Confronting Your Employee--and He's In a Blackout!

Dealing with an employee you have previously reprimanded is difficult. Dealing with blackouts: when your employee doesn't remember being sent home drunk is even more complicated.

Disciplinary action is an unfortunate necessary responsibility of a supervisor. Well documented disciplinary action will focus on work performance and is the best way to make an uncomfortable situation bearable for both you and the employee.

Any employee who doesn’t remember being sent home drunk is likely going to try a variety of tactics to prove their innocence. They may make excuses; even provide possible scenarios that seem plausible to anyone who was not present at the time when they were sent home. Or they may try and relate the incident to another time they do remember, confusing the facts and diverting the situation. Diverting the issue is typical for someone who has blackouts and cannot remember specifics. You should be aware of and prepared for these behavior patterns. Make sure when you send an employee home drunk you have documented the event with a reliable witness and the employee’s signature. Even if the signature is difficult to read due to a loss of motor skills, there is no excuse to invalidate documentation. This will help prevent the feeling of being stranded in a Jerry Springer show entitled Blackouts: When Your Employee Doesn't Remember Being Sent Home Drunk.

In the case of blackouts: when your employee doesn't remember being sent home drunk you may find they will claim they didn’t know, or that “everyone is against them,” they may blame others or try gaining your pity for their personal situation. If they do no remember being sent home drunk they may try playing on your sympathy. Your best defense against this is a calm approach, keeping to the issues of work performance and conduct. A level head on your part will do more to diffuse the issue than anything. Even if the employee begins to get angry or breaks down into tears, you need to keep your focus on the matter of work. Do not try and moralize their situation or diagnose their problem. If the employee was sent home drunk, than the action taken was deemed appropriate at the time and your only course is to stand behind that decision.

The key to dealing with blackouts: when your employee doesn't remember being sent home drunk is to keep level headed and stick to the documentation.

A Web course for training supervisors in DOT Alcohol and Drug Training can be previewed free and without obligation by completing the form at DOT TRAINING OF SUPERVISORS. The web course is offered by WorkExcel.com and published by Daniel Feerst, LISW-CP. Dan Feerst, MSW, LISW. He began his employee assistance career in 1978 as a Social Science Officer for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Occupational Alcoholism Program in Langley, VA. Since then, he has served as a staff member or director for some of America's most well-known Employee Assistance and Counseling Programs, including the Kennecott Copper INSIGHT Employee Assistance Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture 22 Agency EAP Consortium, and Arlington County Government and Public Schools EAP in Arlington, VA. He has consulted with hundreds of small businesses on helping employees, intervening with substance addicted workers, and how to develop effective alcohol and drug-policies.

Obtain and view a DOT Alcohol and Drug Education web course with the features discussed above at WorkExcel.info. The company permits a full full review of the course on a CD that plays on your computer just like it would on you your web site.

Online or Web Based Reasonable Suspicion Training for Drug Free Workplace DOT Supervisor Training

It's difficult to find an adequate web-based, or online Reasonable Suspicion Training Course to reach all of those branch offices you can't easily travel to.

But there are a couple solutions.

First, a few precautions: 1) Get one without the usual infinite online per-user fees. That just eliminated 95% of the choices. Instead, get a program that you own, you buy, you keep, you upload easily to your company web site, and completely control for emailing the start link to supervisors and managers needing DOT Training for a Drug Free Workplace.

Next, ensure that the author is from "the trenches". Woops. There goes another 98%. Don't panic. Solutions are below. You need a little interesting information, so understand the following:

Myths and misconceptions are so strongly held by supervisors and managers that any reasonable suspicion training program that does not spend time addressing and confronting them, essentially becomes nothing more than entertaiment. Seriously, you don't want that. An author of such a program from the trenches who has it all in the way of "excuses and explanations" from suspected employees using on the job, will give your training some life. Your training must help supervisors not fall for the creative excuses and explanations employees deliver on the spot.

And, do not simply do the minimum required training with supervisors mandated by the DOT for supervisor alcohol and drug education. Go a little further and kill these myths and misconceptions in your DOT Training or Alcohol in the Workplace Training program. Your drug free workplace efforts will pay off big time.

Drug free workplaces are made possible not by education alone, but energy of awareness given to supervisors in the training directly caused by successfully dispelling myths. If you do this, supervisor become strong believers and change agents, cover up less, and promote a drug-free workplace.

If you do not have an effective program, they are only hestitant trainees who slept through DOT training.

Alcohol workplace issues especially face the above issues. Alcohol in the Workplace related problems are associated with the most most myths of all. Here's why:

Seventy percent of the adult population drinks alcohol. This is a conservative estimate. Alcoholism affects 10% of them. The most important thing for an alcoholic employee to believe that the cessation of alcohol use is not necessary in order to resolve any personal problems in his or her life that directly or indirectly result from alcohol use. As a result, enormous inertia exists in society in the form of myths, misconceptions, false beliefs about alcoholism and addiction.

The most precious of these myths is the psychological origin of addiction myth. Why is this so value in its absolute falsehood? There are TWO reasons: 25-50% of psychologically treated persons have alcohol and drug problems and don't need the level of psychological care they receive at great expense.

The economic cost of giving these patients up to simple education, disease management, motivational counseling, AA, and self-disease management for abstinence is enormous. It would cause the collapse of the mental health field. And 2) if a person with alcoholism can be effectively treated for their psychological problems (in theory) WOW!, then drinking normally again becomes a possiblity.

Now imagine a reasonable suspicion training program that discusses these issues and a whole lot more? Not in the depth I just discussed, but enough to ZAP the myth. One out of four people has an alcoholic in their family, and if you are one of them - you're resisting what you just read. (Am I right?)

Try these super online training programs no one will sleep through:

WORKEXCEL.COM Reasonable Suspicion Training

BEHAVIORALRISK.COM Reasonable Suspicion Training

WorkExcel.info Reasonable Suspicion Training