The use of alcohol and tobacco in the workplace significantly negatively impacts the productivity and safety of the employees. When the employee is under the influence of alcohol or tobacco, they have low decision-making capacity, influencing how they form the work (Knai et al., 2018). Smoking tobacco can affect other employees who become passive smokers and affect their health. Therefore, there is a need to formulate policies that prohibit alcohol and tobacco use in the workplace. This policy draws from incremental theory, which allows building on strengthening policies that do not work properly as initially intended.
The policy needs to gather political attention because political disclosure offers a source of power. Agenda setting is elite-controlled, externally driven, or competitive and uses various forms to make insightful recommendations to ensure that their issue reaches the political agenda. Mass media is one way of bringing the issue to a public agenda, as televisions, newspapers, and radios highly influence policy lobbying. The role of the media is to inform the public about the importance of policy issues and why it needs to be addressed (Feezell, 2018). Online platforms are also significant in fulfilling their responsibility of providing the public with the appropriate information to make sound decisions on different issues.
The media is essential in manifestation by magnifying certain issues and events while relying on gamification or game theory. When a problem gathers media attention, it becomes a public issue and becomes a public agenda. There is a need for the involvement of interest groups. Interest groups have influential power and a significant effect on the government (Feezell, 2018). The interest groups are comprised of individuals with similar goals for the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco in the workplace. To bring the issue to the political agenda, extension educators are significant and helpful in offering research-based knowledge on the problem. Extension educators give value to the importance of intervention on the problem and influence the decision making. Politicians are directly involved in the politics of a nation and would be significant in raising issues of concern to the nation.
Several factors are essential to ensure the success of implementing the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco in the workplace. Shareholders, safety and health representatives, and contractors may provide consultation services. There will be a need to define the obligations of the policy clearly. The policy should be stated clearly, and clear details of the importance of implementation of the policy should be included. Specific actions to be taken should be efficiently stated. The program should be realistic, where personnel, time, and resources should be necessary for the implementation (Cohen-Shacham et al., 2019). Publicizing the policy will be significant and should be done in writing to make the policy available and for the workforce to remember the policy. There will be a need for instruction, supervisor, and information to all employees on the need to adhere to the policy.
Consequently, there is a need for consistency in implementing the policy. Follow-up is needed to ensure the continued following of the policy for the need to avoid alcohol and tobacco at the workplace. Managers and supervisors should be included to help in ensuring the employees implement the policy. Disciplinary actions should be taken against those who do not adhere to the policy, such as fines and circumstances of dismissal for the aggressive employees following the policy. Finally, the policy should be reviewed regularly and when changes occur, ensure the policy remains effective.
There are various types of evaluation of a policy, such as a process evaluation, cost-benefit evaluation, and impact evaluation. The most effective type of evaluation for this form of policy proposal will be cost-benefit evaluation. The cost-benefit evaluation is useful in comparing the input and output that have been put in the intervention process for the significance of accessing the economic effects and seeing whether implementing the policy is beneficial over the implementation cost. The use of alcohol and tobacco reduces the productivity of the workers. If the policy is effective, there should be an increase in productivity in the workplace hence a positive impact on the economy.
Processing data and analyzing results are essential in determining if the implementation is successful. Outcomes of the policy should be analyzed to see if employees’ not using alcohol and tobacco in the workplace has improved their productivity. If the policy succeeds, sustainability measures should be put in place to ensure continuity of adhering to the policy. Some constraints in this form of evaluation cause barriers to evaluation. These constraints include incorrect data provided for analysis or lack of access to information on the success of implementation and cost constraints for evaluation processes. There may also be limited time to carry out the evaluation process.
References
Cohen-Shacham, E., Andrade, A., Dalton, J., Dudley, N., Jones, M., Kumar, C.,… & Walters, G. (2019). Core principles for successfully implementing and upscaling Nature-based Solutions. Environmental Science & Policy, 98, 20-29. Web.
Feezell, J. T. (2018). Agenda setting through social media: The importance of incidental news exposure and social filtering in the digital era. Political Research Quarterly, 71(2), 482-494. Web.
Hudson, B., Hunter, D., & Peckham, S. (2019). Policy failure and the policy-implementation gap: can policy support programs help? Policy design and practice, 2(1), 1-14. Web.
Knai, C., Petticrew, M., Douglas, N., Durand, M. A., Eastmure, E., Nolte, E., & Mays, N. (2018). The public health responsibility deal: Using a systems-level analysis to understand the lack of impact on alcohol, food, physical activity, and workplace health sub-systems. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(12), 2895. Web.