Workplace Costs of Secondhand Drinking
The workplace costs of secondhand drinking are significant to employees and to the company or agency’s bottom line. Secondhand drinking – the negative impacts of a person’s excessive drinking behaviors on others – directly affects nearly 80 million Americans. These are the husbands, wives, parents, children, siblings, grandparents, boyfriends, girlfriends and co-workers who repeatedly deal with another person’s drinking behaviors.
Those directly affected represent approximately a quarter of the population; up to 35% of a workforce and five times the number of people whose excessive drinking is causing drinking behaviors.
These drinking behaviors include: verbal, physical or emotional abuse, neglect, driving while impaired, alcohol-involved domestic violence, committing a crime or sexual assault, to name a few.
Drinking behaviors are not intentional. Rather they are what happen when the ethyl alcohol chemical in alcoholic beverages changes the way the brain works.
Through contact with people directly affected by secondhand drinking, millions more Americans are indirectly affected. Co-workers, classmates, in-laws and extended family members, roommates, teachers, law enforcement officers and the like typically fall into this group.
In other words, Secondhand Drinking (SHD) poses a significant cost to companies and public agencies; costs very similar to those imposed on the workplace by persons who excessively drink alcohol.
Using the workplace costs of excessive drinking helps us understand the magnitude of the workplace costs of secondhand drinking.
The Workplace Costs of Excessive Drinking
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s page, Excessive Drinking Is Draining the U.S. Economy (last reviewed December 30, 2019), states the cost of excessive alcohol consumption in the U.S. reached $249 billion.
Most of these costs (77%) were due to binge drinking.
Binge drinking is defined as drinking four or more standard drinks per occasion for women or five or more drinks per occasion for men. “Standard drinks” means the amount of ethyl alcohol per alcohol type and quantify is the same. Common standard drinks are 5 ounces of table wine, 1.5 ounces of 80 proof distilled spirits (vodka, gin, whisky) and 12 ounces of regular beer. [To find out the number of standard drinks in a cocktail, click here.]
Relevant to the workplace costs of excessive drinking are these two figures:
- workplace productivity (72% of the total cost) – over $179 billion
- health care expenses for problems caused by excessive drinking (11% of total) – over $30 billion.
Workplace productivity costs are related to unsafe work practices, workplace accidents, absenteeism, late arrivals, early departures and the impacts on co-workers’ product output and workloads, as examples.
Health care expenses for problems caused by excessive drinking include depression, anxiety, heart disease, sleep disorders, digestive problems, high blood pressure, learning and memory problems.
What Does Secondhand Drinking in the Workplace Entail
Secondhand Drinking’s influence impacts the workplace in three ways:
- directly through an employee who causes it (i.e., an employee who excessively drinks either on the job, at lunch or the night before a work day)
- directly through an employee experiencing it personally
- indirectly through exposure to either or both of the above.
In other words, secondhand drinking crosses spectrums from those directly affected by SHD — family members living with someone whose behaviors change when they drink, for example — to a co-worker whose own workplace experience suffers as a consequence of their fellow-employee’s ongoing exposure to SHD.
To get a further sense of the kinds of direct and indirect effects of SHD in the workplace, consider the jobs a person experiencing it or a person causing it might do:
- Drive company vehicles (fire truck, police car, school bus, logging truck)
- Operate machinery
- Handle chemicals
- Handle confidential ideas, products, plans or documents
- Handle cash, accounting, inventory or stock
- Represent the company at conferences or in the public eye
- Monitor computers, nuclear power dials, air traffic control
- Manage employees
- Be one of a team providing health, safety or defense services (e.g., firefighters, police, military)
Additional examples
Other kinds of direct and indirect secondhand drinking impacts in the workplace include:
- Having to work with coworkers who are distracted, less productive or missed work because of a family member’s excessive drinking.
- Working family members of excessive drinkers who find their own ability to function at work and at home negatively impacted by their family member’s drinking.
- Employees who drink heavily away from work are more likely than other employees to exhibit job withdrawal behaviors, such as spending work time on non-work-related activities, taking long lunch breaks, leaving early, or sleeping on the job, which then impacts the workload, job satisfaction and safety of other employees. These same types of behaviors are also exhibited by the family member or close friend who constantly coping with secondhand drinking away from work.
- Employees who drink heavily off the job are more likely to experience hangovers that cause them to be absent from work; show up late or leave early; feel sick at work; perform poorly; or argue with their coworkers, which also impacts fellow employees’ workplace experiences as well as their health, wellness and safety.
Extrapolating the Workplace Costs of Secondhand Drinking
The root cause of secondhand drinking’s impacts is stress. The chronic activation of the brain’s fight-or-flight stress response system (FFSR) when confronted by ongoing drinking behaviors results in stress-related ailments and quality of life impacts that include:
- sleep difficulties
- migraines
- anxiety, depression
- digestive problems
- skin problems
- changes in eating habits, causing obesity or weight loss
- memory impairment
- sleep disorders
- heart disease
- losing friends, dreading social events, trying to keep track of a steady stream of white lies and cover-ups for a loved one’s drinking behaviors
- social and work difficulties
- feelings of helplessness / hopelessness
- having to deal with the fall-out of someone driving while impaired, whether that be a death, injury or ticketed DUI
- questioning oneself and believing somehow there was something they did to provoke the drinking behavior or can do to make it stop
- relationship changes; divorce
- developing a drinking problem having turned to alcohol to relieve the stress.
Check out my article, “Alcohol’s Harm to Others|Secondhand Drinking,” to understand the secondhand drinking-toxic stress connection.
Extrapolating the workplace costs of secondhand drinking.
Given secondhand drinking impacts have not been measured in the same manner as those for alcohol misuse, we can only extrapolate SHD-related workplace costs.
We do know that SHD’s stress-related workplace impacts mirror those of excessive drinking in terms of lost workplace productivity costs and increased health care expenses as described above. In the case of SHD – those costs are related to toxic stress.
Thus it is not a stretch to estimate the bottom line workplace costs associated with secondhand drinking will range from equal to or five times more than the costs associated with employee excessive drinking.
What Can Be Done?
Help your employees understand secondhand drinking, excessive drinking and the tools they can employ to self-elect changing how they cope with SHD-related stress OR use alcohol.
There are many ways this can be done. Please contact me for details via email at lisaf@BreakingTheCycles.com or visit the link to Consultant for more information.
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Note: a version of this post first appeared on SHD Prevention, which I’ve merged with BreakingTheCycles.com.
Lisa Frederiksen
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