The Real Costs of Smoking
What are the costs of smokers in the workforce?
Smokers are estimated to cost UK businesses about £5 billion per year, however is this figure real and what are the costs for an individual business? Estimates have ranged from £400 to £1800 per smoker per year and higher.
Employer costs fall across a few simple categories:
Direct costs including: productivity costs due to extra sick leave due to smoking, productivity costs due to time taken for smoking breaks and increased health insurance premiums
Indirect costs including: Impact on customers with smokers representing your company, impact on other workers with smokers in the workplace, increased fire risk, impact on general company image and loss of key personnel through illness or death
Individual Costs
Of course the individual has costs too – not only the cost of buying cigarettes, which for an average smoker adds up to about £1800/year, but also for an average £676/year for additional costs like increased insurance, breath freshners, dry cleaning, special toothpastes etc. So over 40 years of smoking an average smoker will easily go through £100,000 without taking inflation into account!
Hidden Costs: Lost Opportunities
However it is the hidden cost of lost opportunity that is biggest story here. Employers lose out not only on the direct costs of estimated 25-40 minutes per day that an average smokers takes in extra break - but the lost productivity will drag the business down. Employers expect a return on investment of several times the cost of hiring someone, so if smokers on the workforce are losing 30 minutes a day in productivity it will have a significant impact in terms of lost business opportunities. Similarly individuals lose opportunities in terms of time, money, professionaly and socially.
Effective Solutions
Willpower and cold turkey are effective for about 6% of the time. Nicotine gum and patches will roughly double your chances to 12%. Drugs like Buproprion and Champix raise your chances to 16%-22%. But if you really want to stop then hypnosis to stop or quit smoking is probably the most effective with success rates of 28% up to 80%.
Modern Clinical Hypnosis
However there are many different types of hypnosis. The most modern approach, which has been well studied and also ties in with modern cognitive psychology, uses a package of techniques based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Hypnosis. Research shows these modern approaches to hypnotherapy for stopping smoking reach success rates of 60% to 80%. Some therapists practicing hypnotherapy in London claim success rates of 95%. Unfortunately these are likely to prove highly optimistic. It is not quite this easy. As Mark Twain said “Giving up smoking is easy. I know because I have done it thousands of times.”
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