Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Alcohol Awareness in Reasonable Suspicion Training is More than Spotting the Wobbly Employee



Alcohol awareness training is an important part of DOT reasonable suspicion training, but not for the reasons you might at first imagine. When discussing alcohol awareness, you might think that this topic will focus mostly on signs of intoxication, the way a drunk wobbles, speech, and smell. You will discover few intoxicated individuals this way, and that was proven, well, way back in 1960 when we taught supervisors to do all these things and nothing happened. We then shifted to performance, quality of work, attendance, conduct, workplace troubles, and evaluated these individuals for alcoholism. The reults? Boom! The EAP field was born.

But, I digress. Although these things are important, even more important are intensive education for supervisors which breaks their grip on the myths and misconceptions they naturally possess about alcohol, alcohol abuse, alcoholism, treatment, recovery, and manipulation.

Failing to address these issues will leave your supervisor audience about where they were when they first arrived--resistant to believing in the disease model of addiction and the important ramifications this will have on the future as they engage employees. Supervisors who have not been trained and educated in these myths and misconceptions are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
To keep your alcohol awareness education meaningful, consider the 7-8 handouts on drug and alcohol awareness that you will discover on the WorkExcel.com/blog - specifically at http://www.workexcel.com/blog/nine-musthave-handouts-for-dot-drug-and-alcohol-training-in-reasonable-suspicion-for-supervisors/ These handouts are editable and reproducible, and you buy them on the Web site.

Before purchase drug and alcohol training program for the DOT, be sure this awareness training is in the package. At http://workexcel.info, you will discover you can preview a product free--free postage and free return -- get a good look at the product. Make sure it provides employees with information necessary to increase awareness about alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The alcohol awareness training should focus on employee well-being and workplace productivity and should include information about the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction (addictive disease); common myths and misconceptions; tolerance and cross tolerance, denial; enabling and armchair diagnosing.

Yeah, we got that.

The alcohol awareness training should raise awareness about the misinformation most people possess about alcoholism and drug addiction garnered from popular culture, the media, and family history.

One of society's greatest misconceptions is that someone has to "want help" before they can be helped. The truth is most employees are motivated or pressured by tools of influence or leverage such as a job, money, prison or divorce. They enter treatment and then they become motivated to want what the healtiest patient has found--peace of mind with sobriety

No comments:

Post a Comment