
In the wake of “National No Smoking Day”, many employers have once again been faced with the tricky questions: just how involved in your employees’ business should you be; should smoking be completely banned from the workplace, and should there be separate rules for e-cigarette smokers?
Should smoking at work be banned completely?
Though it’s already illegal to smoke indoors, there is debate over whether smoking should be banned completely during working hours, with breaks and lunch hours included. While there are clear advantages to banning smoking at work, it’s important to understand that a blanket approach is unlikely to work for everyone. With many companies investing in company perks such as life and health insurance schemes, healthy employees who aren’t risking developing one of the many illnesses associated with smoking are likely to be preferable, and so many employers will opt to ban their staff from lighting up. Furthermore, enabling employees to smoke during the working day means that your non-smoking staff are exposed to the effects of second-hand smoke; even if you do choose to provide a designated smoking area, smoke will often still be brought into the workplace on the clothes and belongings of those who have been outside. Allowing staff to smoke at work means you’ll have to factor in smoking breaks, and this is where the issue can become complicated; you can either ban smoking during operational hours and only permit it at lunch or you’ll have to consider how often your staff should be allowed to go outside. If you choose to allow smoking breaks, you should be aware that your employees who don’t smoke may take issue with this, as they’re likely to feel that they’re also entitled to extra breaks throughout the day.- How one SME is growing fast thanks to the e-cigarette revolution
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What about employees who use e-cigarettes?
Currently there are no set rules on the use of e-cigarettes in the workplace, however, employers should ensure they’re handling the situation carefully. Whilst e-cigarettes are generally considered to be better and safer from a health-related viewpoint, the reality is that the long-term effects are still unknown. If you do allow the use of e-cigarettes in your workplace, are you going to allow it indoors? It’s worth bearing in mind that this could cause an unpleasant working environment for those who don’t smoke, as vapour would likely remain in the air. Alternatively, asking employees with e-cigarettes to smoke outside could actually harm their efforts to leave smoking behind, particularly if they have to share a smoking area with employees with real cigarettes.Share this story