Your employees spend a good majority of their time working under your leadership week after week. As an employer, it’s your responsibility to ensure your team members can thrive in a positive, safe work environment and maintain healthy habits. In order to help them do so, you should take measures to prevent your employees from falling victim to substance abuse. Here’s how you can support them:

Recognize the Signs of Substance Abuse

Although substance abuse looks different in every adult, there are some common symptoms that you can keep an eye out for, including:

• Frequent sick days

• Change in work performance

• Frequent disappearances during the workday

• Inability to focus or remember tasks or deadlines

• Poor hygiene

• Isolated or aggressive behavior towards coworkers

If you recognize these behaviors in an employee, keep records of it so you address that person if necessary.

Require Drug Tests

By having a drug-free policy enforced by random drug tests, you can deter employees from taking narcotics or abusing prescription drugs. However, each state has different laws regarding mandatory employee drug tests, so be sure to reference your area’s rules before implementing this policy.

Allow for Mental Health Days

A common reason employees can develop substance abuse habits is because they feel overwhelmed with their workloads and job pressure. You may not be able to immediately decrease workloads or a stressful environment (if you’re in the medical field, for example). However, you can encourage employees to take mental health days to decompress and relax when they’re feeling overwhelmed, rather than drugs or alcohol for relief.

Host Workshops

Enlist the help of your HR team, a non-profit organization, or substance abuse counselor to educate your employees on the dangers of substance abuse and how they can keep themselves safe and healthy. You should have the program’s feature content specific to your industry to ensure employees receive relevant and relatable information.

At Silver Ridge, we offer a clinically integrated, holistic adult drug and alcohol rehab program designed to increase each client’s sense of self and their capacity for regulation across multiple domains of life. Contact us today to speak to one of our addiction counselors.