What’s all the puff about?

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Coming into the building at work in the mornings or visiting the offices of some regular clients of mine, I often pass a group of people smoking. And I’ve recently realised that it’s the same people there every time I walk past Perhaps it’s just co-incidence or perhaps they’re there all the time, I don’t know. But it did get me thinking about the companies they work for and how much productivity is lost when one takes a smoke break that turns into a twenty to thirty-minute gab-fest, ten times a day. 

I understand that these people need to smoke – it is an addiction after all, and I have no problem with that but what happens when a two-minute break turns into a twenty minute social? I think we need to get one thing very clear at the start – smoking is not a right, which means you don’t have a right to go out for smoke breaks every ten minutes. And if you’re going to make allowances for that smoker to take such frequent breaks, then someone who enjoys coffee, for example, and needs to go get it every ten minutes, or someone who has a weak bladder, should all be afforded the same time in which to indulge these things. 

The fact is, it is against the law to smoke in business and public spaces, so you can’t say that a smoker has rights in a public or business space or an office environment. What is accepted is if they go to smoke in a space that dedicated as the “smoking area”   The question I am asking is: how much of your work day is spent out there in this smoking section? And are employers willing to pay for this lost time? 

So just to give you some background, in 2000, South Africa became one of the first countries globally to ban public smoking by introducing its Tobacco Control Amendment Act. And so if the owner of a restaurant or pub or workplace breaks the cigarette laws, where smokers are smoking in a non-smoking area or there are under 18s present in the smoking area, then they will be fined up to R50 000. This is because they have put those non-smokers or second-hand smokers at risk through indoor pollution. Second-hand smokers are at risk of the same health problems that smokers are at risk of. In so doing designated smoking areas were formed to cater for smokers.

It might sound unfair to be hammering these people for this, but take for example a receptionist of a company, if he or she wanted to go out every hour for a smoke, that would be a problem because you need the phone to be answered. So companies should have a very clear cut policy on smoke breaks. That way you can regulate work time being lost. So for example, if a person heads out for a five minute smoke break and does this ten times in a day, that’s a whole fifty minutes of time lost. Add to that tea, lunch and comfort breaks and you’re looking at about two and a half hours that you as an employer are paying for.

Wallace Albertyn from Labourman.co.za wrote a piece on the subject where he outlines five points employers must heed to if they want to control the smoke breaks their employees take and ensure that productivity and in turn, money, is not lost.   

• Find a way to record the amount of time a smoker spends on smoke breaks, for example, have a clocking system;
• Ensure the smoking area is not too far from the workplace so employees do not waste time getting to in the office;
• Limit the number of smoke breaks employees can take during working hours, for example, restrict smoke breaks to lunch breaks and tea time;
• Limit the duration of smoke breaks. For example, the employer can designate specific smoking times, impose a smoking shift system so employees do not all smoke at the same time;
• Ensure the smoking area is visible (glass partitions) so the amount of time employees spend in the areas can be monitored or install a CCTV camera to monitor employees.

It sounds quite harsh but it’s all very necessary. 

The other thing would be to give smokers the choice of dividing up their lunch break into smaller units that they could use as smoke breaks. So if you’re given an hour for lunch, take thirty minutes only and the other thirty minutes can be divided into six, five-minute smoke breaks. Of course, all this has to be closely monitored. 

Or as a very last resort, if nothing changes, make them pay a productivity tax. So if you’re a smoker, you’ll be told that the research shows that productivity is decreased due to smoke breaks, and at the end of the month, like you pay UIF, you should also pay an extra one percent because of the lost time. Of course, smokers will be outraged by this, but take a step back and look at it from a non-smokers point of view. 

As a non-smoker, I would love nothing more than to go outside with my cup of tea for twenty minutes at a time, ten times a day and chat to people about Santana coming to South Africa. But if I do that, my employer would haul me over the coals for not being productive. Thankfully I work for myself. But not everyone has that privilege. 

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.