Smoking breaks: How to handle them as a company

For some, it stinks to high heaven, while others long for the blue haze of a cigarette day in, day out. The Federal Statistical Office has figures for 2017. According to these figures, 31% of men and 23.3% of women smoked in 2017 (21.5% and 16.8% daily respectively). 25 to 34-year-old men make up the largest proportion. In other words, a good proportion of the young, working population. Of course, an addiction is not so easy to kick. And so people smoke not only in their private lives, but also at work. The question is: how should companies deal with this?

4 options for how your company can deal with smoking employees

Option 1: You ban smoking completely

The Federal Act on the Protection against Passive Smoking and the fact that it can disrupt business operations allows the company to ban smoking on its own premises. However, you will not be doing smoking employees any favors. If good specialists leave for the competition for this reason, this is of course annoying.

Option 2: You only allow smoking during breaks

If you don't want cigarettes to disrupt employee productivity, but don't have a problem with the matter in principle, you can assign employees to special smoking areas, which may only be visited during the legally prescribed breaks. These are 15 minutes for more than 5.5 hours of work, 30 minutes for more than 7 hours of work and 1 hour for more than nine hours of work. Enough time to smoke a cigarette or two.

Option 3: You also allow smoking outside the statutory breaks

Sometimes breaks help employees to concentrate better. Smoking employees who only think longingly about the next legal break during work and cannot focus on the tasks at hand do not exactly contribute to the productivity of your company. If you want to give your employees the freedom to decide for themselves when a cigarette break is necessary and useful, you can introduce a time recording system that allows them to clock in and out of breaks independently.

Option 4: You allow smoking at any time without recording the required breaks

If you want to give your employees complete freedom, you can give them complete control over their cigarette breaks. This is particularly useful for tasks that can be freely scheduled. However, it could become problematic if the people concerned subsequently apply for overtime because they have to work beyond their usual working hours and then take these again. This can lead to feelings of envy from other employees.

Conclusion: Time recording makes smoking breaks fair for everyone

Most of your employees probably know that smoking is harmful. Nevertheless, addiction is often greater than reason and so the body does not distinguish whether it is in a situation in which it is allowed to smoke or not. Taking short breaks does no harm to productivity. The only important thing is that these are also fair for the entire workforce, whether smokers or not. A modern time recording system helps you to reconcile all needs.

Would you like to find out more about smoking in Switzerland? You can find interesting facts here.