Well, I am happy to report that there have been some real successes in the last couple of days!

Two of the key successes are

a) certain people on my rehab team are actively negotiating a graduated return to work protocol, and

b) my employer is embracing the parameters and the graduated return to work plan.

So now it’s full steam ahead.  My employers’ HR team has a return to work specialist  who will have the job of convincing the provider of my Long Term Disability Insurance that this is a good idea at this time.

I’m not entirely sure how they measure success in a situation like this.  How do the rehab specialists know that I’m able to do my job when they don’t know my job, and have no baseline measurements to use to evaluate my effectiveness?

One of the things that will end up having to be done is for us  to build out and agree on a structure that they can measure my progress and ability to do the job against. We need to develop a yardstick.  What does that mean? I don’t know. It’s going to be about being able to demonstrate that I am effective at doing my job.
My return to work is being designed as a graduated return, in that what we will do is plug me into my job for four hours twice a week to begin with.  Then we will evaluate how I’m doing and then move to three days a week four hours a day and then just keep building on it until I’m ready to assume my full duties on a full time basis.

The challenge will be understanding how much of the measurements that they are using are mine, which I am controlling to satisfy my desire to return to work and to be seen to be effective versus a real assessment of my ability to fit into the workplace and do the job.