Enabling Employees with Addictions

As long as you are in a relationship with an alcoholic or drug addict, it will be very difficult not to enable. Enabling is something that people do who are in relationships with alcoholics or drug addicts so these could family, friends, and of course, coworkers. Enabling may be covering up for a coworker, protecting the coworker from consequences or letting your own drinking or drug use interfere with your decision to take a stand and deal directly with your employee's job performance problem.To help protect the workplace and the employee dealing with addiction, it's key to include characteristics of enabling in the alcohol and drug awareness training to insure enabling is not happening in the supervisors role.