Smoking Cessation Programs In The Office

One big concern with employee health is smoking. Smoking increases health insurance premiums for companies but it can cause a number of other issues in the workplace as well. It is vital that you implement a smoking cessation program within your company to reduce your health insurance premiums but also to reduce the amount of sick leave and decreased productivity that your employee are dealing with. One of the important things you will notice when you take the time to implement a strong smoking cessation program in the office is that it will also be able to offer healthier families, not just a single employee. Many of the individuals that get involved with the smoking cessation programs will end up taking this information home to their loved ones and they too may join the program and quit smoking and will focus on improving their health.

One person that smokes will impact the health of their entire family. They can cause health issues to arise for everyone else because of their habit. If you can get this one person to quit smoking, you will find that people are much happier and healthier and the visits to the doctor's office will go down for the entire family. Implementing a smoking cessation program is very affordable to do and you will find that it is very easy to do.

What exactly does a smoking cessation program involve and how can you implement one? Studies done on smoking cessation programs have provided results including the following:
- Decrease in daily cigarette consumption down to 2-4 per day from a package or more
- For every $1 spent on the program your company will get a savings of $5.04 to $6.48 in health insurance costs
- Increase in employee productivity
- Lower maintenance costs
- Reduced impact on co-worker health (no second hand smoke around to cause respiratory problems)

Depending upon the size of your company and how large you would like the smoking cessation to be you can find that implementing 2 weekly meetings into your company for the smokers may truly help to reduce the costs of smoking. It will help to drop the amount of employee time off as well as impacting the costs on your insurance premium. So now that you know how a smoking cessation program will work, how do you start implementing one into your organization? Here are some tips to consider using.

In order to implement a smoking cessation program correctly there are 4 key points that you need to use. These elements will make it easier for you to encourage your employees to implement a program that works effectively:
1. Find the current smokers in the company that want to quit smoking. They are going to be easier for you to work with.
2. Employees that are smoking but may not want to quit. They can benefit from learning a few tips about quitting smoking even if they aren't yet committed to it.
3. Individuals that need on-going support after they have quit smoking.
4. Non smokers that could use some help in teaching their loved ones how to quit smoking. Even if they do not have loved ones that are smokers, they may want to help their co-workers quit smoking.

It is a wise idea to invest in an outside company that can help to create an effective program that is specific to your organization. Having an outside company come in and help you to focus on teaching your employees correctly about smoking cessation may make it easier on you but it also helps the employees to understand their position better. They are likely to understand that what needs to be done to encourage your employees to quit smoking. The company needs to be supportive of employees that are quitting smoking. When people are supported by one another in quitting smoking, it makes it much easier for them to have a chance at actually quitting.