GMAT Essays (AWA)

ESSAY QUESTION:
"Poor health and high stress levels diminish the productivity of today's office workers. In order to maximize profits, companies need to provide white-collar employees with free exercise facilities and free wellness classes."

In your opinion, how accurate is the view expressed above? Use reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading to develop your position.

YOUR RESPONSE:
The view mentioned above is ambiguous because of the following reasons:

Firstly, the argument doesn't mention anything about the specifics of the industry and the location of office e.g. investment banker's job is known to be more stressful and tiring as compared with that of a pharmaceutical statistician. From my experience, Investment bankers spend 12-16 hours in the office as compared with 8-9 hours for pharmaceutical statistician.

Secondly, majority of the contemporary industries have free access to gyms and health programs for their employees. The argument doesn't mention the details about the hours of operation of the exercise facilities. This could be a determining factor in understanding the effectiveness of the program because if the gym is not open outside of office hours, majority of people will go home versus going to gym. Majority of times, employees don't get time to go to gym during office hours. I have seen people skipping lunch for attending meetings. The company should enforce "1 hour" lunch window where no meetings should be allowed.

Thirdly, there are other activities and programs that can reduce stress, as for e.g. yoga and meditation. Timely health checkups can also help employees to check their overall health. Like Google, the company should let their employees spend 20% of their time working on activities that they like to do. Google maps and Google news are very good example of these initiatives. For women, the company should provide child-care facilities so that they don't have to worry about their kids while they are in the office, leading to improvement in the efficiency.

Fourthly, the argument fails to address other non-health related issues that may lead to higher levels of stress e.g. work cleanliness, sound-proofness of cubicle and flexible work hours. Work life balance can really help employees to improve their efficiencies. The company can not succeed by giving benefits to only white collar employees and not giving benefits to others. All the employees and right placement resources should be treated equally. The employees should be allowed to work from home some days so that they can spend some time with their families. This will help the company and employees to save some dollars spent on commute, office electricity bills and will in turn give tax benefits to the company for going "green."

Finally, not every company can succeed by implementing health and welfare programs. The company has to make sure that right strategies are made for it to be profitable. Google would not have been profitable without good strategies. Employees' welfare and strategies are part and parcel of the success. One cannot ignore any one of them. However, inclination towards one side should not affect the other side.

Hence, the argument needs to be improved and well contextualized for it to be air-tight.

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