In a typical work day, people who smoke take more breaks than those who do not. Every few hours they pop outside to have a smoke and usually take a coworker with them.
Don Bryden, Managing director at KCJ Training and Employment Solutions in Swindon, England, thinks that nonsmokers and smokers should be treated equally, so he's giving those who refrain from smoking four extra days to compensate.
Funny enough, Bryden is a smoker himself.
"I'm not discriminating against anyone," he told the BBC. "What I'm saying is if you take a smoke break, fine, take a smoke break. I'm not saying stop that."
"But if you say it's three 10-minute smoke breaks a day that equates to 16 and a quarter days a year based on an eight-hour working day."
The move is a great way to level the playing field in the office and to encourage his co workers to live healthier lifestyles as well.
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"I've been asked if someone doesn't smoke for three months, will I give them a day off, and I said of course," he said. "And if they can do it for six months I'll give them two days.
Bryden doesn't believe in discriminating against smokers, but rewarding those who do not for their extra time spent at their desks. "I'll work with the people who smoke but I do want to make sure that the ones who are sitting there working while the others take their ciggie break get some sort of compensation," he said.
The folks at the Centers for Disease Control would agree with Bryden's policy. According to its studies cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke cost $92 billion in productivity losses annually.
Smokers miss time in the office to go outside and blow a butt and they also take more days off. Smokers, on average, miss 6.16 days of work per year due to sickness (including smoking related acute and chronic conditions), compared to nonsmokers, who miss 3.86 days of work per year.
RELATED: Why one boss's response to an employee's mental health request went viral.
On a deeper level, we all pay for the exceptional health costs associated with smoking. Smokers add additional medical costs to both private and public health programs that nonsmokers pay into as well.
How much cheaper would health insurance cost if companies didn't have to pay for lung caner treatments?
According to a study published by the Public Library of Science, smokers cost the U.S. an estimated $300 billion a year. This includes nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and exposure to secondhand smoke.
Those who choose to live healthy have a positive effect on everyone around them. Bryden is right to reward them for their efforts and hopefully more employers will look into implementing at similar policies.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.