By Michael Orwick

I overheard this exchange in my office last week.

“Can you be sure he gets this.  I have to have my break.”
“I thought you were just on your break?”
“No, I was taking a smoke.”

Isn’t smoking something you do ON your break?  I asked two managers at my office and one at my wife’s work.  Two were very animated in their response.  They said that it happens all the time.  Smokers feel they don’t have to waste their break time on smoking because they can “take a smoke” on the company’s time.  Is that true?

Being a non-smoker (or should I say a never-smoker), it didn’t occur to me that smokers would think this way.  Apparently I was misinformed.  Two of the managers said that this was common practice, while one of them stated that it was one of the biggest complaints from the rest of the staff.  Oh, boy, did I open a can of worms.

I guess my question is why smokers would (at least some of them, I’m sure many smokers would never consider this practice) feel they should get twice as many breaks than non-smokers.  First of all, it just ain’t fair.  Certainly fairness is one of the bottom lines of an HR policy.  While we try to end discrimination of all types, why would we support discrimination of any type?

Second, this costs the company money.  Breaks are considered pay for “time not worked.” So if smokers take their regular breaks, which the company has figured into its costs, but they also take extra breaks for smoking, then the company is losing some money.  How much?  According to Yahoo.Answers.com, a cigarette takes about 6-7 minutes to smoke.  Add to that the time to get away, get back in, and get settled into work again, it’s about ten minutes.  So twice a day is 20 minutes a day.  That quickly adds up to more than 1 ½ hours a week of pay for “time not worked.”  That means in a little over a month, the company has paid for an extra employee who isn’t actually there.

Third, what do the others workers think?  When they see someone taking a break AND an extra break, how long before they do the same?  Look no further than the equity theory.  It’s one of the major motivational concepts that HR is built upon.  If person A gets the same reward person B gets, but A gets it by doing less (known as less “input”), then B will eventually equalize the situation by lowering his or her “input” to match that of A.  Where does that lead?

Michael Orwick, MBA, is a professor at the Okanagan School of Business at Okanagan College and a part-time management consultant.  He is a member of BC HRMA in Kelowna and has been teaching management, marketing, and human resource classes for almost 10 years.  Formerly a broadcaster, his personal experience includes both unionized and non-unionized environments.