Chamber speaker: Addiction silence permeates workplace, leads to stigma

By Brice Wallace 

James Hadlock has zero use for zero-tolerance.

A one-time entrepreneurial multimillionaire whose corporate success contrasted with his addiction to drugs, Hadlock believes that companies with zero-tolerance policies to address addiction in the workplace are misguided. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}

“We are so addicted to silence,” he said at a lunch presentation coordinated by the Murray Area, South Jordan, Southwest Valley and West Jordan chambers of commerce and ChamberWest.

“In other words, we’re just hoping and crossing our fingers. Every HR director that we’ve talked to, they cross their fingers and what do they hope? That I don’t ever have to address it. And what are the employees that are struggling with an addiction, what are they doing? They’re crossing their fingers and just hoping that they don’t get caught. It’s doing nothing about minimizing use. It’s just creating and perpetuating more fear, more silence, more stigma.”

Now the founder of human development company BluNovus, Hadlock’s past includes leading a successful company, going to work “with a smile on my face, but starving inside,” he said. His concerns about self-worth led to insomnia, prescription drug use, hanging out at clubs, abandoning his wife and two daughters, overdosing on a regular basis, living on and off the streets and being suicidal.

“The stigma, he said, “is what held me back.”

That stigma stemmed from the silence that permeates substance use disorders. Addiction is “one of most taboo topics that we can ever bring to light in the workplace,” he said. “Our society has just programmed us to not talk about it, right?”

A 2017 National Safety Survey reveals that 70 percent of surveyed company CEOs and human resource professionals believed their organization has been impacted by addiction, 81 percent felt their company lacked an appropriate drug policy, and only 13 percent believed their company was prepared to deal with addiction in the workplace.

“What is it tied to? We just don’t talk about it. It’s this taboo topic,” Hadlock said.

Workers with addiction are embarrassed, afraid and overwhelmed, he said. They are dying to connect, be heard and reminded that they matter.

“People are ashamed, they embarrassed, they’re overwhelmed and they’re doing their best because — news flash, folks — your people, they want to come to work,” Hadlock said. “This idea that they’re just trying to be sneaky and they’re trying to move around and trying to navigate, I’m telling you right now, at the very core of them, they want to be there and they’re doing their very best in that moment, from their viewpoint.”

Hadlock revealed statistics indicating the severity of the situation. Twenty percent of the U.S. workforce has a mental illness and 10 percent have a substance use disorder. Twenty-six percent of employed adults have a family member that struggles with addiction and 42 percent of that group say they are less productive at work because of it. Only 10 percent of the 23 million people that struggle with addiction in the U.S. receive treatment.

Stats show that the cost for companies to address the problems of addiction — from healthcare costs to absenteeism to “presenteeism,” or being at work but not really working — averages $1,000 per employee per year. And that’s for the total number of employees, not just those with addictions.

For many companies, the way to handle addicts is to terminate their employment, but employee replacement costs range from 150 percent to 300 percent of the position’s salary. “This is a horribly costly way to address one of the biggest epidemics we’ve seen in our lifetimes,” Hadlock said.

Zero-tolerance policies are akin to the DARE program in schools, he said. Introduced in 1983, by 1991 it was clear that the well-intentioned program nonetheless had failed to keep kids away from addiction. It still received federal funding for another 15 years, Hadlock said.

Another well-intentioned approach has been employee assistance programs that offer therapy services for people with mental health and addiction issues through therapy services. But less than 3 percent of those people reach out to get help through such a program. They tend to be crisis-driven, with the company trying “to pick up the pieces after they’ve already fallen to the ground.” Programs with so little use are “really just built to check a box and mitigate risk to the employer. It has nothing to do with the employee,” Hadlock said.

Rather than a zero-tolerance policy that breeds silence and stigma, Hadlock suggests an approach that focuses on social interaction.

“Here’s what we know and here’s what the research and the science continue to come out with: It’s not about education. … It’s about social interaction. It’s about connection. Human connection is key, and what is a zero-tolerance policy doing to connection? It’s perpetuating the stigma, it’s perpetuating the silence, and frankly it’s not the human way to go,” he said.

Hadlock suggested that companies reduce stigma by acknowledging that addition exists in the workplace. They can create a “safe” atmosphere by providing confidential third-party support, a resource outside the company — “the most-ashamed [workers] are never going to come to HR until it’s a crisis moment,” he said. And they can provide hope to addicts by “starting a new conversation” and keeping that talk going.

“When you understand the psyche of a person with substance use disorder, the easier it is to understand that we are going about this all the wrong way,” Hadlock said.

With 25-plus years in leadership and entrepreneurial experience and now more than 11 years being drug- and alcohol-free, Hadlock told audience members that they can drive that kind of change.

“I feel that the solution for mental health and addiction is going to land in the workplace. … You have the ability to shift the entire narrative and absolutely change this crisis, right here, right now,” he said.

“Just take a step back and connect. Be authentic,” he said. “You can make the difference. It’s time, folks, to just care. … It’s how we start to change the narrative and support each other in a healthy, happy way.”{/mprestriction}