Alcohol and Work Study

The following is a press release from the Harvard and Boston University Schools of Public Health and the JSI Training and Research Institute, Inc. It summarizes the major findings from a landmark study into alcohol and work. The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholisim (NIAAA).

WORKPLACE ALCOHOL POLICY BROUGHT INTO QUESTION:
PRODUCTIVITY MOST AFFECTED BY NON-ALCOHOLICS

Dear Diary: It was a beautiful wedding. Lots of dancing. Champagne toasts, open bar. Had a fun time and the bride seemed happy. Got home late, fell asleep right away. Woke up at 3 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned. Got to work 15 minutes late in the morning. Couldn’t concentrate all day. Postponed writing the quarterly report until tomorrow when I can think clearly.

It seems harmless, but an employee who drinks a few too many drinks during an occasional Sunday night celebration or has a drink at lunch could be costing their company money. These employees aren’t alcoholics and they don’t have what could be classified as a traditional drinking problem. Nevertheless, a new "Alcohol and Work" study (for more information see the Wall Street Journal article) recently included in the l998 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Anthology and conducted by researchers from the Harvard and Boston University Schools of Public Health, along with the JSI Research and Training Institute, Inc., reveals that the majority of alcohol-related work performance problems are attributed to these employees —employees who are not alcohol dependent, but who occasionally drink too much on a worknight or have a drink during a workday lunch.

It isn’t that alcoholics don’t cause serious problems. They do. But there are so many more nondependent drinkers in the workforce that the total sum of their productivity problems outweighs those caused by employees who are truly alcohol dependent. This finding implies there is a need for a critical shift in workplace substance abuse policy. Currently, most worksite alcohol policies and efforts focus on finding and treating alcoholics, not on also shaping the norms and attitudes of all employees and educating them about the effects of occasional excessive drinking — or any drinking during the workday — on their ability to do their jobs.

This is important because it is also clear that the existing alcohol policies are failing – failing to address all the ways alcohol impacts productivity and failing to alert all employees about the relationship of "hangovers" and lunchtime drinking on work performance. In this new study, many supervisors and employees admitted that they didn’t know what the company alcohol policies were, including rules about drinking before driving a company vehicle.

Jonathan Howland, PhD, Co-investigator, Professor at Boston University School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study, says that these findings indicate the need for re-thinking the way we address the role of alcohol in the workplace.

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, workplace productivity is not only impacted by those with the illness of alcoholism, but by those nondependent employees who sometimes drink heavily the night before work or who drink at lunch. Excessive alcohol use which upsets sleep and decreases concentration can affect the employee and productivity goes downhill, even if the person does not have the classic hangover symptoms of headache and nausea. By not focusing on these types of drinking behaviors, worksites are missing key opportunities to affect the bottom line and their company’s overall performance. Efforts should be made to educate all employees about the relationship between drinking and productivity."

Adds Thomas W. Mangione, PhD, Project Director and Senior Research Scientist at JSI,

"The drinking individual’s productivity is not the only thing that is affected. Current estimates of productivity losses due to alcohol exposure don’t account for "secondhand" effects. In the Alcohol and Work study, 21% of workers reported their productivity was affected because of co-workers’ drinking, including being injured or put in danger, having to re-do work, or cover for a co-worker. Taking into account these "secondhand" effects of alcohol in the workplace means that common estimates of alcohol-related productivity costs are vastly underestimated."

Other surprising findings include:

• Managers are more than three times as likely to drink during working hours than hourly workers.
• Even within the same companies, worksites and workgroups develop their own micro-cultures about drinking. That is, they develop norms which influence how an individual drinks at work as well as away from work.
• There is broad support among managers, supervisors, and hourly workers for assisting employees whose drinking behavior causes problems for themselves, their co-workers, or their company.

This information is based on the results of a large worksite alcohol study, conducted in two phases among managers, supervisors, and workers at seven Fortune 500 companies. The researchers had the opportunity to conduct face-to-face interviews with more than 150 senior corporate executives and plant managers, conduct over 150 focus groups, and survey nearly 14,000 employees at all levels of management. The study was funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). The newly released Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Anthology entitled To Improve Health and Health Care l998, published by Jossey-Bass, includes the chapter "Alcohol and Work" summarizing this study.

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