Growing Ohio’s Employable Drug-Free Workforce: A Statewide Effort Realized!

(Fall 2017) On September 28, 2017, elected officials, system leaders, businesses and treatment providers gathered at the Ohio Statehouse to celebrate the outcomes and accomplishments of the Working Partners® Drug-Free Workforce Initiative.  This Initiative was a year-long, a public-private partnership to address the economic threat of substance abuse by employees and job seekers in our state-funded by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (OhioMHAS).

“This partnership is a good pilot to start tackling things as a community instead of looking at things at the individual level,” said Mindy Vance, bureau chief with OhioMHAS, at the event.  Vance also shared that the state recognizes the role that the workplace, and therefore businesses, play in recovery.

This sentiment was echoed at the event by Randi Ostry, director of statewide substance use education and business initiatives for the Ohio Attorney General, when she said businesses play a large role in the prevention of substance use.

At its core, the Initiative brought together behavioral health agencies and businesses in 17 communities to increase Ohio’s employable, drug-free workforce.  This goal was accomplished through a variety of activities:

• Community Organization: “We broke through walled-off siloes between the prevention and business community,” said Ostry who also served as a stakeholder in Guernsey County, one of the 17 participating communities. “We infiltrated communities, with the invitation for businesses to have a seat at the policymaking table and give them a voice and practical guidance.”
  • • Stakeholder groups in each of the 17 communities were recruited by community behavioral health boards and local chambers of commerce to advise, direct, provide expertise and support the execution of the Initiative.
    • To refine and unify their efforts, stakeholders received extensive education about the harmful use of substances as it relates to the workplace, including current drug trends, the continuum of care around substance use disorders, best-practice drug-free workplace programs and business operations of “second-chance” policies and other management practices.

  Statewide there were 279 stakeholders representing 200 organizations including government, businesses, media and chemical dependency treatment providers.

• Business Survey: Data was collected to get a more accurate picture of how the employers and employees in the 17 counties were being impacted by substance use.
  • A first of its kind, statewide survey was conducted to assess the perceptions, attitudes, knowledge and practices of businesses and community leaders as they relate to preventing and addressing the harmful use of substances in the workplace/workforce.
  • Respondents included 1,484 community leaders and 3,229 businesses representing every size business and industry, with most respondents representing small businesses. (Read “First-of-its-kind survey shows employers could do more to create a drug-free workforce” for preliminary highlight results from the survey. OhioMHAS will be releasing the entire outcome report soon.)

• Technical Assistance Course:
  • A keystone activity of the Initiative was to provide, free of charge, a Technical Assistance Course to five companies in each of the 17 communities. This establishes a nucleus of workplaces operating best practices around these issues.
    • Seventy businesses attended this 14-hour course, receiving in-depth education and guidance to develop (or refine) a state-of-the-art and legally sound drug-free workplace (DFWP) policy and program.“It was probably one of the most relevant, impactful and timely educational seminars that I’ve ever been through,” said Kristina Downing, CEO of Express Employment Professionals. “I learned that a lot of my assumptions, even with my education in the coalition, about substance abuse, were incorrect. That my drug testing policy was incomplete at best. And that as employers, and I think this is probably the biggest impact for me and some of my fellow employers in the group, we have a role to play, and it’s really an important one.”
    • The implementation of the knowledge and practices taught in the course will impact over 10,000 employees and their families.

• Social and Traditional Media: It isn’t enough to just share information with stakeholders and the companies who participated in the Technical Assistance Course, an objective of the Initiative was to get the word out to as many people as possible.
  • Over 220 social posts, receiving over 800 likes and 300 shares were published by the communities to raise awareness about the issue and the Initiative.
  • Communities received media coverage at least 46 times throughout the Initiative.
  • Over 350 Ohio system leaders were kept apprised of the Initiative and related impacting issues via Leadership Briefing emails. These assisted with collaboration on addressing current and future drug-free workforce needs.
  • Media efforts reached over 24,000 Facebook followers and 80,000 newsreaders.

• Job Seeker Challenge: This video addresses the Initiative goal at a micro-level – job applicants– to raise their awareness about the prevalence of and reason why workplaces do drug testing and to give applicants a chance to review their own relationship with drugs based on new education. This resource also serves to connect them (and their friends and families) to local helping resources.
  • The video was customized with information specific to each of the 17 participating communities. (OhioMHAS is finalizing these videos and will be releasing them to the communities soon.)
  • Community stakeholder groups created plans to distribute the video resource to as many of the roughly 68,500 unemployed Ohioans as possible.

Throughout the Initiative and the event on September 28, one thing has remained clear and best summed up by Ostry. “As long as we are affected by this drug epidemic, businesses are not exempt. Their bottom lines are hard hit. Novel concepts and ideas need to be considered and employed. In this environment, we should all be rethinking the same old ways of doing things.”

This Initiative got the ball rolling, starting the beneficial dialogue between businesses and those providing substance use prevention and treatment services.  But the work doesn’t stop with the end of the Initiative pilot’s activities.  Each group of stakeholders identified their top three community needs and ideas to keep moving forward.  As Greta Mayer, CEO of the Mental Health & Recovery Board of Clark, Greene & Madison Counties said, “We’re just now beginning the real work.”