Smoking has long been known to be harmful to the health. Efforts to persuade consumers to stop smoking at the macro level via television ads and other means have not been exceptionally effective, primarily because nicotine addiction overrides the individual's desire to stop smoking. Within communities, greater success has been achieved through the outlawing of smoking in public buildings and through community-wide smoking cessation programs. At the micro level, many companies have now adopted a strict no-smoking policy that either forces smokers to leave the building during breaks in order to smoke or prohibits smoking completely during work hours. Some companies have even prohibited employees from smoking during their off hours at home. These micro-level no-smoking policies have been extremely effective at reducing employee smoking at the workplace and have also been identified as the reason for decreased smoking overall. Strict no-smoking policies have not been popular with smokers, and in many cases merely instituting rules against smoking without mounting a persuasive campaign or making any other changes engenders conflict rather than achieving the desired results. Workplace transformations such as changing a workplace from a smoking to a non-smoking workplace are a form of organizational development, and as such, they require more to be successful than a new set of rules. This paper will examine the issue of no-smoking policies in the workplace, their impact, and how they can best be implemented.
Radical change within the workplace setting can be extremely positive, particularly if it is pointed toward issues that will make a difference in employee productivity, satisfaction, or innovation. On the other hand, radical change that is not preceded by intensive planning and organizational development can result in chaos and employee demotivation. Changes in the workplace virtually always involve people, an...