What is the problem with costs and lack of productivity for both the employee and the employer?

Companies are only in sync when all parties work together. Smoking can affect cost and productivity, now the big question is in it in a good way or bad. Smoking can affect a company in different ways. One way is through its employees and another is through the employer. You might not think your life choices to smoke can affect your job but our life choices affect us daily. 

How it affects your job as an employee?
As an employee, your work for a company is crucially important. You’re the backbone that keeps a company moving. Now smoking is your choice, no one can tell you to stop if you don’t want to stop. You get breaks and you’re allowed to do with them as you please. Smoking is very addictive so you need to go out and get a cigarette more than once or twice a day but it’s not like you can smoke at your desk or in a building. Your choice to smoke is yours but it doesn’t mean you can affect the people around you. So every time you need to get a cigarette you got up to find the designated smoking area, sit there for 15 minutes, and finish your cigarette. Seems harmless until those 15 minutes were just the amount of time you needed to finish a project. 

Productivity is lost due to smoking breaks

Now you have to stay later at work when you could have gone home. Let’s say you also worked on the hourly pay and you have to leave by a certain time and now you haven’t finished your work and your company mandates you have to clock out by 5’clock. Now that affects your productivity and now your manager is keeping their eye on you because you’re not getting your work done on time.  This causes stress about money and security of your job.

How it affects your job as an employer?
As an employer, you run the company. This is your business and you want to see it succeed. The same thing goes for you as well. It is your choice to smoke, but how does it affect your company? Even employers have to take breaks and as a smoker, you might need more than one break. This is the same as if you had an employee that smokes; you’re going to need to take those 15-minute breaks to finish that cigarette which could have been used to make an important phone call, sign some documents, and even get ready for an important meeting. Smokers get more breaks at work and as an employer, you don’t want to smell like cigarettes. It doesn’t come off as professional and can affect business deals and how people may view your work ethic. Now of course this is a choice, not a life sentence.

The way it affects both together?  
A person is like paper. Weird metaphor but bare with me.  Paper is absorbent; whatever you write on it becomes an important law, a love letter, the best home-cooked mac and cheese ever, a dream that no one knows yet. The same goes for people.  We, of course, don’t write on ourselves but we become what we worked to be, ambition to succeed, in love, and caretaker, a childhood dream we want to make happen. Yet just like paper when you spill coffee on it, that paper gets stained and will smell like coffee for a long time, maybe even ruining the document forever and messing up the words. That happens to people as well when you’re a smoker.  You are staining your body with the chemical that beckons you to be addicted. It forces you to do things its way and it leaves its mark on you when you are done with a perfume of smoke for everyone to know what transpired. Smoking can affect your work, the small pack of cigarettes tells you when it’s time to have another. Leave you less time to finish what needs to get done. Putting stress on you now that you have less time to get work done which means you can lose your job or lose a business deal, which makes you smoke more. It can mess up the words you have put on yourself to succeed in your life. Of course, a different course of action can change everything for you.

Ways to help you quit smoking?
There are many companies today that are built to help other companies’ employees and employers stop smoking and help improve your work environment. It has been shown that non-smokers are more productive at work. As Mindcotine, we specialize in helping businesses using a unique combination of virtual reality, mindfulness, and CBT, called VR-MET, as a way to make smokers take back their health and for companies to save up to $8,000 per year por smoker.

If this resonates reach to emilio@mindcotine.com or request a demo at www.mindcotine.com

Renee Rameshwar