Any advice on how to manage smoking breaks, should this time be deducted from lunch time? Employees seem to take a smoking break every hour plus a lunch break... Our workforce has more smokers than non-smokers...
I took a three-pronged approach to this at a workplace that had a large proportion of smokers.
1. Yes, smoke breaks come out of their one-hour contractual break, to a maximum of 4 smoke breaks per day (we did some observations and identified that, contrary to the belief of smokers that a typical smoke break was five minutes long they were, in fact, about ten minutes long).
2. We moved the smoking area to make it longer walk. In compensation, we made it more sheltered, but we did find that the number of smoke breaks people took on rainy days came down by about 25%.
3. We began to look at ways to encourage smoking cessation. Now, this last one didn't get a lot of traction by the time I moved on, but had a lot of potential to explore.
I took a three-pronged approach to this at a workplace that had a large proportion of smokers.
1. Yes, smoke breaks come out of their one-hour contractual break, to a maximum of 4 smoke breaks per day (we did some observations and identified that, contrary to the belief of smokers that a typical smoke break was five minutes long they were, in fact, about ten minutes long).
2. We moved the smoking area to make it longer walk. In compensation, we made it more sheltered, but we did find that the number of smoke breaks people took on rainy days came down by about 25%.
3. We began to look at ways to encourage smoking cessation. Now, this last one didn't get a lot of traction by the time I moved on, but had a lot of potential to explore.
