Smoking out a solution
People Management Magazine, August 2007
In light of the recently implemented smoking ban, many people seem to have been debating whether to allow staff who smoke to have time off during working hours to seek smoking cessation treatment, given the potential resentment that this may cause among non-smoking employees.
As a smoking cessation practitioner, I would argue that allowing smokers to seek professional help makes sense.
On average, smokers take twice as much sick leaves as non-smokers. So it's likely non-smokers are already having to work harder to compensate for their smoking colleagues. If you add the fact that the average smoker takes 40 minutes per day in unoffical smoking breaks, in real terms that equates to around a month less each year that a smoker is present in the workplace compared with non-smoking colleagues.
So when you start to add up the bugbears that smoking already causes among the non-smokers, any potential detrimental effects involved in allowing smokers to attend treatment during working hours seems negligible.
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