Making your workplace smoke free

One of the biggest benefits to getting your employees to quit smoking is that you can turn your business into a smoke free workplace. One of the best reasons to have a smoke free workplace is that it improves the public image of your workplace. Another good reason to have a smoke free workplace is that it can make your business more attractive to future employees who don't smoke, which will increase the pool of potential employees that you have to choose from.

If you do not currently have a smoke free workplace policy for your business here are the steps you will need to follow to develop that kind of policy.

Step one:
Learn about all of the state and local laws and regulations in your state that address smoking. One of the best places to get this information is from the American Lung Association, you can get this information directly from their website at http://slati.lungusa.org/states.asp or you can order publications by calling (202) 785 - 3355. Just keep in mind that when developing your policy you want to ensure that it is in compliance with state and local smoking ordinances.

Step two:
Make sure that you are involving your employees in this policy change because the key to success is to have your employees involved in making the new policy. When choosing which employees to involve in reforming this policy you want to be sure to include both smokers and non-smokers. Also if your business is unionized remember that union involvement in any policy change is absolutely necessary.

Step three:
Give your employees plenty of notice before you put the new policy into place. The reason for this is that they actually need time to prepare for the change, not to mention they need to have enough time to ask any and all questions that they might have about why the policy is going into effect. They need time to be able to understand why you are changing the policy.

Step four:
Make sure that you are always offering your employees appropriate smoking cessation assistance, both before and after you have implemented the new smoke free policy for your workplace. You also want to make sure that you are actively offering these stop smoking programs to your employees. In doing this what you might be surprised to discover is that many of your employees want to quit smoking, the problem is that they just aren't sure how to go about it. Therefore, by aggressively campaigning the stop smoking programs and providing your employees with the resources that they are going to need to stop smoking and to get the help they need to stop smoking you are going to be enabling your employees to quit smoking sooner than they would on their own.

Step five:
By offering incentives for your employees if they quit smoking you are going to get more of the employees on board to quit smoking. This is great because the more employees that you get to quit smoking the more your company is going to save on health care costs because your business will be healthier. Some great incentives to help people quit smoking would be gum for those who replace smoking with gum chewing, cash incentives, recognition in the company newsletter for how many days they have been smoke free, etc.

Step six:
Finally you are going to need to come up with some ways to ensure that your employees are following the policy once you are done developing the policy and have decided to implement it. One of the things that you are going to want to include in the policy is what is going to happen to the people who do not follow the policy. You also want to include how long people have to make changes before the new policy goes into effect. After the initial time period is up you will need to enforce the policy strictly and fairly.

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