No Ifs, Ands or Butts:

Smokers Need Not Apply.

By Eileen Gunn.

Walk up to Union Pacific's headquarters in downtown Omaha, Neb., and the gaggle of smokers typically clustered outside office buildings these days is nowhere to be found. The company has banned smoking anywhere on its main property -- inside or out. Gradually though, where employees smoke will become less of an issue, because in Omaha and seven other states, Union Pacific won't hire smokers.

"We put so much time into helping employees to lower all these different health risks, it doesn't make sense to bring them in as smokers and then have to put all that effort into getting them to quit [smoking]," says Marcy Zauha, director of health and safety, who helped to put the hiring policy in place last summer.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer health-insurance premiums rose almost 14% between the spring of 2002 and 2003, marking the third consecutive year of double-digit growth. So companies big and small are analyzing their insurance claims to see which preventable, lifestyle-related illnesses are costing them the most. And they're coming up with a range of wellness programs, from in-office gyms to healthier cafeteria food to annual on-campus physicals to help employees avoid those health problems.

ComPsych, a company in Chicago that administers wellness programs, has seen its lifestyle-intervention programs go from being about 1% of its business five years ago to more than 15% today.

Kicking the Habit

Help for people who want to quit also is improving. "We know that a combination of medication and counseling helps more than the medication alone," Ms. Darling reports. Smoking-cessation programs often don't cost companies much, which means they can take a carrot-and-stick approach -- barring workplace smoking while lending support and even financial incentives like a discount on insurance to those who want to quit.

Union-Pacific makes prescription coverage for drugs like Zyban, used to treat nicotine addiction, available to all its employees -- a move that costs less than $10,000 a year, total, according to Ms. Zauha. When members of its largely male, middle-aged population take the drug, they also receive phone calls from wellness counselors and have access to occupational-health nurses at field offices.

This dual approach worked for Glenn Foppe, 54, a supervisor in the company's billing department who'd smoked for three decades up until three years ago. "I tried many times to quit. I tried gum, hypnotism, Smokenders," he says. He once even managed to quit for a few months while wearing a patch. But what finally did it, he says, was his Zyban prescription, which allowed him to gradually smoke less, and walk more, over 90 days. He also had counselors keeping in touch with him by phone and at work -- it was "a kind of reward" to have someone asking about his progress and eventually congratulating him on his success.

For its efforts, Union Pacific saw its smoking population shrink from 40% of its work force in 1990 to 27% in 2003. And, while lifestyle-related health-care claims have risen across the country by about 2.2% a year, Union Pacific's fell by 35% between 1990 and 2001, according to Ms. Zauha.

The Supportive Approach.

The policy so far hasn't hurt the company's ability to hire employees. Union Pacific operates in about 23 states but applies this policy in only a few locations -- where it's legal and the local labor pool is large enough that the rule won't make a discernable difference in the number of applicants.

In 2005, it will ban smoking on all its property nationwide -- a bold move for a railroad company that owns vast tracts of land. Still, Ms. Zauha and others concede that it's difficult to ever be 100% smoker-free, because "some people have made the decision to not quit and they're not gonna do it."

But every time they make it a little harder for employees to get to that next cigarette, "it reduces the number of people smoking during the day and decreases the amount of smoking going on overall," notes Rich Chaifetz, chief executive officer of ComPsych.

When Union Pacific asked employees not to smoke inside its buildings several years ago, Mr. Foppe kept up his two-packs-a-day habit on weekends, but cut down to about half that during the week without even trying. "You'd only have your 10-minute breaks to smoke as much as you can, and you really can't smoke much more than one cigarette in that time," he says.

Of course, employee morale and public image are tricky, another reason why even the most aggressive companies take care in how they implement these policies. "If you act like there's a new sheriff in town, you become the wellness Nazi and people resent it," says David Hunnicutt, president of the Wellness Councils of America. "That's why you have to be as creative and supportive as possible."

Better-organized companies give employees a few months' notice before starting a program like a campus-wide smoking ban. Lowe's, for example, gave employees nine months of lead time and worked with the American Lung Association to educate employees who wanted to quit in that time.

The company still heard from disgruntled employees and even customers about the policy. But, a spokesperson says, "the positives have outweighed the negatives. Anecdotally, we're hearing that productivity at some of the stores has gone up."

If employers' health-care costs continue to rise, and our knowledge about wellness gets still better, it's likely that employees will see more companies following in the tracks of Lowe's and Union Pacific.

-- Ms. Gunn is a free-lance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Also Visit: Smoking v/s Employment

Quit Smoking Before You Are Asked To Quit Your Job.

Quit Smoking In A Natural And Easy Way.