Transcription:
Alyssa Place (00:00):
Welcome to Perk Up, a podcast about workplace culture and benefits brought to you from the team at Employee Benefit News. I'm Alyssa Place, executive Editor at EBN. With Perk Up, my colleagues and I are sharing the stories of businesses that have implemented forward thinking, covetable workplace policies and benefits, keeping their employees happy and their company's bottom line thriving. This week I take a look at how an alarming increase in substance use disorders is impacting the workplace and how employers are offering an empathetic path to recovery.
(00:42)
The statistics are shocking. Nearly 50 million people suffer from substance use disorder defined as a chronic pattern of drug or alcohol use that can impair health and function of that group. Around 30 million people struggle with alcohol addiction, and 24 million have an addiction to drugs and other substances. While substance use disorder is a treatable condition, a lack of resources along with paralyzing stigma can often lead to the worst case scenario. Between January of 2021 through 2022, 107,000 people died from drug overdoses. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's estimated that 140,000 people die per year from alcohol related causes. Behind these troubling statistics are real people who struggle with the vice grip of addiction, often hiding their struggles from family, friends, and coworkers. For Dana Piscopo, a successful director of sales operations at Software Platform Oracle. A dependence on alcohol quickly spiraled out of control during the pandemic.
Dana Piscopo (01:48):
We don't all have to end up under a bridge with a paper bag in our hand. I was drinking so heavily that I was probably blacking out three to four days a week, and it was ugly. I wasn't remembered conversations. I wasn't remembering how I drove home from bars. It was bad.
Alyssa Place (02:07):
Piscopo said she regularly began drinking while still clocked in at work and continued well into the evening before frequently blacking out. Yet she says she was able to hide it from coworkers and even from her husband. The attitude around drinking during the pandemic only fueled her behaviors even more.
Dana Piscopo (02:25):
I hid it really well, which good or bad could have been a disaster. My drink of choice is a nine and a half percent alcohol beer, and I was drinking four a day. Between four and seven. I needed to be drunk by seven so I could get through the rest of the evening. So it was pretty bad. I was drinking a case a week and that was just at home. That wasn't including all the stuff I was drinking out, and I know I'm not the only one. I mean, during the pandemic, everybody started drinking at three or four o'clock in the afternoon because we were all having happy hours cause we'd never thought we were going to see each other ever again.
Alyssa Place (03:01):
Piscopo is far from alone. While an issue well before Covid 19, the pandemic led to an alarming uptick of people abusing drugs and alcohol. Dr. Dan Jolivet, a therapist as well as the Workplace Possibilities Practice consultant at Insurance Company The Standard, is an expert on healthcare and behavioral health services, as well as return to work programs to get people with addictions Back to work. He says the standard conducted research pre covid and then again a year into the pandemic, which showed some shocking upticks in alcohol abuse as well as the impact that it was having on employee performance.
Dan Jolivet (03:39):
When it comes to the workplace, alcohol is the biggest problem. A third of remote workers reported drinking at least some of the time during business hours, which is a terrible idea. So it's been a longstanding problem. The pandemic has much made it much worse.
Alyssa Place (03:59):
Jolivet calls addiction, a disease of isolation, and COVID created an environment that drove many employees deeper into the secrecy and shame that surrounds their behavior.
Dan Jolivet (04:09):
Addiction always occurs in the shadows. We know that with addictions, people can conceal their problems first because of denial. They don't realize they have a problem. They don't realize how severe it is. If you're in denial, you're not going to tell someone. You're not going to say to your boss that you've got a problem if you don't think you do.
Alyssa Place (04:28):
It's estimated that around 9% of the workforce has a substance use disorder. According to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services, people are struggling in every workforce. Jolivet says, yet, HR leaders, managers, and other employees are not well-equipped to address these challenges. Jolivet points to a 2018 study by the standard, which found that two-thirds of HR decision makers were not confident in their ability to support someone with an addiction. Additionally, workers themselves feel an intense amount of fear around asking for support.
Dan Jolivet (05:08):
Almost a third of people we surveyed said that they were worried if they disclosed they had an addiction, that they would be treated differently at work. People would talk about them behind their backs. They wouldn't get the same opportunities or that they would get fired. If you're worried you're going to get fired, if you disclose you have an addiction, you're going to do everything you can to hide it. Everyone has a part to play when it comes to reducing stigma and reducing some of the myths and stereotypes and helping people to feel like they can disclose when they're struggling and get the help that they need.
Alyssa Place (05:49):
At the International Center for Addiction and Recovery Education, known as ICARE, that work is at the core of their mission. ICARE provides clinical care counseling and management training programs along with advocacy and education around addiction. Cheryl Brown Merriwhether, ICARE's vice president and executive director says she's been focused on this work for decades. Pre COVID, the ICARE team was expanding into the workplace by training employees themselves to serve as coaches and advocates within their organizations. The pandemic has brought these issues out of the shadows, but it's still just the start, Merriwhether says.
Cheryl Brown Merriwhether (06:30):
It is not a new issue, but there's an increased spotlight on it now, and we're so grateful for the opportunity to help people understand what's going on. Now in this post pandemic world. There's a lot of misunderstanding just about the nature of the disease, and that's why we call it a sickness of silence. HR folks, just as wonderful as they are, as professional and skilled as they are, they're just not trained to address this topic. Now, they will try to get information on what to look for in terms of signs and symptoms, but I tell folks, by the time you see the signs or the symptoms, it's too late. So our goal is to try to create safety in the workplace so that these issues can be addressed more proactively and safely, where folks can get the resources that they need before they crash and burn, so to speak.
(07:30)
The work that we've done now since 1996, we've trained about 40,000 addiction and recovery professionals in 40 nations. We're very proud of that. So a lot of what we're doing now in the workplace has come about organically because the coaches in large part have come to us as part of their own personal recovery journey. The workplace is a fertile ground for them because of their life experience to go back and say, Hey, let me help teach others about resources and about this disease and things that can be done through the workplace systems of care to help others.
Alyssa Place (08:18):
That's a mission that resonated with Piscopo. She had attempted to get sober multiple times, which lasted a few months before she would relapse. She shared. Piscopo says she finally hit her rock bottom, which ended her drinking for good.
Dana Piscopo (08:33):
I'm a vegan. I'm a master vegan lifestyle coach and educator, and my rock bottom was eating a chicken cheesecake. And I know it sounds silly and crazy, but I thought to myself, after all this other stuff I've done, driving under the influence, working under the influence, like all of these other things. It was that chicken cheesecake because I was like, oh my God, if I could do that, what else am I going to do? And that's what cut me off.
Alyssa Place (09:02):
Piscopo says she was a month into her sobriety when she discovered eyecare already a health and wellness coach. In addition to her professional career at Oracle, Piscopo began working on becoming a certified sobriety and recovery coach. The training gave her purpose to continue to focus on her own journey while helping her realize the needs that could exist within her organization, Piscopo shares.
Dana Piscopo (09:25):
I needed to tackle my own sobriety and recovery, and also how I found ICARE from my certification. I was a month into my sobriety when I was like, I need to do this because I knew it was going to keep me sober. I knew it was going to put me on the avenue of staying sober and being in recovery, and I wasn't an AA type of person and I needed something different in this recovery journey of mine, I thought to myself, there is just no way that I'm the only one struggling in this corporation of 150,000 people. And if I needed support, there were other people that were going to need support too. So I went to the general manager of our line of business, our senior vice president. I told him what my rock bottom was. I told him that I thought it was important enough to squash the stigma and shame in the workplace and something needed to be done. It opened up conversations with hr, with US benefits, and also we have an Oracle mindfulness community where my program lives now. April of 2021. I started a weekly session called Reclaim Your Moxie. It is a safe space for fellow colleagues and coworkers to come share to come learn about mental health, wellbeing, addiction, awareness, and those types of things. And it has blossomed.
Alyssa Place (10:52):
Since starting Reclaim Your Moxie, which is part of Oracle's mindfulness program offerings and supported by the organization. Piscopo says dozens of employees have opened up about their struggles, asked questions, and helped her stay accountable in her own journey with sobriety today.
Dana Piscopo (11:08):
I need to make an impact. It became this fire in me that I had never had with anything before. So it really opened up a channel for people to feel safe, to know that there was an ally somewhere in the company that they could go to that maybe not be able to help them personally, but show them the way of finding help. That's what this is all about, right, is that peer support, and we're all here to help each other.
Alyssa Place (11:36):
Merriwhether understands the resistance. Some HR leaders may feel around discussing addiction and personal issues in the workplace. She says, many leaders feel comfortable only directing employees to an employee assistance program and moving on. But digging deeper and allowing employees to share their personal experiences can be healing for employees and good for a company's culture
Cheryl Brown Merriwhether (11:58):
In the workplace. You'll hear an HR practitioner say, well, I can't talk about anybody's story. We've got privacy laws and we've got HIPAA, so we can't talk or share this information. But I can tell my story. I married a husband who had a behavioral addiction. I lost a brother and a father to alcoholism. So the patterns and that I experienced as a child followed me throughout my teenage years into my adult life, into my professional career in the workplace. Through my work with ICARE, I've been very fortunate to be able to bring together all of these experiences, my life experience, my education, my work experience, and the ability to design training programs to help others learn about these things. There's an a growing initiative to educate managers and leaders around the bottom line impact of creating an empathetic and inclusive workplace culture that allows and creates the psychological safety that is needed for these issues to be discussed in the workplace. If you embrace me and welcome me and open the door for me to bring my gifts and my talents with me to work, then you get that win, win, win.
Alyssa Place (13:40):
While programs like ICARE are an important piece of the addiction support system in the workplace, Jolivet shares a few other components employers should consider when providing treatment and other workplace support.
Dan Jolivet (13:52):
HR people need to look at their benefits. All health insurance, all group health insurance. In the United States, because of the Affordable Care Act, it's required to include services for alcohol and drug use disorders. So the insurance is there, but the other thing is there are plenty of free or low cost services available, whether that's a 12 step self-help group like AA or or you know, can call two 11 in most communities to get the United Ways resources and they can direct people to free or low cost services. So help is available. Having an open and clear statement supporting people with alcohol and drug use issues, putting it right in your policies, putting it in your orientation materials, making sure people know that the company is aware that people struggle with alcohol and drug use disorders, and we want people to disclose them. We want people to get the help they need.
Alyssa Place (14:58):
Merriwhether also advocates for recovery Ready and recovery friendly workplaces where employers make commitments to providing a supportive environment for those impacted by addictions. This means creating affinity groups like piscopo's, Reclaim Your Moxie, all the way up to state recognized programs that offer training and clear pathways for recovery and workplace engagement. Not only do these programs continue to acknowledge the role addiction plays in the workplace, it allows employers to take responsibility in finding solutions. Merriwhether says.
Cheryl Brown Merriwhether (15:31):
It's affecting our bottom line. It's affecting our employee's ability to service our products or our customers. Let's, let's do something with this. I always say, if you change one individual's life, you change a family, you change the workplace, you change their community, and you change future generations cause you're creating life. Recovery is life giving.
Alyssa Place (16:00):
For Piscopo, becoming a recovery coach has changed her life and kept her on track with her own recovery. She implores other employers to support workers through peer support programs and to simply listen and respond if employees seem to be struggling.
Dana Piscopo (16:15):
I have been promoted twice in 10 months. I went from an individual contributor to a senior manager to a director in 10 months. That would never have happened without my sobriety, without this coaching certification because I do believe that it really helped my confidence, it helped my knowledge. It helped me be a good leader and a good manager. So it has changed my life, all of it for sure. The amount of support I've gotten here with Oracle, it just continues to grow. If employers can find a way to open up programs of peer support, of just being available, to have a safe space for people to go to find resources or to talk to somebody confidentially is a huge step in the right direction. There's been certain challenges where I'm like, oh, I could really use a beer right now just to put myself out of my misery. But I knew in the long run that wouldn't be good. But it's the accountability and it's just, it's the thought of letting myself down and letting others down, and being so outwardly with my recovery that keeps me sober.
Alyssa Place (17:33):
Thanks for joining us. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode on how employers are handling the politically charged abortion issue with benefits and advocacy. This episode was produced by Employee Benefit News with audio production by Kelly Malone. Special thanks this week to Dan Jolivet from The Standard, Cheryl Brown Merriweather from ICARE and Dana Piscopo with Oracle and Reclaim your Moxie. Rate us and review us wherever you get your podcasts, and check out more content from the EBN team@www.benefitnews.com.