August 25, 2021

11:00am – 12:00pm

“What COVID Taught Us About Your Interactive Process”

The COVID-19 pandemic has had countless lasting impacts on our workplaces.  In this session, we will focus specifically in on what COVID-19 taught us about the interactive process and reasonably accommodating employees with disabilities.  We will examine how COVID-19 highlighted the role that “direct threat” plays in our analysis of reasonable accommodation and medical examinations in the workplace.  We will discuss what we have learned about remote work as a potential reasonable accommodation, and how that will effect interactive process meetings in the future.  Finally, we will highlight a number of best practices that were solidified during the pandemic.

Speaker: Kelly Trainer Policky, Employment Practices Manager, California JPIA

Kelly Trainer Policky serves as the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority’s Employment Practices Manager.  A licensed California attorney, Kelly has worked as an advisor, trainer, investigator, and negotiator for public agencies for almost 20 years.  She has a passion for the preventative side of the practice of law, and oversees the Authority’s Employment Hotline, providing advice and counsel support to over 120 member agencies on complex, high-risk employment law issues.  In this capacity, she works directly with members on issues such as reasonable accommodation and the interactive process, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, discipline, freedom of speech and association, privacy, and social media.  Kelly is also a highly regarded trainer, and regularly conducts a variety of seminars and workplace trainings for employees on matters such as harassment prevention, disability discrimination, implicit bias, workplace investigations, managing difficult employees, workplace violence, discipline and termination, social media, performance evaluations, creating effective documentation, and leaves of absence.