GMAT Essays (AWA)

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

“Should employees keep their private lives and personal activities separate from the workplace?” .I agree with the author that employees should keep their private life and personal activities separate from the workplace but author ignores the fact that we can build better teams by integrating employees personal activities with work.

First, employees can bring personal life to work by various vehicles such as through employee sponsor picnics, holiday parties or other events. Top management always encourages managers to know their employees personally. If manager checks with employees occasionally on their recent vacation or about a sick family member employees feel cared and it builds strong bound with the manager. By just going out for lunch with the team breaks personal barriers. Since employees know their team members or managers personally it builds cohesive environment.

Second, by knowing employees personally will help managers to create dedicate employees and boost overall team moral. Study shows large corporation encourages managers to arrange employee sponsor events such as tennis leagues, Holly ball or basket ball leagues. Recently one of my friends who is a project manager at large IT company was facing a conflicts within his team. Design, development and QA teams were not working properly as a team. He tried several different ways and finally he enrolled them on a tennis league. With in weeks he started to see results, now all employees know each other personally and are working as a team supporting the project needs.

On the other hand, too much personal activities at the work affect the productivity. Employees should not get together and start discussing personal life at the work. It should not be a routine that every Monday morning employees are getting together to discuss their weekend. Employees should not spend time either doing a personal internet shopping or discussing any personal life issues over the phone that distracts coworkers. Employees should behave professionally and keep any personal problem behind when they are at work.

In sum, as long as personal activities have no effect on productivity, by integrating few personal activities into the work life we can build efficient cohesive teams which have no personal barrier and at the same time boost productivity and employee moral.