essay - GMAT: Issue 31

Companies benefit when they discourage employees from working extra hours or taking work home. When employees spend their leisure time without eproducing f something for the job, they will be more focused and effective when they return to work.

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

Answer:
I agree with the opinion mentioned above as a whole. Nowadays, more and more companies try to reduce employees' overtime work and enhance time for employees to spend meaningful personal lives. Yet I believe that work and life have a strong bond with each other. And also, for one who has a great ambition, thinking private life as a completely separated thing from work undermines his ambition.

"Work life balance" is a hot topic for contemporary enterprises. "Work life balance" is a concept that employees should keep a good balance between work and private life. This is the very concept that the opinion says. Spending prosperous private life contributes to the effectiveness and efficiency at the office. This concept also reduces payroll costs of overtime work, while taking benefits from more productive employees. Furthermore, this concept is necessary to attract resources outside such as new graduates or job seekers. In other words, ignoring "work life balance" makes the company to be in a serious situation in terms of its image. Therefore, in the sense, companies should try to reduce overtime work and enrich employees' private lives.

On the other hand, I believe a tight bond between work and life. I mean, thinking work and private life as the completely different things is nonsense because people think about work such as a trouble that was experienced previous day or a plan to do next day when spending their time at home to some extent, and they think about private lives such as a dream that he has or family that he needs to feed when working at the office to some extent. It can be happened that a person comes up with a great idea that he can use at his laboratory while doing shopping with his wife. My standpoint is that work and life exist mutually affecting, and taking a proper balance is the essential to have successful life.

In addition, I believe that sometimes people need to take work home or work on whole weekends at the office to achieve a higher goal. Especially, young people should make themselves absorb themselves in work completely for a certain period. The experience really makes them grow in their professional lives. In my case, I believe that since I worked taking a lot of hours when young, I now have enough competence to do work in a good manner with a short timeframe.

To sum up, although I generally agree with the opinion, I'd like to stress the importance of the synergy effect between work and life and the experience of working thoroughly.