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Should You Care If You have Employees Who Smoke?

By James Edholm

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 16Mar2012 Word count: 425 Viewed: 36 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

According to statistics; one in 5 adults in America smoke, so you may have smokers working for you in your company. This is the part where you say "so what?"

Each state in the country tends to have pooled health insurance products for employers with small sized members of staff, and there is no experience component to the cost.

In the state of Massachusetts, if your workforce is under 50 lives, your rate will be a hundred percent (100%) if your workers smoke. Even if none of your workers smoke, you are still going to get the same rate. Okay, why worry about it?

You need to understand that employees who smoke are costing you a lot of money, not just when it comes to paying health insurance.

Here a few things to take into consideration: An average smoker is absent 2 days per year than non smoking employees. Naturally, you will have some sort of paid sick time; so that is definitely some mullah out of your pocket!

Smokers are also not as productive as their non smoking counterparts. The smoking breaks that they take is time away from the workplace, even when they return from their break there is efficiency lost as they try to gear back up to face their work.

The average lost of productivity cost per smoking employee is $1,897 per year. That is over $150 per month! And believe it or not, it comes right out of your company's bottom-line.

Workers Compensation costs. The 4 to 10 minutes smoke breaks taken by smoking employees means that the smoker works a whole month less than the non smoking worker!

How you Can Help Smokers Quit You can help smokers quits, because according to surveys, 70 percent of smokers want to kick the habit. By stepping in, you will be meeting the needs of smokers who are dying to quit.

Here are a couple of things that you will need to put into consideration: Direct your employees to community programs aimed at helping smokers quit.

Some Massachusetts carriers will help pay for smoking cessation attempts; this includes counseling. Some Massachusetts carriers subsidize nicotine replacement therapies.

Create a highly supportive workplace Offer a lower health insurance premium incentive to non smokers or employees who enroll in cessation class.

Put a ban on smoking on the company's premises. Doing this will even improve the look of your surrounding, lower exposure to being slammed with lawsuits for second hand smoke injuries and will lower your maintenance expenses.

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