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 Drug Free Workplace What it Feels Like to Say "NO" |
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Drug Free Workplace What it Feels Like to Say "NO" |
In big business "you make a profit." In small business, you "survive" or "thrive" or "grow." In small business, profit means full-time work for everyone, or permanent jobs or even overtime for a while. In big business the talk is about shareholders. In small business, it's about jobs. In small business, any talk about substance abuse is rare because everyone hopes the problem will go away before someone's job is on the line.
For many reasons, including safety in the workplace, small business owners are beginning to say "No" to employees with a substance abuse problem: "No, you can't work today", or "No, we haven't got a job for you", or "No, you can't come back here." In small businesses, unlike big businesses, the employer knows the name behind the "No" and not just from seeing it on paystubs and benefits packages.
In small businesses, such as Big Creek Lumber in California, employees often know each other quite well, often on more than a work basis. At Big Creek, the human resources director, Ellen McCrary, is remembered by many employees as a kid just starting out in the family business, now several generations old. Now, she performs a critical role for the company in seeing that accidents do not eat away at the bottom line and compromise the future of the company and of everyone's jobs. She is the one who must tell a family breadwinner that his problem is affecting his work and either it goes, or he does. She must say these things in the face of his family's fears, or because of them.
All the issues surrounding workplace substance abuse hit close to home in a small business like Big Creek Lumber. McCrary can describe every referral to the employee assistance program (EAP) in the last four years and knows the story behind every recovery. She is also witness to the daily signs that someone is having a problem.
Big Creek Lumber, in operation for nearly 50 years, is a big part of its community. Many employees, including McCrary, are second generation, which makes changing the workplace- by trying to reduce the tolerance for alcohol abuse, very difficult.
Substance abusers in a small business do not act much differently than they do anywhere else, except that in the family atmosphere created, they can use emotional leverage to avoid taking responsibility for their problems. McCrary finds that they will try to make her responsible for their problems, but she has some emotional leverage, too. Her family wants to feel good about the contribution the company is making to the community. For McCrary, that means making employees' jobs safe and secure and ensuring that the EAP is available and confidential to employees seeking assistance on their own.
Assistance providers give presentations on substance abuse to the employees. McCrary has observed that successful recovery occurs when employees help each other. Recovered alcoholics seem to make themselves available to encourage recovery in fellow empl oyees. She would like to broaden the program, possibly to include drug testing, which could curtail use before it becomes abuse, reducing the burden of deciding when and how to intervene.
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