Smoking is an extremely difficult habit to kick. only about 3% of smokers who try to quit actually succeed. This is an extremely low number and obviously makes it very difficult for an organisation with proactively tries to reduce the smoking rate of their staff.

However, some recent research has provided a new way of increasing this success rate. It has been shown that smokers are twice as likely to quit successfully if they receive cash rewards of doing so. In an 18 month trial period, one group of smokers was paid $750 each for refraining from smoking. An amazing 9.4% of this group successfully quit over the 18 months, compared to only 3.6% of the control group.

This sounds like a very enticing investment for an organisation. Such an amount of money dwindles in comparison to the financial costs of lost productivity and increase absenteeism that smokers often bring to an organisation.

However, looking at this type of incentive from the other angle, how would non-smokers feel about their smoking colleagues being paid a substantial amount of money to quit. Many people may see this as an incentive to start smoking simply so they can quit and receive the financial rewards…………………………..