Occasional drinking lowers productivity
April 1, 1999 2 minutes read
Occasional drinking lowers productivity
It doesn’t take much alcohol to lower a worker’s productivity, according to a new report sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Many workers, and even many occupational health professionals, are under the impression that significant alcohol abuse or actual drinking on the job is necessary to impair a worker’s job performance, says Thomas Mangione, MD, of JSI Research and Training Institute in Boston.
But that’s not the case, according to Mangione, who conducted the study. He says employees who drink occasionally account for more alcohol-related productivity problems at work than do workers who are heavy drinkers and alcohol-dependent.
It’s not that the heavy drinkers don’t compromise their job performance. In fact, they more frequently cause alcohol-related work problems such as showing up late, leaving early, performing tasks poorly, and arguing with supervisors or co-workers. But occasional drinkers (who cause the same problems as heavy drinkers) outnumber heavy drinkers three to one in the workplace, so they account for a large proportion of all alcohol-related productivity problems. Occasional drinkers account for 59% of alcohol-related productivity problems, and heavy drinkers account for 41%.
The study results were gleaned from surveys and interviews with more than 14,000 corporate executives, supervisors, and workers at seven Fortune 500 corporations. Mangione says many of the productivity problems related to alcohol can be traced to two particular kinds of drinking behavior. Drinking immediately before or during working hours — including the lunch hour and company social functions — can significantly impair productivity on the job. So can heavy drinking the night before, when the employee crawls in to work with a hangover.
The research also showed that most companies have policies addressing alcohol use and offer to provide treatment for alcohol abuse. Those policies, however, do little to address productivity problems caused by lunch hour and social function drinking. The good news, Mangione says, is that light drinkers may be more responsive than heavy drinkers to educational messages about changing the pattern of their drinking behaviors.
Sources
For more information, contact:
• The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 6000 Executive Boulevard, Willco Building, Bethesda, MD 20892-7003. Web site: http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/.
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