The EEOC's enforcement guidance rejects blanket "100% healed" return-to-work policies, and it draws no line between an injury on a warehouse floor and an injury on a ski slope. That single point undoes half of what HR teams instinctively believe about personal injury claims. A weekend car crash, a torn ACL from a Sunday league match, a fall down someone else's porch steps: the moment that employee walks back through the door with restrictions, the file on your desk stops being a scheduling problem and starts touching federal law.
Most of what goes wrong from here is belief-driven. HR teams act on assumptions inherited from workers' comp training, then find themselves defending decisions the law doesn't support.
Here are the assumptions worth retiring.
Off-the-Clock Injuries Don't Live Outside Your Responsibilities
Start with the tidiest assumption: that a non-work injury is a private matter between the employee and their doctor. It's not, and pretending otherwise is where files go sideways. Once the injury affects how the employee performs the job, whether that's lifting, standing, focusing, driving, or showing up, you're inside the ADA's zone, and possibly the FMLA's, regardless of where the injury happened.
The workers' comp instinct is to route everything through the insurer and wait. With off-the-clock injuries, there's no insurer to route through. HR is the process. SHRM's guide on handling workplace injuries is written around occupational cases, but the coordination logic (leave designation, accommodation, medical documentation, return-to-work) carries over almost intact, minus the workers' comp piece.
A Doctor's Note Is Not a Reasonable Accommodation Analysis
The second myth: if the employee brings in a note saying "light duty for six weeks," the note is the answer. Print it, file it, done.
A note is an input, not a decision. The ADA expects an interactive process, meaning a conversation between employer and employee about what the restrictions actually mean for this job, what accommodations are possible, and what qualifies as undue hardship. Skip that conversation and you've skipped the part regulators care about most.
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Read the restrictions in context. A 20-pound lifting limit means one thing for a warehouse role and something else for a desk role. Match the restriction to the essential functions of the actual position.
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Ask, don't assume. An employee can request accommodation in plain language, with no legal terms and no paperwork ritual. If they mention the restriction and ask for help working around it, treat that as the request.
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Document the exchange. Notes, emails, follow-ups. The record of the conversation is often what carries you through a later complaint.
Leave Is an Accommodation, Not a Substitute for One
Another common assumption: once FMLA runs out, so do your obligations. The employee either returns at full capacity or doesn't come back at all.
The right question isn't "has FMLA ended?" It's "would a defined extension let this employee return to essential functions, and does that create undue hardship?" Those are different questions with different answers.
The Personal Injury Claim Isn't Your Fight, But It Shapes the File
HR teams sometimes assume that because the employee is pursuing a claim against a third party, whether the other driver, a negligent property owner, or a product manufacturer, the legal side is entirely external. Their lawyer, their insurance, their business.
Mostly true, with one wrinkle. The employee's outside counsel will often request employment records: wage history, missed shifts, job description, accommodation offers, medical leave documentation. How you respond, and how consistent your internal records are with what you tell the employee, can matter.
Firms that handle these matters, including personal injury attorneys who represent injured workers, build damages calculations partly from employer-supplied data. Sloppy or contradictory records don't just embarrass HR; they can complicate the employee's recovery and, in some cases, prompt questions about retaliation.
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Keep records clean. Wage statements, hours missed, accommodation offers, and medical documentation should tell one coherent story.
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Route requests properly. Third-party subpoenas and authorizations go through your usual legal channel, not to whichever manager the lawyer reached first.
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Separate the claim from the employee. Whether they sue, settle, or drop the matter is irrelevant to how you manage their employment. Treating it otherwise invites a retaliation claim you didn't need.
The Interactive Process Is the Whole Job
One thread runs through every myth above. The interactive process, the documented back-and-forth about what the employee can do, what the job requires, and what adjustments are possible, is the work HR owes. Not a form, not a policy citation, but a conversation followed by decisions you can defend.
An off-the-clock injury lands on your desk because the employee needs something changed to keep working. Answer that question deliberately and the rest of the file tends to sort itself out.