Smoking breaks are a common thing in most offices around the world. A company in Japan is giving employees who don't smoke an extra six days off to make up for smokers' cigarette breaks.
The marketing firm Piala Inc. introduced the policy after an employee complained about cigarette breaks affecting productivity, according to CNBC.
Hirotaka Matsushima, a spokesman for Piala Inc., had told TheTelegraph a few years back “One of our non-smoking staff put a message in the company suggestion box earlier in the year saying that smoking breaks were causing problems.”
He said that frequent breaks taken by employees for smoking mean they waste at least 15 minutes of their working hours each day.
After hearing about the complaint, the company's CEO, Takao Asuka, decided to grant six extra days of paid leaves to non-smoking employees as compensation.
"I hope to encourage employees to quit smoking through incentives rather than penalties or coercion," Mr. Asuka told Kyodo News.
To discourage the habit of smoking in youth this step is taken by the company. A growing number of companies in Japan have begun to tackle the menace of smoking.