essay - GMAT: Issue 10

Question:
“Employees should keep their private lives and personal activities as separate as possible from the workplace.”

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Answer:
I don't agree with the statement that employees should keep their private lives and personal activities as separate as possible from the workplace, because I believe that there are several significant positive effects coming from the opposite policy.

First of all, the situation in which employees know each other's private life can make employee's collaboration much more efficient. Easily understood, knowing each other's wife's name and the number of children can expedite the communication. I also once read an article saying that more and more corporations begin to plan family events and support communication at the private level. Personally speaking, it's clear that communication with a person who I privately know well is much easier and better than one with a person who I don't know well.

Second, we cannot ignore the effect of private acquaintance that curb the attrition rate. Some business analysts advocate that the most vital factor to decrease the overturn rate is to enhance the employees' private communication. If an employee don't satisfy with the workplace, but if he has personal connection with other people in the organization, he remains in the organization. In our increasingly competitive world where the human resource is vitally important, making a good strategy for preventing employees from leaving the company becomes more and more important. This thought also matches my personal experience. I had been working for a company for around ten years, thinking of changing the job everyday, but what had been preventing me from doing so was my good friends working for the same company.

Yet we also pay attention to the negative aspects of personal connection among employees. For instance, it is said as a good practice that bosses should avoid having personal feelings toward their subordinates in order to discipline the organization. And also in case he needs to make a severe decision on his subordinate such as dismissal, personal attachment may spoil the right judgement.

To sum up, although it has some negative impacts, I believe that enhancing private communication among employees is valuable for corporations. Therefore, corporations should plan family picnics or barbecues to achieve its merits that I mentioned above.