Employees educated on random tests in advance
When Aurora Occupational Health in Sheboygan, WI, and its client worked out the logistics of random, on-site drug and alcohol testing, it was time to start educating employees.
The employer, Rockline, did not want to spring the random testing on employees without warning, says Jerith Buteyn-Gier, RN, director of Aurora Occupational Health. She agreed, so they decided it would be better to warn workers that drug testing was coming and steer them toward employee assistance programs and other sources for help with any drug and alcohol problems.
Striving for a win-win situation’
"They knew about three months before the testing was to begin," Buteyn-Gier says. "The employer took a lot of steps to make help available to the employees so that the message was that this was going to be a win-win situation."
The testing is performed each month when the company sends Aurora an updated list of all employees at the Rockline facility, including upper management. The occupational health program uses that list to update its own computer files and then has the computer randomly select 30 employees each month. About 10% of the Rockline work force is being randomly tested every month.
The company takes that list and determines how many of those people are on which work shifts so that the company and the occupational health program can coordinate the testing visits.
"The list is kept strictly confidential, with only one or two administrators privy to it, so they can set up the testing times," Buteyn-Gier says. "We show up with our equipment, and they pull the people off the line for the testing to be done. Sometimes we’re able to do them all on one shift, but we’ll come back on all three shifts if we need to."
If the selected workers are on several shifts, Aurora may wait a few days between visits so that workers on the second and third shifts don’t hear that the testing is going on that day and have time to get clean or orchestrate a tampering attempt.
The subsequent shifts still know that random testing is coming in the next few days, but they’re still left wondering exactly when. And just to keep them guessing, sometimes the different shifts are all tested on the same day. (See story on the rate of positive drug tests, below.)
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