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"Since the physical work environment affects employee productivity and morale, the employees themselves should have the right to decide how their workplace is designed."

Discuss the extend 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.



Employee productivity and morale are two important ingrediences of a successful company. To enhance these two factors, companies should take care of their employees and do the most to make them feel comfortable. Productivity and morale can be boosted by many factors, for example by working at a company that has a good reputation, offers promotion prospects or offers you the freedom to create your personal workspace. Though having the possibility to create your own workspace might increase productivity and moral, it is hard to implement in most businesses.

The first reason why designing your workplace is difficult is that every employee may have a different perception of what he or she thinks is fashionable. If this employee is working in a single bureau this would be, under some circumstances, acceptable but if you are working in a bureau with more than 5 people, rearranging your workplace might be difficult to realize. Imagine your co-worker is a fan of the New York Yankees and decorates his space with posters of the team and you absolutly hate his team because you are a fan of the White Sox. Would this be a boost for employee productivity and morale? I doubt it.

The second reason why I think that employees should not have the right to decide the design of their workplace is that it is doubtful whether the costs of the new design will make up for the possible boost in productivity and morale. If the employees of a small company in a low margin business decide that they want a new cafeteria, kitchen and a room to realax this would defenitely be a incentive for the workers. However, if the costs of this change would lead the company to lay off workers in order to be competetive, employee morale and productivity would probably be on a new low.

Though letting employees design their own workspace is in many cases counterproductive and not realizeable in many businesses, there are examples where this might indeed boost productivity and morale.Take a designer loft as an example. I think it would be a boost for employee productivity if the employees can design their own workplace and live in their organized "chaos" in order to think more creatively. This case would help the company owner by employing motivated and productive employees who produce creative work, and the employees would be also very contend in that they work in their personalized environment where they spend a lot of time.

In sum, letting employees decide how to design their workplace or leaving this decision to the management depends heavily on the field you are working in. While there are opportunities in creative job fields to realize this task, in most other jobs this would be counterproductive.




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I know the conlusion should be longer but I ran out of time...

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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Wed Apr 13, 2011 9:01 am
The writing here is strong, but there is some focus and clarity missing.

A few observations:

In the first paragraph, you should clearly state your position.
In this essay, you state that productivity and morale are two important ingredients of a successful company so at this point, I'm getting the feeling that you feel that these ingredients are important enough to give employees the right to decide the design of their workplace.

Your second sentence seems to support this idea.

In the third sentence, you say that Productivity and morale can be boosted by many factors, for example by working at a company that has a good reputation, offers promotion prospects or offers you the freedom to create your personal workspace. This is somewhat off topic since the issue isn't about whether or not letting workers design their workplace is the only way to boost productivity and morale. The issue is whether or not worker should have the right to design their own workplace.

In the last sentence of the first paragraph, you state that productivity might increase if workers have the right to design their workspace, but it would be hard to implement this. Unfortunately, the issue isn't whether or not this is hard; the issue is whether or not worker should have the right to design their own workplace.

So, going into the main body of the essay, the reader isn't 100% certain of your position, and this makes the essay harder for the reader to read.

Some might argue that your position is implied, but we need to be more explicit.

The 2nd paragraph discusses why it is difficult to let employees design their own workplace. This is off topic. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean that it is not right. If you want to make this paragraph relevant to the issue at hand, you need to explicitly state how the difficulty of the process relates to your position that workers should not have the right to design their own workplace.

It isn't until the 3rd paragraph where you explicitly state your position regarding workers' rights.

As I said, I think you are a strong writer. However, unless you clearly state and support your position (throughout the essay), your score will suffer.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Brent

PS: I have several free videos on the AWA section at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/analy ... assessment
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by Goldfinger2001 » Wed Apr 13, 2011 9:30 am
Hi Brent,

thank you for your valuation. I didn't think that I am off topic but you got my focus right now.
Thank you for the link, I will watch these videos before Sunday :)

What kind of score would you give for this essay? Is a 5 in range?

Thanks again for your efforts, I appreciate that!

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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Wed Apr 13, 2011 10:37 am
Goldfinger2001 wrote:Hi Brent,

thank you for your valuation. I didn't think that I am off topic but you got my focus right now.
Thank you for the link, I will watch these videos before Sunday :)

What kind of score would you give for this essay? Is a 5 in range?

Thanks again for your efforts, I appreciate that!
I'd have to say 3 or 4
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by Goldfinger2001 » Thu Apr 14, 2011 1:51 am
Thanks for your jugement, I'll work on my essays!

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by tanviet » Tue Apr 19, 2011 3:15 am
PLEASE HELP. I WRITE THIS ESSAY IN 26 MINUTES. I FIND THIS ISSUE HARD TO BRAINSTORM REASONS TO SUPPORT. SOME ISSUE IS EASY AND I CAN BRAIN STORM MORE REASONS/EXAMPLES TO WRITE. BUT FOR HARD ISSUE LIKE THIS ESSAY, I FIND HARD TO BRAINSTOM.

PLEASE, HELP ME HOW TO BRAINSTORM THE REASON/EXAMPLES.

CAN I GIVE AND ANALIZE 3 EXAMPLES TO WRITE. CAN I NOT GIVES REASON AT ALL. I HEARD SOME PERSONS SAID THAT I CAN GIVE AND ANALIZE ONLY EXAMPLES NOT REASON TO WRITE.

EXPERT, PLEASE, HELP AND SHOW THE PROBLEM WITH THE FOLLOWING ESSAY. I NOW BEGIN TO READ THE ESSAY ON THIS ISSUE OF OTHER PERSONS.



"Since the physical work environment affects employee productivity and morale, the employees themselves should have the right to decide how their workplace is designed."

Discuss the extend 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.

Some persons think that employees should have no right to decide how the workplace is designed. This is a complex problem. My view is opposite. It is better if the employees have right to do so.

The first reason for my view is that work environment affects productivity. I can give you many example for this point. The first example is that different persons require different ways of arranging the table and chair. You already know that some persons are left handed and other are right handed. It is clear that those persons would have to need the arrangement of chair and table differentlly. If they can not disign the work place, thay can not work effectively. No one can know their requirement and design for them. The second expmple is that different persons requite different vehicles for working. You can see that some persons are dissable persons. Other persons are normal persons. The dissable persons require special vehicles to work. Many blind persons need a computer to work and only they can understand what they need. Only they can design the work place so that they can work effectively. They need a special computer and a special table. No one can help them design because no one understand what the dissable need.

The second reason for my view is that work environment affects morale of persons. If a work place is designed by other persons, the employees could become naughty and corrupt. If the work place is designed the employees can not be corrupt. I can give you an example of this. If an outsider designs a separate room for one young boy and one young girl to work, it is likely that the two persons would have love affair. If we let the two person design their workplace, they would make the room separate because only they know how to protect themselves from the devil. The room they make would be connecting with other rooms. This prevents them from having love affair. So it is clear that if employees design the work place themselves, the morale is improved.

In conclusion, after analysing all reasons and example above, I see that it is better for employees to design there working environment. Doing so would improve productivity and marale. I hope you would agree with me.

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by tanviet » Tue Apr 19, 2011 3:35 am
I find that many issus are in the pattern " BECAUSE THIS.. WE HAVE THAT" (not argument essay). And I find that those kins of issue essay are hard for me to brainstorm reasons/example. PLEASE, HELP ME WITH THIS KIND OF ESSAY.

In writing essay, I try to make idea rich and clear, use simple language (because idea is important than languge), and create simple introductory and conclustion paragraphs

but when I write the above issue essay, I am not happy with the reason/idea I brainstorm. I feel the reason is not interesting/impressive.

PLEASE, HELP ME, EXPERT.