Figure 9 Employee Absenteeism After Implementing Drug Testing
Figure 10 Workers’ Compensation rates after Implementation of Drug Testing
chronic high absenteeism. One of the early findings of implementation of drug testing programs was the decrease in absenteeism (14). There are many explanations as why this benefit may be caused by a drug testing program but the classic explanation is a better quality of employee who does not “call in sick” on Mondays. Employees that are using illicit drugs or abusing prescription drugs are less productive, tend to miss work more often, may steal from the company and are prone to more accidents (14,15). The proportion of companies reporting low absenteeism rates (0–15%) increased from 91% to 96% after implementing drug testing programs. This was one of the questions in the survey that had one of the lowest responses (n=162 and n=218 respectively) and suggests that this is one measurement that compa- nies have a hard time correlating to implementation of a drug test when their absentee numbers are relatively low. However, when the absenteeism of the company was greater than 15%, the implementation of a drug testing program showed a reduction in absentee- ism from 9% to 4% (see Figure 9). This strongly suggests that when absenteeism is greater than 15%, a significant portion of this absenteeism is related to drug use/abuse and that the implementation of a drug testing program significantly impacts absenteeism. Several state and private insurance
companies provide decreased workers’ compensation premium rates for com- panies who have a drug testing program as they know it will decrease accidents and their costs associated with claims. This is especially true in companies that have high rates of workers’ compensation claims, greater than 6%. The study par- ticipants reported a decrease in workers’ compensation incidence rates from 14% to 6% (among organizations with work- er’s compensation incidence rates greater
16 datia focus spring 2012
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