To encourage its employees to quit smoking, a British company has decided to reward those who have quit smoking for at least a year by offering them 4 additional days off.
It is an original and benevolent initiative in business that could well be emulated. Rather than sanctioning its 11 smoking employees, the British recruitment firm KCJ Training and Employment decided to motivate them to quit smoking permanently… by offering them 4 additional days of vacation.
“I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t we all quit smoking?’” explained to the site. Recruiter Don Bryden, the firm’s director, himself a smoker. “I told the employees what I was going to do. Those who don’t take a smoke break will get four extra vacation days per year… I prefer to reward non-smokers and encourage smokers to quit because a healthier workplace is a happier workplace,” he says. he.
A generally well-received idea
According to Don Bryden, his employees, whether or not they smoke, welcomed his idea “warmly”. Some would have said that “it’s a fantastic idea”. One of its employees, however, would have objected that it is “discrimination against smokers”. “The fact that smokers go out to smoke a cigarette is discriminatory against non-smokers,” argues the British boss. A sign according to him that this method would work: one in two employees have already quit smoking, or are about to do so.
In his interview with Recruiter, Don Bryden encourages British employers to follow his example, but warns them: it is up to them to determine how many days of leave are equivalent to quitting smoking in their company, cigarette breaks not always having the same length and the same frequency according to the employees. “I think you have to think about what fair compensation is. This is where each company must carry out a fine assessment of its case.”
Cigarette breaks, a thorn in the side of companies
As reminded LCI, the firm KCJ Training and Employment is not the only one to have offered additional days off to its employees in exchange for their cessation of cigarettes. In 2017, in Japan, the firm Piala Inc had already rewarded its non-smoking workers by granting them more holidays. The hidden objective? Encourage them to give up their cigarette break, which would reduce the performance (and therefore the profits) of the company. “It is true that the offices are located at 29and floor, and that smokers have no choice but to go downstairs to smoke their cigarettes. The boss found the proposal fair, and rolled it out, giving non-smokers extra time to compensate,” a company employee told The Telegraph.
According to the “Tobacco, territory, work” survey conducted in June 2009 by the CSA Santé institute, employees who smoke are indeed “less productive, less concentrated at work, more subject to road hazards and more often ill” than those who don’t smoke.
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