Time to Breathe: Smoking Prevention

Smoking Prevention as Part of Corporate Wellbeing

Implementing healthy lifestyle programs in the workplace is not just a social initiative, but an economically justified step. Within a comprehensive corporate wellbeing program, smoking prevention holds a special place. The speaker explains why employee smoking is a problem for business and how to properly organize efforts to reduce nicotine addiction in the workforce.

The Economics of Smoking: How Much Business Loses

To launch a prevention program, it is necessary to speak to the business in the language of numbers. The presentation details the calculation of company losses due to smoking employees. On average, losses amount to about 200,000 rubles per year per smoking employee. This amount consists of lost working time for smoke breaks (about 96,000 rubles), frequent sick leaves (8,000 rubles), and an overall decrease in labor productivity (another 96,000 rubles). Understanding these figures helps justify the need for investments in staff health.

Monitoring and Identifying the Target Audience

The first step to solving the problem is assessing the current situation. Using their company as an example, the speaker shows how an annual healthy lifestyle survey helps not only to find out the percentage of smokers but also to identify those who want to quit. It turned out that three-quarters of smoking employees want to get rid of this habit. They become the main target audience of the program. In addition, regular monitoring allows department heads to clearly understand the situation in their teams.

Interactive Methods and Changing Mindsets

Standard scare tactics, such as scary pictures on cigarette packs, often do not work. Instead, it is proposed to use interactive approaches. For example, placing QR codes in smoking areas leading to a corporate wellbeing platform. There, employees can receive individual consultations from healthy lifestyle experts and psychologists. An important element is "healthy lifestyle contacts," where employees are offered to take a short test to assess the degree of nicotine addiction. The results often surprise the employees themselves, showing a weak addiction, which becomes an incentive to quit smoking.

Encouragement and Leadership

Support and encouragement for those who decide to quit smoking play a key role. If an employee successfully abstains from smoking for two months, they are publicly rewarded. This not only consolidates personal success but also serves as an example for colleagues. It is important to note that the program is implemented without prior promises of financial bonuses, which makes the results more sincere. The personal example of top executives is also critical to the success of the initiative.

Results and Future Plans

The results of the program implementation are impressive: in a few months, 88 employees quit smoking, which allowed the company to save about 16 million rubles a year. Plans include achieving a 15% quit rate among the target audience, integrating healthy lifestyle indicators into the assessment of line walks by managers, distributing motivational literature, and launching a "health relay" with the participation of top management.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to calculate the company's financial losses due to smoking employees?
• What methods help identify workers ready to quit smoking?
• How to use interactive tools and wellbeing platforms to support employees?
• Why is it important to publicly reward those who have quit smoking, and how does it affect the team?
• How to integrate healthy lifestyle indicators into the industrial safety assessment system?