Help! An employee wants to bring an emotional support animal to work
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has many parts. Some of the provisions apply to employers and some apply to public places, such as restaurants and movie theaters. For employers, employees may request to bring a service dog or an emotional support animal into work. Your response would be the same for either type of animal. Both are requests for a workplace change and, as long as the change is based on a medical condition, your ADA obligations are triggered.
For public accommodations (restaurants, etc.), patrons must be allowed to have a service animal, but not emotional support animals. Service animals are not pets. They are defined as animals that have been individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, also known as the animal’s handler. Only dogs and miniature horses are considered service animals under the public accommodation provisions of the ADA.
Emotional support animals, which can also be pets, can provide aid to a person with a disability, but do not perform a specific task or duty, as they are not trained to do so. Emotional support animals, therefore, do not meet the definition of a service animal. Obedience training alone is not enough to make it a service animal.
For employers, however, neither service animal nor emotional support animal is defined. A request to bring an emotional support animal into the workplace as an accommodation usually falls under the category of modifying a workplace policy, assuming you have a no-animal policy.
What would you do?
So, if Joe Employee were to ask to bring in his emotional support squirrel, what do you do?
Treat the request as you would any accommodation request. You would do the same if Joe asked to bring in a service dog. Look at the particulars of the situation, including the employee’s job, the work environment, and so forth. Talk to the employee. This is all part of the ADA’s interactive process.
Assuming it’s possible to modify the no-animal policy, you may (but are not required to) ask for medical documentation if the disability and need for accommodation are not obvious or already verified. You have to consider only those accommodations that are needed because of a disability. Documentation might include a detailed description of how the animal would help the employee in performing job tasks and how the animal is trained to behave in the workplace.
Once the need for accommodation is established, the next step is to talk with the employee about whether the animal is trained to be in a work environment and if it will be under the employee’s control at all times. You do not have to provide any accommodation that poses an undue hardship. One factor in determining undue hardship is whether the accommodation will be unduly disruptive to other employees or to the ability to conduct business.
Finally, possibly the best way to determine whether to permit the employee to bring an animal to work is to allow it on a trial basis and see if it works. You might want to make a written agreement with the employee that there will be a trial period, how long it will last, and what factors might end the trial period early. If, for example, the animal shows any sign of aggression or if the employee cannot keep the animal quiet or under control, you will immediately end the trial period and deny the request.
If you do not have a no-animal policy and allow other employees to bring in animals, then you should allow employees with disabilities to bring in animals without going through the accommodation process.
