When you are designing a random drug testing program it is important to make note of what works best to help maintain a drug-free and safe environment for you and your employees and use it to your advantage. Establishing effective methods and sticking to them will help you a great deal over the course of the initial program and on into the following years.

The practices below are a great place to start regardless if you are Department of Transportation tested or not.

Here are a Few of the Best Practices to Use

• Know Who Needs Tested: Before you make selections on who to test remove employees from the list who aren’t required to do jobs that are considered safety sensitive, that is jobs that require the employee to be unaffected by substance abuse.

• Know What Testing Times Help You: Don’t be predictable! Make sure your testing dates and times are random! Alter the time of workday, the time of the month and the day of the week and don’t allow the testing periods to fall into a pattern such as once a month or once every 6 weeks.

• Give Notice Without Letting the Cat Out of the Bag: It’s important your employee and supervisors have enough time to get them to the testing site without disrupting work. Avoid giving them notice more than about an hour or so ahead of time and give them notice without drawing attention to the fact.

• Absent Test Subjects: If your employee isn’t present due to calling off sick, being on leave, or having a scheduled day off it’s probably best to choose another person to take their place. The accuracy of your testing results won’t be affected if one person is traded for another.

• Establish Regulations and a Written Policy: If your current and future employees know what your drug testing policy on drug use are they can more easily follow them. Establishing regulations and posting them throughout the workplace while asking each employee for a signed verification that they understand and agree to adhere to these regulations is the best way to maintain these policies.

• Know the Law: Verify all of your policies and methods by federal, state and local law to be sure you’re doing thing “by the book”. At no point should your employees right be ignored or violated.

• Have a Drug Testing Plan: If you’re going to test your employees you should have a set method of drug testing. This means that you should have an established testing site, someone to test the employee and set method of maintain the validity of the urine sample.

• Confidentiality is Key: Establishing and maintaining confidentiality isn’t just about keeping your drug testing accurate and random. Your employees rights are very important and it’s best for them if their drug testing results good or bad aren’t easy to access or talked about as part of gossip. To maintain a respectful working environment these results and who has been tested needs to remain confident.

Related posts:

1. Things You Need to Know While Designing a Random Drug Testing Program for Your Workplace
2. FAA Random Drug Testing Requirements for Pilots
3. How Do DOT Random Drug Testing Programs Work?
4. How to Randomize Data in Excel for Workplace Drug Testing
5. Random Drug Testing for Teachers

Tags: department of transportation, drug test, Drug Testing, drug use, initial program, random drug test, random drug testing, Substance Abuse

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Workplace Drug Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.