Marion business gets help toward drug-free workplace

MARION – The drug-free workplace program Working Partners tailored for the Wilson Bohannan Lock Co. has been so successful that representatives of the latter company have been invited to help launch Join the Front Line at Work.

The initiative — a partnership of the Crawford-Marion Board of Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, the Marion Area Chamber of Commerce and the Marion Community Foundation — aims to provide drug-free workplace training and education to local businesses.

Wilson Bohannan was a client of Working Partners, a drug-free workplace consulting firm, before Join the Front Line at Work was established. The company sought out a drug-and-alcohol policy because the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation offers a premium rebate to eligible employers for implementing a loss-prevention strategy addressing workplace use and misuse of alcohol and other drugs, especially illegal drugs, said Randy Dawson, the company’s vice president of operations.

“The biggest thing is (Working Partners) took a big, dark, strange and serious subject for us and really shed a lot of light on it,” Dawson said. “We didn’t know enough about the issues, particularly what does it look like in the workforce, from a human resources standpoint, from a management standpoint, and at that time (drug addiction) was becoming very prominent in the community, becoming a huge problem.”

New approach with employees

Wilson Bohannan, like many employers in the Marion area, was having difficulty finding sufficient numbers of applicants for its job openings who could pass drug screenings, he said.

In cooperation with Working Partners, the employer of 65 set up drug-free corporate procedures that included a second-chance program.

“As a company, a small family-owned company, we try to keep a family environment here,” Dawson said. “We believe in second chances. We test on accident, reasonable suspicion or when someone returns from leave. If someone tests positive, we typically don’t terminate them.”

Instead, the company puts employees on administrative leave and allows them to go through treatment or counseling.

“We hold their position open,” he said. “Upon completing whatever treatment program or counseling program their professional recommends, we bring them back with full pay back to their original position and give them a chance to start over here. We love that. That’s just kind of how we want to handle this. And we have had that happen.”

Dawson said he would not disclose the number, buthe said said there have been several times the company has had an employee violate its drug policy.

He said all but two of those employees successfully returned to work, “and in a couple cases, it really turned their life around.”

Being a union shop added another dynamic to the issue, he said, adding that the union welcomed the drug-free procedures implemented.

“They looked at it more from a safety standpoint,” he said. “It creates a potentially safer work environment for them, which is a huge fact. It was very well-received. We don’t random test. We can random test if someone fails a drug test post-accident, but going into the program, we chose not to random test overall because generally it’s not received very well by unions.”

Incentive present

Jody Demo-Hodgins, executive director for the Crawford-Marion Board of Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, said that when businesses invest in employees’ training, they have an incentive to try to keep those workers rather than dismiss and replace them.

“I think the employers end up often being the ones who see workplace performance declining because of substance abuse, whether it’s alcohol or substance abuse,” Demo-Hodgins said. “They may see safety issues, especially in a manufacturing environment. They see people change in behavior and attitude, and because they put so much money into training an individual, you don’t want to turn them over simply because of an illness. You want somebody to look at these illnesses for what they are. Then we want them to make sure their employees are complying with the treatment they’ve been given and are doing what they need to do to make themselves well.”

Sharing a similar view, Karen Pierce, Working Partners’ managing director, said: “It makes sense to refer people for service rather than put them out on the street.”

Working Partners’ approach worked well for his company, Dawson said.

“They spent a considerable amount of time here with us, and not just trying to decipher what we wanted to do mechanically with the program, but how we wanted it to look ethically. ... What kind of message do you want to convey to your workforce?” he said. “They really dug deep in those issues. We really appreciated that because that’s what we wanted to achieve. And they didn’t try to steer us toward anything we didn’t want to do.”

“And as I said, they took a lot of the fear and mystery out of the subject,” he said. “It makes us less apprehensive in hiring individuals we know had issues in the past, and we have done that. We’ve hired several associates who are ex-offenders, and those offenses were drug-related. It had been years ago. They’re restored citizens. Typically, companies are averse to hiring those kinds of folks, but if you have (procedures) in place in handling that going forward, it makes it more comfortable to hire. It does the community good. It does the company good. It’s win-win all the way around.”

Community partners

Pierce said Wilson Bohannan was invited to be part of the first stakeholder meeting regarding Join the Front Line at Work program in January. Also attending, in addition to Working Partners, were the Crawford-Marion ADAMH board, the local chamber, the United Way of Marion County, Marion County Job and Family Services, the Marion Area Counseling Center, the Marion Community Foundation and Marion Matters.

“They have been a client of ours for a very long time,” she said. “They do such a great job with their drug-free workplace program.”

Trish Kozlik, Wilson Bohannan’s human resources manager, said having the drug-free procedures in place and Working Partners helping has “taken a lot of the guesswork out of the supervisors and management positions.”

“Post-accident, we’ve created little packets so where post-accident you say ‘Here’s your paperwork to take to occupational health, here’s your drug screen,’ so the paper trail is more consistent,” she said. “That’s something we put together after our training with Working Partners last year. We update the training every year. New associates, temps, everybody goes through it.”

“If someone does get caught up in our program, we generally steer them toward Marion Area Counseling Center,” Dawson said. “Again, they’ve been great to work with, so there’s a lot of support in the community.”

jjarvis@marionstar.com

740-375-5154

Twitter: @jmwjarvis