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It's your right to hire only nonsmoking employees.ou have a right to protect your business from financial loss and you have an obligation to protect your employees and provide them with a safe place to work. One way to do that is to eliminate smoking and tobacco use in the workplace by only hiring employees who do not use tobacco products. A smoke-free hiring policy can help a company control healthcare costs and other costs related to smoking, such as daily productivity losses due to smoking breaks. Even if employees do not actively smoke while at work, employers still incur costs, including higher health care expense, extra time off work due to illness, increased workers' compensation utilization, and generally lower job-related productivity. A company may also incur intangible costs associated with a smoker's personal presentation to customers or the public, especially in health-related industries. Moreover, nicotine addicted smokers cannot truly leave their addiction at the door when they enter the workplace. Their use of nicotine and its delivery system, the cigarette, has an ongoing impact on a smoker's personality and behavior long after the last smoking inhalation. Within 30 minutes after finishing the last inhalation, a smoker is already beginning a physiologic withdrawal. Now that Ohio law requires workplaces to be smoke-free, the repetitive withdrawal that smoking employees suffer diminishes both their productivity and affability while at work. This chronic withdrawal helps provide a rationale beyond medical care costs for requiring that employees not smoke on or off the job. Click here to learn more about the legality of these types of hiring policies. Or click here to read about some companies who have already implemented such policies. For Additional Information: |