The purpose of the proposed three-year project is to refine, implement, and evaluate a team-based substance abuse prevention program for the workplace that has begun to emerge from our previous work. A workplace substance abuse prevention program that is closely tied to team-based environments found in a large number of organizations today is needed. The program consists of highly involving, participatory exercises designed to increase employee awareness of issues relating to workplace alcohol and other drug use and its consequences. Because these issues and consequences occur within an organizational context, the proposed training addresses specific factors that thwart policy implementation and aggravate employee substance use. These factors include supervisor/co-worker relations, stress, work group climate, and organizational change. Three samples will be used to implement and evaluate the program: (1) three high risk departments from the City of Fort Worth, Texas (Water, Transportation, Parks), (2) uniformed police officers from the City of Fort Worth, and (3) employees of the City of Grand Prairie, Texas. The specific goals of this project are: (1) to develop a participatory substance abuse prevention training program for the workplace that incorporates principles from quality and organizational change initiatives, and which addresses work cultures that tolerate and enable employee drug use and alcohol problems, and the impact of substance use on productivity and wellness; (2) to implement this enhanced training program in three different workplaces with a variety of departments and functions; (3) to evaluate the program in terms of specific training goals, including awareness of policy and work group substance use, and employee skills at reducing enabling behaviors and tolerance, and to determine whether the enhanced program does a better job of meeting these goals than no training at all or a standard, didactic, lecture format program typically used in many organizations; (4) to assess whether these individual goals of training are associated with a reduction in substance abuse and related problems for individuals and work groups; and (5) to produce training manuals documenting the content and implementation of the training program that can be used by other organizations, and a manual to train trainers.
