Monash Business Review
|
|
Home
| Databases
| WorldLII
| Search
| Feedback
Monash Business Review |
|
Business is starting to wake up and smell the Colombian. Time to make changes in the workplace, says Peter Holland.
Drug and alcohol addiction in the white-collar workforce and the pressures that lead to addiction have been a celebrated part of popular culture since the coke-snorting, heavy-drinking, stressed yuppie made their debut in the 1980s. The familiar white-collar metronome of get up, go to work, get stressed, go to bed, do it again, is fertile ground for alcohol and illicit drug abuse. Add to this issues of longer hours and the individual’s perception of job insecurity and you have a fermenting situation where the solution lies not in attacking the problem but in changing the workplace in which alcohol and illicit drug use thrives.
Credible research indicates substance abuse costs industry (predominantly in lost productivity) $3.7 billion each year; $10 billion annually in employee turnover, poor decision-making and employee stress; and accounts for 10 per cent of workplace deaths and 25 per cent of workplace accidents. According to The National Health and Medical Research Council, 22 per cent of the working population drinks alcohol at harmful levels with up to 27 per cent of the working population experiencing alcohol-related problems annually.
This can initially be related to the nature and role of alcohol in Australian culture. As noted by wine expert Jancis Robertson, “It is the dogmatism with which we insist that to drink is normal, to abstain abnormal, that suggests our attitudes to alcohol… The reason we do not take the trouble to scrutinise our drinking habits may be partly because we are reluctant about what the scrutiny might bring.”
There is little doubt that we work longer, harder hours than we did 20 years ago with a cross-sectional analysis of occupations revealing white-collar and professionals lead the charge.
On an international comparison, Australians work 13 per cent longer than the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development member nation average per employee. Add to this the fact that compared to Europeans we have fewer holidays and 60 per cent of us don’t take our full leave entitlements, Australia is arguably the most overworked nation in the world.
“Australia is not the land of the long weekend and the endless sickies our mythology tells us,” claims Clive Hamilton, Executive Director of the Australia Institute, in Fioni Buffini’s article Barbie’s off, they’ve all gone to work in The Weekend Financial Review (20-21 November 2004).
“We are working longer and harder than anyone else in the world at great cost to health and personal relationships,” he says.
This new work culture is also seen as not only blurring but invading the boundaries of work and home and it’s no coincidence that this increased engagement with work parallels the technology revolution. The internet makes it easy to check emails, and the mobile phone puts workers on call 24/7, creating a seamless connection of time on and off the job.
Who worked more than 45 hours a week in Australia in 2001? 19.5 per cent were manager/administrators; 23.5 per cent professionals; 15.9 per cent associate professionals; 14.6 per cent tradespersons; and 10.5 per cent construction workers.
Under Australian occupational health and safety (OH&S) legislation, employers have a duty to provide a safe workplace for all employees, visitors and passers-by. Significantly, the duty of employers is not confined to avoiding injuries but also mitigating their risk, thus employers are obligated to provide a safe workplace which logically extends to the prevention of injuries arising from alcohol and drug use.
Research from the US, where workplace drug testing is common, indicates that it reduces absenteeism and accidents and is the most popular method of removing the issue of substance abuse. These points provide a compelling case for drug and alcohol testing in the workplace to ensure that employees are meeting their contractual obligations to a satisfactory standard, and also to ensure that employers meet the requirements of duty of care under OH&S legislation. Implicit in these points is that employers who do not have alcohol and drug testing policies and programs are potentially maintaining an unsafe workplace.
While employers might see the development of drug and alcohol policies as a proactive and responsible stance, without an understanding of the reason for the problems, it critically misses the vital issue of workplace culture, which is central to the use of legal and illegal drugs.
In a variety of cultures, formal and informal pressures still encourage weekly after-work team building and relaxation based on alcohol consumption while caffeine and tobacco are embraced in ritualised breaks.
In the white collar environment, Rigby writes in The highs and lows of drug use in the corporate world in The Weekend Australian (8-9 January 2005) drug and alcohol addiction in the financial services, and the pressures that lead to addiction, have been a celebrated part of popular culture since the coke-snorting, heavy-drinking stressed yuppie made their debut in the 1980s.
In the City (London’s financial heart), on Wall Street and in similar environments the world over, there’s no doubt that drug and alcohol use and abuse are widespread and even talked about, but almost always in the third person.
“And if individuals are cagey, banks and brokerage houses are more reticent still. The attitude is very much don’t ask, don’t tell,” says one former banker.
In the workplace, holding the view that drug use is a problem for the individual worker avoids any exploration of how the workplace may contribute to the problem. To gain an understanding of workplace drug problems, one must look at a full range of factors that influence drug use patterns.
This is supported by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) that argues that any consideration of alcohol and illicit drug abuse in the workplace needs a broad consideration of the environmental factors. The ACTU argues that the misuse of alcohol and other drugs may be symptomatic of other problems including unrealistic deadlines; lack of job satisfaction; lack of participation and control; and work culture. Many of these issues are reflected in the new white-collar culture where work intensification goes hand-in-hand with increased job insecurity and stress.
• Much of this increase in stress has been stimulated by changes in work organisation in the second half of the 20th century. Among the changes:
• Jobs have become more complex
• Responsibility in the workplace has been devolved to less senior personnel
• Employer organisations have become larger and more global
• Manual labour has been mechanised
• Machines have become more ‘intelligent’
• Continuous production schedules have disrupted daily life patterns and resulted in more people working for extended periods.
Indeed, fatigue and stress generated by these factors combined with increased deregulation of the labour market in Australia raises major OH&S workplace issues. Evidence suggests that it is fatigue that creates the need for employees to sustain themselves under these pressures leading to drug and alcohol abuse and workplace problems and accidents. As such, employers need to re-evaluate their perceptions of the issue.
“Some level of stress is a normal part of working life, especially in financial services,” claims Priory Group medical director Neil Brener, “and the disruption it causes is largely down to how people cope with it. But when stress and anxiety escalate, employees tend to suffer from such symptoms as anxiety, depression, panic and chest pains. If these go on for a long time, sufferers seek coping strategies ranging from say, obsessive exercise at the gym to rowing with their partner – to drugs and alcohol.
“Both are readily available and readily acceptable. You have a few drinks and you feel better, alcohol is much part of the City financial culture. But if you add long working hours and the need to be alert, the other big coping method is drugs and these can often be used in combination. Cocaine lifts you, but then you need alcohol to bring you down. Maybe even other drugs like Valium, too.”
Traditionally, the concept of fitness for duty meant little more than pre-employment screening of employees to determine their capacity to meet the requirements of the job. Now it is seen as a more holistic (and pragmatic) approach for testing for a wide range of physical and psychological factors which may impair performance. While the search for appropriate tests remains, the philosophical underpinning of this approach is that the causes of impairment or abuse of drugs and alcohol are not confined to circumstances within the employee’s control.
This also provides the first step in employers’ understanding the impact of workplace conditions, attitude and culture. The importance of this approach is to highlight key issues driving these problems in the workplace and providing employers with understanding and the opportunity to address them.
“There are signs that business is starting to wake up and smell the Colombian,” says Nicholson McBride corporate psychologist Charles Sutton. “Although stress levels may have stayed the same, the media and public awareness of it as a problem has risen. Plus businesses are implementing programs to reduce stress and the risk of being sued. The idea of ethical responsibility has also crept up the ladder, along with a less altruistic realisation that rehabilitation of an employee might be better value than a replacement.”
Brener argues if you’re a bank senior executive it’s often cheaper to take you out and fix you up than replace you. Which, if you’re talking about being an in-patient for 28 days at a cost of about $30,000, is a pretty good deal if someone is on a salary of $700,000 a year.
While alcohol and illicit substance abuse in the workplace may need to be viewed in the context of the provision of a safe and healthy workplace, it is not a singular issue, and therefore should be examined in the broader context of OH&S in the workplace. The concept of fitness for duty highlights the impact of drugs and alcohol and how they may impair employee capabilities. Significantly, the origins of these impairments fall variously within the control of employees and employer. As such, an isolationist (single-issue) approach may deal with the symptoms rather than the causes by removing the employee from the workplace, but not the reasons for abuse that remain.
Dr Peter Holland (PhD, University of Tasmania, MA Kent) is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Employee Relations at Monash University. His current research interests are new patterns of work organisation, union strategy and monitoring and surveillance in the workplace.
AustLII:
Copyright Policy
|
Disclaimers
|
Privacy Policy
|
Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MonashBusRw/2005/14.html