the best way forward is to use a carrot and stick approach

Being the boss of a company gives you a lot of power to help your employees succeed and ultimately if they succeed so will you. One of the biggest but often overlooked actions that bosses can take is to improve the health of their employees. With smoking being a major influence on poor health in the workplace, probably the best thing you can do as a boss is too give incentives to your employees to quit.

In fact, the best way forward is to use a carrot and stick approach. There must be an incentive for your employees to quit as well as the proverbial stick to keep them on track.

Firstly make sure that the smoking areas for your employees are not in pleasant areas; somewhere near the rubbish bins is always a good idea. It is important that your employees don’t look forward to going to their cigarette break too much and only go for one when they really have a strong craving.

Secondly, [this is the carrot part] make sure that you give them incentives to be smoke free. The best incentive is always hard cash and this has been proven by a research project done in America. You can tell your employees that you will give them as little as £5 a day for staying off cigarettes which will be added to their monthly salary. You can also add the condition that it must all be paid back if they smoke within a year. You must also remember that your employees will save money of their own by not buying cigarettes which could mean that over a year they end up with an extra £4,000 in their pocket.

This may cost you quite a bit of money over the year but you are very likely to get that back in increased motivation, loyalty and less absenteeism. Healthy employees produce healthier profits than unhealthy ones and there’s nothing like grateful employees to spur on a company to greater heights.

It seems crazy that the health benefits alone of quitting smoking are not enough to motivate employees to quit but unfortunately the human brain responds better to hard cash than to common sense.