Addiction Recovery Training: The Hidden Gap In Workplace Wellbeing Programmes
A 2024 study conducted by Emily Pearson, founder of Our Mind’s Work called the Wellbeing Strategy Maturity Quiz revealed one of the most glaring gaps in wellbeing strategies and programmes: addiction and recovery support in the workplace.
Pearson’s study found that even though there’s been an increase in mental health interest within workplace wellbeing programmes, addiction is still one of the most overlooked and stigmatised aspects. For example, only 6% of respondents reported recovery-friendly practices as part of their wellbeing strategy.
What’s more, in the UK, 70% of people with substance abuse problems are employed and alcohol abuse costs £7 billion annually in lost productivity. Plus, nearly 6 in 10 employees (57%) admit to having struggled with some kind of addiction, whether that’s alcohol (15%), gambling (14%) and drugs (7%), according to Bupa.
These sobering stats not only reveal this hidden gap, but also highlight a conversation that needs to happen. Should addiction recovery training become a more prominent part of workplace wellbeing programmes and how can it be achieved?
The Need For Recovery-Friendly Workplaces
Let’s take a moment to consider what Pearson describes as recovery-friendly workplaces in an article she wrote for Make A Difference Media.
According to her, a recovery-friendly workplace “supports employees recovering from addiction by providing compassion, resources, training, policies, and practices that promote their health and wellbeing and treat people with dignity and respect. Recovery is contagious so having open conversations, offering access to treatment and recovery coaching while creating stigma-free and psychologically safe culture and implementing supportive policies and practices, employers can foster a philosophy of acceptance and support for colleagues in recovery or struggling with addiction.”
Based on this definition, here are some of the potential benefits of recovery-friendly workplaces:
Higher employee wellbeing: If people are genuinely supported, they are more likely to feel present at work, less prone to absenteeism and communicate their struggles in ways that are comfortable to them so a future crisis is averted.
Better retention: Employees will build a sense of loyalty to the company and hiring and retention improves overall.
A positive culture: Work culture is strengthened so employees at all levels can speak their mind, feel included in organisation-wide initiatives and are able to support each other.
What Do The Experts Have To Say?
For these kinds of workplaces to become a reality, it’s worth hearing from experts and practitioners who are working in the space.
Dr Charlie Orton, CEO of UK SMART Recovery, a charity focused on helping to change perceptions and behaviours around addiction by supplying training and education in the workplace, believes the subject remains a blindspot in corporate wellbeing strategies “because addiction is a very confronting topic for people to open up about. It’s probably the most heavily stigmatised human condition in our society today and when you say the word addiction most people think of those who are out of work and partaking in the use of illicit substances.
Employees don’t feel psychologically safe to be open about harmful behaviours for fear of losing their job or being reported to the authorities. In addition, addiction lacks public sympathy because many perceive it as something that people do to themselves and they can easily choose to stop it if they really wanted to. Therefore, addiction is often hidden or buried within Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs).”
Orton encourages senior leaders to avoid misconceptions like assuming “addiction doesn’t affect people who have high social capital i.e. something to do, somewhere to live and someone to love. There is a misconception that addiction is confined to people who are not in employment.
However, addiction probably affects more high performing individuals then we realise. It is all around us and everywhere and it is a massive misconception to think that because somebody is pitching up to work every day, perhaps raising their children and able to perform that they won't be doing anything to self soothe or self-medicate when they're under extreme stress. My message is that addiction is all around us and everywhere and I challenge anybody to give up their morning coffee for a month, tell me how they feel and see how they judge people with addiction after that.”
On how L&D teams and wellbeing leads can make the case for addiction recovery training, Orton says “addiction informed training is all about raising awareness and bringing the matter to the forefront of people's consciousness in the workplace. Look for training offers provided in the main by the charity/ third sector. Many community and charity organisations provide addiction or substance use awareness training. UK SMART Recovery supplies business owners with this training including lots of other support and advice for the workforce. We can bolt on our recovery programme to any EAP so that employees can receive direct and confidential help.
L&D could look at performance measures such as absences from work. They could look at sickness in the workplace that may be aligned to patterns after the weekend or due to hangovers. You could measure the number of people who come forward for support and help.
They could undertake an awareness survey among staff. They could start to intertwine conversations around living a balanced life into one-to-one meetings or annual appraisals and record the narrative or qualitatively analyse the kind of conversations that result from it.”
Founder of Betterminds, Dave Kneeshaw, a trainer and practitioner with a background in addiction recovery, feels that the mental health aspect of addiction needs to be emphasised and truly understood for training to make a real difference in wellbeing programmes.
He says:
“There is a massive cultural failing with a lot of stuff around mental health. One of the cultural failings is language. So if you have a physical health condition, the way that that is described is specific to what needs to change. So if I say I have a broken leg, you can work out in your mind’s eye, oh, as a lay person, I can work out what needs to happen. I don’t necessarily know how to do it, but I can work out logically, as a leader, as a manager, as support, that you need to rest it, you need to treat it in a certain way.
We have a series of topics like addiction, suicide, depression and if you pick those three words, they don’t tell you, as a lay person, what the opposite is. They don’t tell you what needs to change. So even at the most structural level, and up until around 2021 or 2022, the World Health Organisation acknowledged that the way we understood depression has been fundamentally wrong since the mid-sixties. Up until that point, there was this idea, still huge in pop culture, of a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
I created a diagram that I use when I’m training practitioners, which explains that what is wrong with us is either trauma or self-esteem, and they’re interlinked. Trauma, in this context, is the stuff that happened in the past that informs the present. So even if it happened a second ago, if I was in a car crash and now my body isn’t okay, it’s traumatised because of something that’s previously happened.
In terms of the gap between our areas, we don’t necessarily know what it is that causes us to behave the way we do, but the way we do behave isn’t congruent with how we want to behave. We look at other people functioning and we feel dysfunctional. We don’t need to go that far back, we don’t need to know everything. We just need to see that currently you are saying that but you’re doing this. Once we do that, whether as a practitioner or a trainer, we can take something complicated and break it into little bits.
Then something really interesting happens. Somebody starts to like themselves. And if they like themselves, they lean into the challenge. What we find with everybody else, and this is when it comes to why we lose staff at work, is when people don’t lean into a challenge, they either go off sick because the fear of being found out makes them sick, or they exit the business. It’s a “I’m traumatised by being vulnerable. I’m traumatised by asking for help, I’m traumatised by being confused” kind of response.
What we need to do as leaders is say it’s okay to be vulnerable. So if I’m going to treat all of that stuff, the starting point is to demonstrate, model, share and celebrate that we’re all wonky. It’s okay to be an individual. And leaders don’t always do that. They hide behind glass partitions, desks, time pressures and structures that remove the humanity from communication. Without that humanity, people don’t feel safe enough to say, “I struggle with this.”
Pippa Robson, Head of Operations and Wellbeing Lead at EPIC Global Solutions, a gambling awareness and addiction recovery organisation, has a useful perspective to share on gambling addiction. On why gambling harm is overlooked in workplace wellbeing programmes, she says:
“Gambling-related harm is largely invisible. With gambling, you don’t have the physical signs people associate with other addictions, so it flies under the radar. A lot of organisations still see it as a personal issue rather than a workplace risk. The reality is, if you’re not actively looking for it, you won’t see it.
For wellbeing professionals, there’s also a structural issue. Gambling-related harm often doesn’t sit neatly within existing frameworks. It’s not always captured under mental health, financial wellbeing, or addiction strategies, so it falls between the gaps. That means it’s rarely measured, rarely discussed, and rarely prioritised. The opportunity is to reposition it, not as a niche issue, but as something that ties in with financial wellbeing, psychological safety, and organisational risk.”
Robson suggests that leaders need to look beyond the misconception that gambling addiction “only affects a certain type of person. It doesn’t. It affects people across all roles, levels of seniority, and income. Another is assuming they’d spot it. Most people struggling are very good at hiding it, something that applies to every single one of the people I work with at EPIC who bring their lived experience perspective of the issue.
“There’s also a tendency to underestimate scale. Leaders often think in terms of “problem gamblers”, but harm exists on a spectrum, where people could be at different stages of potential addiction and starting to affect those around them without reaching what would be defined as a clinical addiction. You don’t need clinical addiction for there to be a workplace impact. That misunderstanding can stop early intervention, which is where wellbeing teams can make the biggest difference, helping teams to understand where they or those around them may fit on a gambling spectrum and where intervention and support is potentially needed.”
For L&D teams needing to prove a business case and impact, Robson says:
“I’d advise that you link it to risk and responsibility. When you frame gambling harm as both a wellbeing issue and a governance issue, it lands differently. For wellbeing professionals building a case, it helps to align with existing priorities like mental health strategy, financial wellbeing, DEI, or duty of care.
“Real stories are powerful, but so is connecting the issue to business continuity and culture. The most effective conversations move it away from “nice to have” and into necessary to manage risk and support people properly.
Robson also feels it’s worthwhile to look at existing data to help quantify the cost of not addressing gambling addiction. “Start with what you already measure. Things like absence, presenteeism, performance issues, and EAP usage. Then ask what might be sitting underneath. Wellbeing professionals can also look at financial wellbeing indicators, which will be issues like requests for salary advances, hardship support, or debt-related conversations.
“However, beyond all the metrics, it’s about risk exposure. If someone in a sensitive role is struggling, the cost isn’t just operational, it can be reputational or regulatory. I’ve worked with people who previously caused others to lose their jobs because their gambling harm was allowed to go unchecked in the workplace and fraud was taking place. It wasn’t just the person committing the fraud that had to go, but those who also had responsibility for auditing their financial actions. As cases like that proved, not everything will show up in a dashboard, which is why a proactive approach matters.”
The Path Forward
Based on this commentary, the need for addiction recovery training is clear. In order to make sure it’s implemented and embedded in workplace culture, there must be a balance of tailoring solutions on a case by case basis, while having open conversations about the impact it will have on the bottom line of the business.
These conversations can be made easier by knowing how to tie ROI-driven metrics to improving the lot of employees who are going through different kinds of addiction. Crucially, you can’t afford to reduce people to numbers or statistics.
The starting point is making it clear to those who are suffering in silence that they can ask for help, that they aren’t going to be labelled and stigmatised or at risk of losing their livelihoods.
As Brene Brown has said, “when we see that someone's hurt or in pain, it's our instinct as human beings to try to make things better. We want to fix, we want to give advice. But empathy isn't about fixing. It's the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness--not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”
True empathy is creating the space or environment for others to find how they need to heal. Addiction recovery training is not a one and done solution. In an ideal world, it’s a path that people can choose to walk if they find it useful, one star to follow within a galaxy of wellness options that companies should offer because it’s the right thing to do.