A big drag for business

First came Movember. Now there’s Stoptober, a slightly less linguistically felicitous themed month. Organised by Public Health England, Stoptober is a stop-smoking initiative that has caught the attention of over 250 employers.

Why? Because smoking doesn’t just poison you, clog your lungs, stunt your growth and make your clothes smell. It’s also a big drag on productivity. So even employers who don’t really care about the health of their staff are happy to step up, because there’s a clear and quantified ‘business case’ to getting staff to stub out the fags.

Stoptober reckons that businesses lose ‘approximately 11,597,164 days of productivity every year’ due to smoking-related sick days, costing £1 billion. In total, ‘smoking breaks cost businesses £5 billion a year’, and perhaps most tellingly of all, ‘every year smoking-related deaths result in 158,290 years of lost productivity, costing the economy £3 billion a year’.

Employers who’ve signed up include Mars (confectionery), Greggs (pasties), McCain (chips), PepsiCo (sugared drinks) and the British Army (war machine). All should presumably be roundly applauded for their contribution to public health.

If you’d like to sign up to Stoptober, there’s some great information on their site. Cynicism aside, you probably should, because who knows – you might be able to save a couple of lives as well as the seemingly more important business of increasing yield.

About the author

Andrew Baird

Andrew is the CEO of HRville. He is also Employer Brand Director of Blackbridge Communications, Editorial Director of Professionals in Law and an associate of The Smarty Train. Previously, he was the MD of TCS Advertising.