Taking a proactive initiative to maintain or ensure employee safety is an excellent way to practice a healthy environment for your organisation. Meanwhile, it is a known fact that drugs or alcohol or both have caused accidents and can impair one’s decision-making skills. Furthermore, a workplace demands you to be your best self to carry out your daily tasks and functions. Especially in workplaces with heavy machinery, one can injure themselves and others if they are under the influence. In addition, employees that are addicted or are into chronic use of drugs and alcohol put people around them at risk due to their slow reaction time in situations and less productivity impact on the organisation.
So, there are various instances where the workplaces can conduct the test; they include pre-employment, random testing, or after rehabilitation to ensure that the employees are not abusing drugs again. Besides, adopting drug and alcohol testing shows that companies care about the safety of their employees. Apart from these factors, there are various reasons why workplaces can benefit from testing for alcohol and drugs, such as:
1. Productivity
Testing is a way to ensure that the barriers to productivity are not in the environment but due to the external force, and in this case, drugs. Once that is clear, the person can work towards the issue to perform better at work and provide a better quality of work. This can also terminate contracts for those who do not adhere to workplace practices. Or it can be an indicator to hire people likely to meet your goals as an organisation and perform their duties without putting anyone at risk. Meanwhile, chronic users often fall sick due to the intake and its adverse effects on the body. It leads to absenteeism, directly affecting productivity, which testing could eliminate.
2. Reduce Overall Turnover
In environments that are not healthy and could lead to conflicts, employees opt to switch jobs to have a better work atmosphere. As such, many cases are being reported where one of the employees was under the influence of drugs and had a conflict with a colleague that ended up in violent behaviour. It also affects the mood of other employees, which could be dealt with by testing employees for drugs or alcohol. And this inadvertently affects your overall turnover. It also helps you as an organisation to save recruitment costs. Nevertheless, if employees don’t leave, you don’t need to hire them.
3. Avoid Legal Issues
The abovementioned conflicts may lead to claims and legal battles without which the company can do better. The legal issues affect not only the name of the employee but also the company, which affects your market value. These conflicts and poor decision-making skills can cause severe damage to the company. And these could be avoided by randomly testing the employees to ensure better checking.
Based on the policies of every industry, you can take a call on what needs to be done after the process of drug and alcohol testing. It could be termination, voluntary resignation, providing help to the employee, or any other suitable option. Testing ensures that your workplace is healthy, and a healthier workspace brings in better results in terms of productivity. Therefore depending on the field, industry and setting, you can adopt these tests for peace of mind and a better workplace.
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