Company boss announces four extra days of holiday for non-smoking staff

A company in South West England is trying to get smokers to dump the habit by giving non-smokers four extra days of annual leave. The initiative began when Managing director Don Bryden noticed that employees that smoke took up to an hour each day in smoke breaks while their non-smoking colleagues remained at their desks hard at work.

Incentives for non-smokers

Mr Bryden runs a logistics firm KCJ Training and Employment Solutions located in Stratton, near Wiltshire. He decided to start the new year with this radical policy. While talking to local media, Bryden said that he saw some of his employees take 10-minute breaks in order to smoke and given that the employees had seven and sometime 10 smokes a day added up to a lot of wasted time. Bryden added that when he looked at the non-smoking employees, they were all on their phones or typing away on their desks and believed that they should be compensated.

He told media that he came into office on the New Year feeling generous and declared that he would be starting the new policy. On of the employes, Krzystof Krzywozeka said that he was quite surprised by the new policy and thinks its an amazing idea and that it could really motivate people to quit smoking.

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In similar news, a Tokyo-based marketing company called Piala Inc has offered its non-smoking employees six extra vacation days. This company gave its non-smoking employees an extra six days off in order to make up for smoker's cigarette breaks. The company decided to apply the policy after an employee complained that smoking breaks were harming the productivity of the company. 

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The company has its office on the 29th floor of a building and that meant that in order to smoke, the employees would have to travel all the way down to the basement which resulted in breaks lasting for 15 minutes. Those 15 minute breaks led to growing resentment among the employees that did not smoke. After being informed of the problem the company's CEO, Takao Asuka decided to grant non-smoking employees six extra days of vacation as a form of compensation.