How can I protect my employees with drug and alcohol testing?

The Allways Hire Business Toolbox is a series of articles on topics that are important to our customers and their businesses. Our Safety At Work Series focuses on important health and safety topics to help you understand more ways you can look after your team.

In the first article in this series we talked to Tessa Allan from WorkAble to help us answer some questions about Drug and Alcohol Testing.

As employers, we’re all responsible for keeping our people safe. The rules we put in place can protect our teams from physical and mental harm on the job. They also protect the public and help us to keep our worksites safe.

Having a policy around drug and alcohol use or being under the influence of drugs and alcohol at work is an important part of protecting your team. You can read more about identifying risks in your workplace and putting plans in place to reduce them on the WorkSafe website.

We spoke to Tessa Allan from WorkAble (beworkable.com) to find out more about how drug and alcohol testing can be used to keep employees safe. Workable supports businesses across Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Bay of Plenty with their Occupational Health, Testing and Health Monitoring needs.

Q: What different types of drug and alcohol testing are available?

A: We offer 4 main categories of drug and alcohol testing. Pre-employment, Random, Post-Incident, and Reasonable Cause testing.

Pre-employment drug and alcohol testing happens before an employment contract is signed. This is a great way to set expectations for a role. For example – if you’re recruiting a truck driver and you expect him to be drug and alcohol free on the job, a pre-employment drug and alcohol test can check to see if he has any traces of drugs or alcohol in his system before you sign the contract and offer him the role.

Random drug and alcohol testing is a good way to prevent any incidents when employment contracts make it clear that drugs and alcohol are not allowed on the job. We support our clients with random testing by setting up unpredictable testing dates and selecting test subjects at random. Tests can be designed around employment contract requirements.

Post-Incident drug and alcohol testing can encourage your employees to follow the rules of their contract if they understand the consequences of a positive result. Post-Incident testing isn’t as effective as random testing in preventing serious incidents but is less costly and can help you identify whether drugs and/or alcohol were the cause of incidents if they happen.

Reasonable Cause drug and alcohol testing. This is used when an employer or supervisor has evidence that an employee may be working under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Testing is carried out on an individual rather than a shift or whole workforce.

Q: How do I introduce drug and alcohol testing at work?

A: I always recommend working with an Employment Law expert to make sure you’ve got the right contracts in place before you start testing. A first question for anyone considering testing is whether your employees understand what’s expected of them. You need to start by identifying and communicating clearly what your expectations are around drugs and alcohol use at work and then build a policy and introduce it to your employees. Then you can build a testing regimen to match.

Q: How can I identify the right drug and alcohol testing programme for my business?

A: The right drug and alcohol testing programme needs to support your employment contracts and reduce the risk of harm to your employees and the general public. We usually recommend a combination of pre-employment testing and random and post-incident testing.

Q: How often should I carry out random drug testing?

A: How often you carry out random drug testing is specific to the needs of your business, the number of employees you have, and how high you consider the risk to be. It’s important to make sure the frequency and the people tested are random so that your testing is neither targeted nor predictable.

Q: How are the drug and alcohol tests carried out?

A: Drug testing is either carried out with urine testing, or with saliva testing using the Drager 5000. A breathalyser is used for the alcohol test. If our testing detects any positive results then we send them to the laboratory for confirmation.

Q: Where do you do drug and alcohol testing?

A: WorkAble has a mobile testing unit so we can come to your worksite or offices to carry out testing with minimum downtime. Other businesses may be able to come to your location or have offices that you can visit for testing.

Q: Who carries out the drug and alcohol tests?

A: WorkAble uses experienced, fully trained registered nurses to carry out all of our testing.

Q: How much does drug and alcohol testing cost?

A: Pricing for drug and alcohol testing can vary by provider and depending on how much testing your business needs. The best plan is to work out the right programme to protect your employee’s safety then review pricing based on that.

Ready to find out more about drug and alcohol testing?

We’ve shared some important resources that could help you to plan and implement policies with your team.

Creating employment agreements that include your drug and alcohol policy is an important first step for any testing programme. You can find out more about this at Employment NZ.

There are various organisations who can provide or implement drug and alcohol testing for your team. You can choose whether you carry out testing in-house or ask a company to provide the service for you.

WorkSafe provides a lot of clear information on how to protect your employees from impairment at work and what your responsibilities are. Take a look here or browse through their website to find the information you need.