As businesses begin to reopen, some employees are reluctant to return to the office, whether from a general fear about catching COVID-19 or due to a health condition that makes catching COVID-19 all the more deadly. On the other hand, employers who had been forced to pivot to a fully remote workforce at the beginning of the pandemic are anxious to bring their employees back to work where they can be supervised more closely and where job functions that had been shelved during the pandemic can be performed. While employers generally are not required to allow employees to telecommute, there are exceptions when the employee requests a telework accommodation for a disability.

Before the pandemic, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stated that telework would not be a reasonable accommodation where the employee's job required "face-to-face interaction and coordination of work with other employees … in-person interaction with outside colleagues, clients, or customers … [and] immediate access to documents or other information located only in the workplace." See EEOC Fact Sheet, Work at Home/Telework as a Reasonable Accommodation (Feb. 3, 2003), http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/telework.html. Pre-pandemic courts agreed, stating that many "jobs require the kind of teamwork, personal interaction and supervision that simply cannot be had in a home office situation." See EEOC v. Ford Motor, 782 F.3d 753, 761 (6th Cir. 2015); see also Credeur v. Louisiana, 860 F.3d 785 (5^th Cir. 2017) ("There is general consensus among courts, including ours, that regular work-site attendance is an essential function of most jobs"). To a certain extent, this remains true in the pandemic and post-pandemic world. A neo-natal nurse cannot perform his or her job from home, for example, nor can a sanitation worker, cashier, police officer, firefighter or production worker. But what about traditional office jobs?