time off and, ultimately, FMLA unpaid leave to cover the two days off per week.

Part-Time Work No Longer Feasible

After 10 months of this arrangement, Penn advised Keyhani that it could no longer permit her to work this reduced schedule. That same day, Keyhani provided a note that she was capable of working five days per week for six hours per day—which Penn accommodated. Ten months later, in August 2017, Keyhani returned to a full-time schedule, with only the headphones and sunglasses as accommodations.