Smoking

T200 said:

If you're planning to forbid smoking, you should just fire him.
Any smoker or ex-smoker knows it's nearly impossible to refrain from lighting up for 8 hours or more.
He'll find a place to light up when he thinks you're not looking.
You may find him.
Then what?
(Repeat)
If everything else about him is good, you may wish to consider some sort of compromise.

I say this as an ex-smoker who quit with the help of gum.

I've had guys who smoked and I let them smoke on exterior work but not interior. Despite my regular repeated requests, I still found butts all over the place. On interior jobs, we were losing over an hour per day on smokers going outside to smoke. I try to avoid hiring smokers. If I had a smoker working for me, I'd probably pay him less than I would if he smoked (because of the lost time)--and offer him a small pay raise as an inducement to quit.

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I'm not going to fire a good worker because I'm banning smoking! I'm going to give him an oppurtunity to succeed under the new rules. Say i do go ahead and ban it. Now he has the choice to quit, I don't need to fire him first.

Now, if he wants to take the chance of smoking while I'm not around and possibly getting caught that would also be his choice. I know for a fact, though, that he knows just as surely if I caught him being dishonest like that, he'd be gone before he could extinguish the butt, no questions, no excuses. That's the way I am and he knows it.

As for losing time to smokers, that's just another thing I already won't put up with. Smokers get breaks like everyone else. They don't get more. When you are working for me and I'm on the job, I dare you to walk outside and light up! Won't happen. Not trying to play internet tough-guy here, that's just the way it is. If an employee chose to skirt whatever the rule was when I wasn't around then, like I said, he's taking his chances.

Mack