Company gives non-smokers six days holiday to compensate for cigarette breaks
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Nowadays we use the coffee/watercooler break but it's not quite the same as getting out of the building, feeling the outside air against the skin (hot or cold) and getting a change of scenery. We've tries the walk around the parking lot thing, but most office buildings are really not set up for walking spaces...
It's great for the creative processes as well as for maintaining focus throughout the day. It also helps settle things a bit when socializing gets overwhelming.
I'm very fortunate in that I don't crave cigarettes any more. My wife will still bum one on occasion if we're drinking or camping. I might have a cigar once every month or so, but I have no interest in more than that, and cigarettes completely gross me out now.
As for this thread, I don't always vape when I hang out with the smokers. Or even when I do, vaping just takes a quick puff. I'll generally stick around while the smokers finish their cigarettes.
In regards to willpower, I'm still addicted to nicotine. I don't mind being addicted to it. I'm glad I found a way to do it that doesn't involve literally sucking on burning paper and plants. That said, I've been halving the nicotine content of my juice annually. I should be completely off in two years.
That's no reason to actually buy coffee though. You can just take a walk in the middle of the day.
However, caffeine is a larger problem. It's very additive with strong withdrawal symptoms, but giving it up for 6 months has significant mental health benefits. Unless you enjoy black coffee it often adds up to several hundred calories per day.
I agree the sugar and milk/creamer add a fair amount of calories to your diet.
However, because of how it integrates with your sleep patterns it can take 6 months for normal alertness levels to show up assuming total avoidance. Healthy individuals with reasonable sleep cycles should feel alert for the vast majority of the day without any form of stimulants.
Also there is some weirdness in the research where it's hard to find a dose response curve, and you see larger effects on cardiovascular system than lungs. I think there might be some confounds, like if you are married to a smoker or work at smoking establishment you're more likely to be poor, and be unhealthy in other ways besides smoke exposure.
I can't even begin to imagine what kind of model of the world you'd have to be working with to believe that, which is why I deliberately chose the word hysteria to describe it.
Your problem is that you, as you say, equate smoking with poison. That's hyperbolic. One could say the same about sugar, but it would sound just as ridiculous.
It's almost as if smokers are dehumanized these days, and non smokers deliberately ignore reasons to smoke.
There has also been ample evidence of neuroprotective effects of nicotine[0][1] for decades now. I dont mean to suggest that you go out and start a pack a day habit, but my point is that walking past a smoker won't give you cancer.
The real problem is people selling short-term benefits over long-term consequences.
No, that's not it at all. If that's all it was, then I'd have no qualms or quibbles; that's a choice for each individual to make. The power of the secondhand-smoke argument is that it catapults this debate out of the realm of individual choice. Now those nefarious smokers are harming you, too! They must be stopped!
This is the key you need to unlock smoking bans. You can't get any of that done without the overreach on secondhand smoke.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/tobacco-and-canc...
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
Again, it's only because there's a deliberate hysteria around this issue that my claim seems even remotely controversial to you.
And, yes, even the CDC is capable of hyperbole:
Secondhand smoke harms children and adults, and the only way to fully protect nonsmokers is to eliminate smoking in all homes, worksites, and public places.1,2,3
Yes, I mean, that's trivially true. Eliminating all smoke in the world is the only way to ever truly be safe <cue scary music>.
>Yes, I mean, that's trivially true. Eliminating all smoke in the world is the only way to ever truly be safe <cue scary music>.
Sure, but when I'm by a campfire and the smoke gets in my face, I move. Don't you?
I don't want it affecting me, whatever the effects may be.
"Secondhand smoke harms children and adults, and the only way to fully protect nonsmokers is to eliminate smoking in all homes, worksites, and public places" - Center for Disease Control
"At least 69 of the toxic chemicals in secondhand tobacco smoke cause cancer" - National Cancer Institute
Try the same with car exhaust and see how it goes
They also understand that downtime is important and would rather a long ongoing employment compared to a short, no-holiday speed-run of legacy code production before bailing.
It's not as if the boss came in one day and told people "Everyone gets 2 x 15 minutes of breaks a day. Except for smokers, you guys can take all the breaks you want."
If my employer gives me 2 x 15 minutes of breaks a day, I'll take those even if I don't smoke.
Everywhere I have worked the breaks were defined in the work contract. Right under my salaries, benefits, etc. I have a clause that more or less says: "You are entitled to take a 30-minute break after working five consecutive hours. This 30 minutes can be split through the day but not used to leave early or lengthen your lunch break."
Anyone taking more breaks than that will simply be fired.
The only exception being bathroom breaks because let's face it, we are all adult enough not to need to ask a supervisor to take a leak. I use this time to brew and enjoy a coffee in the lounge in the morning and to take a walk around the office during the afternoon. A smoker would probably split those 30 minutes into 6 cigarette breaks and that's fine.
Nobody gets extra breaks because they smoke. Is this different elsewhere?
Every salaried job I've had never had anyone watching my breaks, arrival, or departure times as long as I got my work done. There is a general expectation that I will usually be present during normal business hours but that's about it.
As a developer, I get to work for some pretty relax workplaces. At those places, the breaks are not monitored but you are expected to respect the limit. 30 minutes of paid lunch (and 30 more minutes of unpaid lunch if you choose to) and 15 minutes of paid break in the morning along with 15 minutes of paid break in the evening. Note that by law, employers here are only required to give you an unpaid 30-minute break for every 5 hours of work. What I am describing here is living the good life as a developer.
Even then, most developer at big agencies (100+ programmers) here work by the clock & timesheet and have to log their worktime to the minute and are unpaid the missed time.
Perhaps I should put emphasis on the fact that those are paid breaks I'm talking about.
I guess that you could "disappear" every hours but the culture would make it so that your coworkers would start to ask questions, your supervisor start to worry, you yearly evaluation suffer and your bonus or salary increase might be lower than the previous year.
I am lucky enough to work somewhere pretty relax with a "startup" culture. This allows me to start at the time I want and leave at the time I want. That being said, I'm expected to do 7.5 hours every day, to be present between 9h and 15h and to respect the allowed time when taking breaks.
> I wouldn't talk with my friends or family, I wouldn't watch youtube or TV series, I wouldn't even walk
Are you doing those things on the clock? I'm confused.
An assembly line worker will stick to the letter, a software developer will never consider it.
Is this the same community that raves about sleeping breaks to incease productivity? I think this is useful regulation.
And it's actually easy to handle: My employers always gave everyone the same breaks - how you use them is up to you. Smoking, eating, chatting - all of it. However smoking outside those breaks was a no-go. And as a former smoker I don't even see how this is up for discussion.
Physical presence does not equal working time. I wish more managers understood that motivated workers will work and non-motivated workers will always find the path of least resistance. Remote or in-office doesn't matter that much.
The other half of this is that it incentivizes smokers to quit.
This is about motivating non-smokers who are feeling de-motivated. And about helping people drop an unhealthy habit.
Similarly, I help people dropping the unhealthy habit of Tokyo high rise office blocks by not working there. Why mess about with symptoms when you can have the root cause?
This part has nothing to do with cigarettes, but I do think talking over work in different contexts is useful. I can't prove anything, but am convinced that more creativity in problem solving comes out when meetings aren't always in a conference room.
I know of a simple 2 week engineering project that almost didn't even get proposed because marketing thought it would be a multi-year project and the problem had to solved in a few months or the entire market would be gone. A chance waster cooler conversation with an engineer got the prototype done that afternoon and a small but valuable market was captured.
The smokers I know are not just taking a break and doing nothing. They are talking a break with other smokers and having conversations. Sometimes they are about family, but sometimes they are about work subjects and they solve real work problems.
True. The people taking smoke breaks aren't doing anything differently than those at the water cooler (other than, you know, smoking).
At my first office we had this arrangement and it was a boon for continuing ad hoc meetings which started in corridors or at the printer. "Grab a chair, let's have a look at the database..."
Unfortunately we moved to a more "modern" office with higher-density desking and no spare space.
A much better idea to help people not sit is to make a walking break.
Isn't that what I said?
More productive perhaps, but healthier? I don't think so.
EDIT: Typo.
The question here is not whether smoking is good for you, which it obviously isn't. It's whether, in this case, the benefit of being forced by addiction to get up and engage in light physical activity once per hour outweighs the carcinogenic effects of the tobacco consumed during smoke breaks.
Smoking break usually shifts you the direction of thinking and you solve a problem probably faster. Not because of the cigarettes itself, but because of the environment change.
This whole idea sounds like "People without social media accounts are allowed 1 more day off, because they don't spend time on checking their facebook messages."
I found these to be so valuable that even after I quit smoking, I'd still take "fresh air breaks" with others just for this very reason.
It's like a forced elevator conversation or something like that :-)
Every job I have worked that isn't hourly, break times are not monitored. If you have something during the work day, just go, if you want to walk around the park and clear your mind, have fun, need a smoke, shit have 2. So long your not screwing something up timing wise.
Also, it seems to me that the people who complain about such things have unimportant roles...
Some context though, Australia has a fairly great coffee culture, we have even been described as coffee elitists. So while the frugal and indifferent will use the office coffee machine to get a fix, it seems to be pretty well understood that it's not great coffee and you have to venture out to get the good stuff.
I don't think anyone is going to call you out, it would be quite hypocritical of them.
In the US I'm not even sure it is legal to provide different benefits to individual employees than the rest of the company. But one thing I can say for sure is that if this was in the US most people wouldn't take the days. Most people I know don't even take the days they have :(
Well it really depends on the state. "At Will" States they can do whatever they like or fire whomever. Now they might get sued but its not against the law to just walk down to a person and say "Your Fired and Your Not Getting An Explaination."
The smoking is bad of course, but the specific focus on it, to me, feels pretty hinky.
How about taking breaks every once in a while because you work hard, and you’re a human, not a robot? That should be ok without the passive-aggressive framing.
I dunno. Just seems a bit “off” to me.
This is especially true for places on timeclocks, probably less if you're salaried.
Have you never had a manager who enjoyed micromanaging and enforcing rules pointlessly?
If you haven't personally, have you never even heard of someone else having such a manager?
If a company wants to have breaks for smokers only, there's nothing stopping them: http://www.hrhero.com/hl/articles/2015/07/31/are-for-smokers...
I think that there must be some sort of human need to have a group to hate, and that in the West today that unlucky group is smokers. One may say the worst things about them in any social or business setting — that they are stupid, filthy, foolish, whatever — without any risk of being contradicted, indeed with the expectation that everyone will agree with you.
When I started at my job, the head of HR noted where the (outdoor, uncovered, across a street) smoking area was, 'but I don't think you're that sort of person.' He'd never have felt free to say that about other behavioural choices.
I suspect that part of it is that smokers were so dominant for so long that those who suffered in the past are enjoying having the upper hand.
Trump voters, conservatives in general often feel this as well.