Drinking on the job

If you think you are drinking a little too much these days, don’t be too hard on yourself. According a new survey, your boozy work mates control your drinking behaviour, both on and off the job. This is the message from recent research that examined the impact of work group membership on drinking patterns.

Previous studies on work site drinking norms have shown that individual relationships at work are associated with on and off the job drinking behaviour. This paper, by Barrientos-Gutierrez et al (2007), examined whether group relationships are associated with heavy drinking, frequent drinking and drinking at work.

Results showed participants working in work groups that discouraged drinking were 45% less likely to be heavy drinkers, 54% less likely to be frequent drinkers and 69% less likely to drink at work than their counterparts whose work culture encouraged drinking.

The research confirms the basic notion that social norms in the workplace are a powerful influence … on people’s behaviour at work and away from work.

The rates of heavy, frequent and work place drinking were significantly lower in organisations that discouraged social drinking, such as transport companies, than in those that most tolerated it.

If drinking is the norm in the employer’s culture, simply providing employees with information is not going to change anything. The target should be a strategic plan to change norms in the work place.

The researchers concluded that while “work site preventative research has focused on health promotion at the individual level, and occupational health research has focused on health protection activities,” the findings suggest “the importance of work site-based social intervention as broad-based public health campaigns.”

Reference

Barrientos-Gutierrez, T., Gimeno, D., Mangione, T.W., Harrist R. B., & Amick, B.C. 2007. Drinking social norms and drinking behaviours: a multilevel analysis of 137 workgroups in 16 worksites. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 64, 602-608.

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