Light Duty That Actually Works: Writing Restrictions Employers Can Use

"Light duty, no heavy lifting, no repetitive bending" is a phrase, not a plan. A warehouse supervisor reading it has no way to know whether the worker can move a 20-pound tote from a conveyor to a cart, so the safe answer is to send them home. Multiply that by three weeks and the claim has doubled.

The fix is not looser restrictions. It is more specific ones. Specificity protects the worker — it makes the boundary enforceable — and it gives the employer something to schedule against.

Restrictions only convert into hours worked if someone matches them to a real assignment in writing. A modified-duty offer should describe the actual tasks, the shift and hours, the pay, and the reporting location, and it should state that the assignment falls inside the physician's current restrictions.

Putting it in writing does three things: it gives the worker clarity, it documents the employer's good faith, and it creates a record that matters if the worker declines. Verbal offers create arguments; written offers create files.

A physician who has never seen the job is guessing at its demands. Employers who send a functional job description — essential tasks, weights, frequencies, equipment, environment — get materially better restrictions back, because the clinician is writing about the real job rather than a category.

For high-volume roles, build the description once and attach it to every referral. It takes an hour and pays for itself on the first claim.

Restrictions should move. A worker who is two weeks into therapy for a lumbar strain should not be carrying the same 10-pound limit they had on day one unless there is a documented reason.

Set a review interval at every visit, advance restrictions when objective findings improve, and identify early the small number of cases that genuinely need imaging, a specialist, or a functional capacity evaluation. Ambiguity, not injury severity, is what turns a four-week claim into a four-month one.

If the injured worker is a federal employee, the agency does not direct treatment. Under the Federal Employees' Compensation Act, the employee chooses their own initial treating physician. What a federal agency can properly request is documentation and evaluation — a duty status report, a fitness-for-duty examination, a second opinion, an impairment rating.

That distinction matters when a mixed workforce shares a facility. The clinical work of writing precise restrictions is identical; the authority to direct where the worker goes is not.