How much money do you lose on smoking employees?

Smokers are costing their employers millions of dollars on lost production costs, sick leave, and healthcare costs. Smokers not only endanger their health, they endanger the health of their co-workers. Several companies have implemented smoking cessation programs to discourage employees from smoking. These programs can offer incentives to employees if they quit smoking or they can be a little more extreme by charging them extra money for healthcare or they can even fire an employee for smoking. Smokers often feel that their lifestyle choice is their decision and their employers have no business poking around with it. This may have been the case in the past but employers have the right to fire employees that are costing their company too much money. So how much money do smokers cost their employers? Here are some statistics that may surprise you:

• Smokers healthcare costs are 40 percent higher from their healthy co-workers
• Employees that smoke cost their employers roughly $1,429 more per year compared to their non-smoking co-workers
• Employers spend nearly $40 billion a year due to disability costs and premature death costs that are directly related to smoking
• Smokers take 2-3 times the amount of sick leave than their healthy co-workers
• Smokers are 50 percent more likely to be hospitalized due to complications from smoking (compared to non-smoking individuals)
• Smoking costs roughly $120 million dollars or more in fire damage costs
• Smokers are less productive because they have less energy and are prone to more illnesses.
• If those costs don't convince you to implement a smoking cessation, then perhaps this will:
• The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that smokers will die 7-20 years earlier from healthy individuals. Smoking causes roughly 440,000 premature deaths in the United States and about $157 billion is spent in healthcare costs.
• Smoking causes 30 percent of cancer deaths. This number is actually on the rise since the CDC has uncovered several different types of cancer that are directly linked to smoking.
• Smokers have 5 times as many heart attacks as non-smokers.

What does smoking do to the body? Smoking damages your lungs and other areas of your body. When you smoke, you restrict oxygen to the bloodstream and harmful toxins are pumped throughout the body. Smoking attacks the heart, lungs, and brain. When you restrict the blood flow in the body, all of your organs start to fail and eventually many of them will just give up. Smoking is the culprit of several problems like yellow teeth, bad breath, decreased circulation in the fingers and toes, skin wrinkles, heartburn, chronic coughing, vision loss, arthritis, and hearing loss.

Implementing a smoking cessation program is a wise decision if you want to increase productivity and reduce healthcare costs. By promoting a smoke-free workplace, you will protect your healthy employees from exposure to second-hand smoke. Several people die as a direct result of exposure to second-hand smoke and this number is also on the rise. Smokers don't often think about the people they are harming when they light up.

If you plan to implement a smoking cessation program, hold a big company event to let all of your employees know of your plans. Show them the costs of smoking and why you are planning to implement this program to save money. Make it a policy and give each of your employees a copy of the policy. Enforce harsh restrictions on employees that are caught disobeying the policy. One penalty you can try is to start charging your employees more money for healthcare if they are caught smoking. This is a great way to recover some of the money you are spending on this employee each year and it's a great way to send a message to your other employees that smoking will not be tolerated.

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• How to help your employees stop smoking
• How to create support for employee wellness
• How employers are working to reduce obesity in their employees
• How employee wellness programs benefit everyone
• Great tips to improve health and wellness
• Does changing furniture provide you with better employee health?
• Common issues of employee health
• Benefits versus cost of employee wellness programs
• Are health and safety assessments meaningful?