The Bold Question
Fors Marsh had worked on substance use for many years: tobacco, alcohol, overdose prevention. It’s a company with a lot of researchers. Then an employee asked what CEO Ben Garthwaite calls a rather bold question:
What are we doing to support our own employees through substance use disorder and in recovery?
Ben was in the room when it was asked. “Honestly, we didn’t have a good answer to that,” he says. “I didn’t really know what we covered or didn’t. We definitely didn’t talk about it.”
The handbook mentioned substance use once. It spelled out the consequences for substance misuse. The go-to celebration was the company happy hour.
“I can only imagine how unseen and unsupported our employees felt at that point in time,” Ben says. “But of course, the beautiful thing about people and the people at Fors Marsh is we can change.”
He calls what came next a moment of self-reflection. Then the company got to changing.
Rethinking the room
Go back a decade, and alcohol had a role in the company’s culture. The 10-year anniversary gift involved champagne. Many company gatherings were happy hours. The annual party was held at a brewery for many years in a row.
When the company put out its broader policy, it reconsidered all of it. The anniversary gift became financial recognition. “Which, let’s be honest, people strongly prefer,” Ben says. The annual get-together isn’t at a brewery anymore, partly because the company outgrew it. Any company-wide function that might involve alcohol now has a required mocktail hour, and the company makes sure leadership is there.
For Ben, that’s about access.
“It’s important to allow access,” he says. “Some of the engagement outside of the traditional business avenues can happen at those events. And so making that as accessible to every employee, and making it easy, I think is a secondary benefit.”
Many doors, said out loud
Employees, the HR team, and a few outside collaborators built what the company calls its Workforce Supported Recovery Program. It rolled out about five years ago.
The program recognizes that there are a lot of possible paths to treatment and support, and it names as many as it can. An employee can go to a supervisor or to HR—or directly to the employee assistance program (EAP) without going through either. A manager can make a referral.
The program is clear about what information is shared, with whom, and why. In many cases, that stays very limited if the employee wants it to.
The program also says plainly that evidence of drug or alcohol misuse isn’t cause for automatic termination. That kind of policy, Ben says, is something “we found out in our employee research is a real barrier to getting support.”
Still, he points to one thing above the rest. “The most important thing is that we talk about it, and we talk about it a lot.”
All employees have a handbook to the program. It’s been shared at all-hands meetings, supervisor meetings and lunch-and-learns. The company held a panel with people in recovery and people with family in recovery.
Ben says their research also shows that, more often than not, the person employees trust most is their supervisor. “So we have to arm those folks with enough information to be able to be supportive and ready for those conversations.”
“This isn’t really about a CEO being passionate about an issue,” he says. “It’s about a company of people that are there for one another.”
The quiet that follows
Most of the time, Ben hears nothing.
Sometimes a note or a call comes in. Probably six to ten times over five years, he estimates. Someone saying thank you. Someone who could put work aside and take care of a partner. Most of those notes are about family members, more often than about the person writing.
“Those are notes that you remember every word,” he says.
He wishes he heard more from people in general, even criticism. He knows there’s a barrier to writing the CEO; the people who do are going out of their way.
Asked what he’d tell another leader considering this work, Ben says he’s not much to lecture people. His guess is they’re probably doing a lot of the things already, but they’re not talking about it.
“Put yourself in the seat, in the role, in the world of someone who’s struggling and needs that support,” he says. “They need you as a leader to make it safe, to invite them, to tell them it’s okay.”
At Fors Marsh, it started with a question the company couldn’t answer. Now every employee has the answer in a handbook.
3 Things You Can Do This Week
- Put support in writing. Add a sentence to your handbook naming the support available for substance use and recovery, along with how to access it.
- Make resources visible. Share them in break rooms, onboarding materials, and team meetings. Put information where people already are.
- Give supervisors the words. Help managers feel comfortable starting a supportive conversation.
These questions offer a place to begin:
- “How are you doing, and is there any support you need at work?”
- “Would you like information about available support resources?”
- “Would you like help connecting with the appropriate support contact?”
Listen without pressing for personal details. The goal is to open a door and help someone find support. Follow workplace privacy procedures and involve HR for accommodation requests.
Culture Shift: The Employer Series. A National Recovery-Friendly Workplace Institute and Journey Magazine collaboration.
