I am an employer of about 12 people. More than half of them are smokers. I have personally hired at least half of the people currently working for me, and most of the new hires happen to be smokers. Now, let’s get down to observations.
We work in an extremely busy environment and usually do not have much extra staff around. What this means is, anyone who is on break is severely missed if they are gone for very long, and if they are out of pager range, it causes problems. We generally work 8-10 hour days. All employees are paid for the entire shift. Our policy is that if we are needed, our breaks need to be cut short to take care of customers.
When a nonsmoker takes a break, they usually stay inside the store, and sit close by so they can hear if they are needed and can also see if the lines are getting too long. My observations have been that nonsmokers usually take one short 10 – 20 minute break and then get back to work. If it is slow, they may extend their break to 1/2 hour, but that is a rarity.
The policy for smokers is that they are allowed a cigarette break once every 2 hours if business allows. What I have observed here is that the primary focus of every smoker is to make damn sure nothing gets in the way of getting out either right at 2 hours or shaving it short whenever possible if they don’t think I will notice. Secondly, they always have to go outside, but, rather than staying reasonably close to the side of the building so they can hear if they are paged, they either go as far away as possible to hide, or, they go in their cars, so they can’t hear the pager. They also tend not to notice if there is lots of business suddenly coming in, so do not automatically stub out their cigarette and get back inside to help out.
When I do remind everyone of our break policies, they shape up for a short while, but it never takes very long for them to go right back to the other way of doing things. Now, I do understand that it is an addiction, but, shouldn’t the nonsmokers be able to do exactly the same thing to feed their habits then? That is where the biggest problems typically arise. No matter how the policy is applied, the nonsmokers feel that they are being cheated by having to work harder than the smokers, and the smokers feel that they are being picked on even if the policy is applied right by the book.
Personally, I am now a nonsmoker. I never did smoke a lot, but, I do remember working at a place that didn’t give nonsmokers any break at all. Therefore, I became a smoker just so I could take a break. That definitely didn’t make any sense! Needless to say, I didn’t stay there very long because any place with a policy like that really isn’t a place I wanted to be anyway.
In their favor, some of the smokers are also my best employees. The problem with this is that if they didn’t smoke, they would be even better! As stated earlier, even the best ones can’t seem to help cheating the system as much as possible to make sure they get their fix. This is the issue that makes my frustration levels soar! As a manager, I am still one of the workers. I also work more hours than any of my employees by far. Therefore, if they are making sure they get more breaks so they can smoke, guess who gets stuck making up for the lost work efficiencies?
Is there a correlation between smoking and being a bad employee? Yes. If someone is a bad employee anyway, being a smoker makes them worse. If someone is a good employee, being a smoker generally makes them less good than they could otherwise be. This latter statement is supported by someone that has worked for me. This person quit smoking a couple of different times. During the time he was not smoking, he was a model of efficiency and good customer service. When he started smoking again, I could tell before I even saw him buy cigarettes because his productivity went down immediately and he was much more distracted by clock-watching to know when he could go out for another cigarette within the approved time frame.
I will not say that there isn’t anything else people do that might also contribute to being poor employees, but in my observations, those other things also exist within the smokers, so smoking is often just one more addition to the problem.
For those smokers that do not take advantage of the system and do not let their habit get in the way of being the best employee they can be, I apologize and also wish I could find some of you to come to work with me.
