Impairment Testing

A. Impairment Testing

In order to avoid undermining employees trust, Castulon Corporation should establish an impairment testing policy. Impairment testing would help determine which workers could be putting themselves and others at risk by measuring the employee's fitness for duty. An employee's ability to perform a task safely may be impaired by things other than drug usage, such as fatigue, and impairment testing can help identify those workers as well. Impairment testing has the potential to be more effective than drug testing due to its ability to specify a person's functionality at the time they are working, not at some point in the past and also focuses on all sources of impairment, not just those from illegal drug usage.

There are also cost advantages to using impairment testing versus traditional urine drug screenings. While there is no upfront cost associated with urine drug screenings, each individual test is charged to the company. Impairment testing does have the initial cost of software and hardware required to perform the testing but requires no additional cost for each test (workrights.us, 2010).

Testing for impairment encompasses hand-eye motor skills and is therefore less invasive than urine testing (hr.com, 2001). As Beverly pointed out, some employees may feel that urine drug testing is an invasion of privacy due to the ability to discover personal information about an employee, such as different types of medication an individual takes. An impairment test is sensitive to job-related impairments rather than pointing to activities outside of the workplace giving employees a deeper sense of privacy.

Impairment testing will also give employees a sense of fairness. They will not feel like they are being punished for activities outside the workplace but instead judged by their job performance. This will help solidify employee-employer trust by making safety the number one concern, not the use of illegal drugs.

B. Challenges for Drug-Testing

According to HR.com (2010), drug-testing faces many challenges. Among them is the limitation of the results of drug screening. Testing for illegal drugs only measures the use of the drugs, not the impact that the use has had on the individual's ability to function on the job. The results also do not indicate when the usage occurred and therefore, could have been several days or weeks prior to the screening. Also, the number of drugs that widely used urine tests screen for is limited. The tests do not take into account different types of legal medications a worker could be abusing that could affect their performance.

Another obstacle drug-testing faces is the employees' perception of invasion of privacy. Combine this with possibility of businesses overusing drug-testing and it can lead to an increased number of grievances, loss of trust between labor and management, and difficulties attracting and retaining qualified people (HR.com, 2010).

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