Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • Maternity & Paternity
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
    • OHW Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • Maternity & Paternity
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
    • OHW Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

Smoking in the workplaceWellbeingOpinion

Firm hold on ‘no smoking’ gun

by Personnel Today 6 Sep 2005
by Personnel Today 6 Sep 2005

According to The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s international bestseller about ‘social epidemics’, the way to tackle a growing social problem is not to do what governments and health campaigners instinctively do, which is to emphasise the huge scale of the issue – how many people are drinking, smoking, becoming addicted to X-Box, failing to go to bed early, eat vegetables, and so on – and the crisis that is sure to ensue unless they change.

All that does is to reinforce the fabulous gregariousness of ‘bad’ habits.

The message sent is that everyone is doing it, they can’t all be mad, so why believe what tyrannical busy-bodies and intolerant governments have to say?

A wiser path, Gladwell suggests, would be to stress how eccentric such behaviour is, to make adherents stand out from the crowd, isolated in miserable delinquency.

People seek social endorsement for their choices. ‘Memes’, the social epidemiologist’s jargon for ideas, messages and behaviour, spread in much the same way as viruses do, so the best strategy is to try and ‘interrupt’ the contagion by attempting to quarantine its leaders in a lonely ghetto of anti-social self-harm.

The message should be ‘a handful of idiots are trying to kill themselves’, rather than ‘so many people are making lifestyle choices we don’t like’.

The strategy should aim to deny the social dividend of ‘unhealthy’ lifestyles.

Memetics has all the hallmarks of a bit of faux-clever reverse psychology. But what is interesting is that this way of thinking appears to be becoming almost the received wisdom in the new politics of lifestyle reform – and employers are in the front line.

Take company smoking policies. More than half the employers in the UK now have a ‘smoke-free policy’, forcing smokers outside to take cigarette breaks. The effect of observing windswept, faintly poignant, little huddles of workers puffing away in office doorways sends out a powerful message that smokers are outcasts – social rejects from the corporate community. There is little to suggest the glamour of the mysterious outsider.

In ancient Greece, they used to write the names of unwanted people on a stone tablet known as an ostrakon – hence our verb, to ostracise. And this is exactly what smoking bans are: an exercise in social ostracism. It is employers using their power to privilege the rights of the employees who are making ‘healthy’ lifestyle choices above those making less healthy ones.

The latter are temporarily cast out each time they palliate their craving.

They are then welcomed back in to the disapproving, though forgiving, embrace of their employer, bearing only the faint odour of miscreance about them.

Free-smoking workplaces, as opposed to smoke-free ones, have until 31 December 2007 (after which the government’s partial workplace smoking ban comes into force) to amend the error of their ways.

In matters of employment rights, it is normal for employers to take a libertarian line, arguing that it is up to workers and managers to find arrangements that suit them.

Tyranny

But the proposal to deputise employers in the battle to deter smoking has provoked little muttering about nanny’s expanding naughty circle, or invocations of CS Lewis’s famous dictum that “a tyranny exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive”.

The idea of making a law out of something employers were already widely doing voluntarily has instead been received with something approaching gusto outside the hospitality sector, which is currently caught up in an unwholesome alliance with the tobacco lobby. In effect, many employers were already helping to push a lifestyle reform whose ultimate purpose lies well beyond the confines of the workplace.

To date, attempts to deter smoking on a national scale have been limited to financial punishment, via high taxation, and persistent health warnings about the consequences. Bans open up a new front: the power of social censure and social approval, as mediated by employers.

In Ireland, which in March 2004 introduced a much more comprehensive workplace smoking ban than is planned in the UK, the Office of Tobacco Control – the republic’s anti-smoking agency – argues that the effect has been to deny opportunities to smokers.

Because people can only smoke outside, smoking – a sociably anti-social kind of vice – becomes less appealing. Thus smokers smoke less, or finally take the decision to give up, and sales of cigarettes have gone down.

Being in a persecuted minority can be fun, of course, but not so much fun that smokers endure the rain to savour it. If they could smoke at work, or in a specially designated room, this sense of social disavowal would not be nearly as potent. But because people want peer approval so strongly, the effect of employers endorsing one lifestyle and repudiating another is a very powerful one.

In former times, such strategies might have been described as authoritarian. Today, employers’ involvement in ‘tipping’ lifestyle trends has aroused little suspicion, and considerable support, and health promotion is seen as an unremarkable addition to the range of social services employers already provide.

Governments can tax and cajole their citizens into better behaviour. But it is only with the help of employers that they can successfully wield the memetic power of social ostracism.

What do you think?

Tell us your views: How can employers resist the urge to act as a government stooge in matters of employee health? E-mail [email protected]

Avatar
Personnel Today

previous post
BBC unveils HR supplier shortlist
next post
Assessments jeopardise government skills plan

You may also like

Nurses leaving due to pressure and workplace culture

18 May 2022

Bald move: Tribunal was right in sex-related harassment...

17 May 2022

Crumbling school buildings ‘risk to life’ suggests leak

16 May 2022

Workers feeing increasingly anxious, burnt out and fearful...

13 May 2022

Spain plans menstrual leave for painful periods

13 May 2022

How employers can support women during the HRT...

13 May 2022

What it really means to be mentally fit

13 May 2022

What is employee wellbeing? Gethin Nadin talks to...

13 May 2022

The seven dimensions of wellness at work (webinar)

12 May 2022

Maya Forstater: What is a woman?

10 May 2022

  • The importance of being an ethical leader and how to become one PROMOTED | What is ethical leadership?...Read more
  • RPO Report: 2022, The Year to Outsource PROMOTED | Employers should be overwhelmed with choice...Read more
  • Report: Enabling organisational agility through talent & people success PROMOTED | Work has been challenged...Read more
  • Employee Trends 2022 report PROMOTED | Edenred research on employees analysed the key employees’ trends for 2022...Read more
  • How finance apprenticeships can boost business PROMOTED | As the world’s most forward-thinking professional accountancy body...Read more
  • Paul Devoy: Showing appreciation to the Investors in People community PROMOTED | Ask most people what comes to mind when you mention Investors in People...Read more
  • White paper: How digitalisation can support evolving occupational health PROMOTED | Download this free white paper to discover how digitalisation can help occupational health meet emerging challenges...Read more

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2022

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2022 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • Maternity & Paternity
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
    • OHW Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+