Drug and Alcohol Awareness: How It Can Help Your Business

Running a business can be a tasking challenge for anyone, whether you’re very involved in the day to day running or you take a more reserved approach. Day to day life can affect everyone whether they’re an employer or employee and sometimes it can transition into work. This can often have very negative effects for everyone around them and can have negative effects for your business too.

With alcohol being so abundant and a large part of many people’s lives, there’s more than likely going to be a point where it crosses with work. Drugs are rarer but if not looked at quickly, will change the environment of your workplace very quickly.

Praxis42 bring you a look into how drugs and alcohol can affect your business and workplace with some steps towards helping the individual involved.

Alcohol

We’ve all had them weekend where it lasted a bit too long and we ended up feeling slightly hungover at work. This happens all over the country and affects many businesses daily. Having to deal with employees not coming into work due to a drinking all night, having hungover employees who are slow to pick up work or in the worst case scenario are drunk employee in the workplace that’s a danger to themselves and people around them.

In 2006 survey carried out by YouGov for PruHealth they found “that on any given day around 200,000 British workers turn up to work hungover from the night before” and “nearly one-in-four employees (22 per cent) admit to making mistakes at work as a result of being hungover”

If these problems are left untouched then they can lead to social, psychological and medical problems for the employee. It may be up to you as a business owner and their employer to suggest help in this regard.

Drugs

When people mention drugs, they don’t necessarily mean illegal drugs. Completely legal drugs can have a negative effect on the employee and the workplace if the specific employee becomes addicted to them and relies on them for their day to day function.

Sometimes, people will take new over the counter, prescribed drugs and it’ll have an effect on them that they didn’t expect. Possibly making them slow to work or distracted by the workplace around them. It’s important to notice when drugs are involved in the office and whether your employees have been using them for quite some time to avoid future problems.

Getting Help

A great way to help in these situations is to provide Drug and Alcohol Awareness courses for you and your employees. Online courses can cost as little as £25 each and there are many courses available for the manager and the employee.

It’s important that your business and everyone involved has the knowledge they need to live and work healthily. This way everybody knows what to look out for when somebody has a rough night drinking or has been on a specific drug for a bit too long.

It also removes the need for vital work time to be replaced by going to a course, as they’re all done online, in your own time. You and your employees may have different learning curves and speeds that they take on information. Online, it’s easy for the individual to take on the information and process it in their own time.

Explore the possibilities available to you and your employees and get your business back on track.