Some People Like To Spend Their Leisure Time With Their Colleagues | Band 8 IELTS Essay Sample
Some people like to spend their leisure time with their colleagues while others prefer to keep their private life separate from their work life. Discuss both views and give your opinion.
Here is a band 8 IELTS essay on this topic submitted by one of our students. Need help with IELTS writing? Get your IELTS essays, letters and reports corrected by me.
Band 8 IELTS essay sample
Nowadays, many people continue to hang out with their colleagues after work hours; however, others prefer to have another circle of family friends to spend time with. I think both approaches have their merits.
It is not really easy to separate work life from personal life. First of all, our colleagues can actually be seen as our extended family members. That is because all of us spend a great deal of time at work. Actually, some of us spend more time with our colleagues than with our family members. Needless to say, they eventually become our friends and we start to enjoy spending time with them. This is advantageous in many ways. When we treat them as friends, we can create a more harmonious and delightful working environment, which will eventually result in an improvement of efficiency at work. Another advantage is that when we are friends with our colleagues we receive support when we need it. For example, if we are facing a personal issue that affects our productivity at work, an empathetic supervisor who knows us personally can understand our situation and provide valuable advice and support.
On the other hand, some people do not want to mix these two aspects of their lives because they believe that this is crucial for maintaining professionalism at work. When the manager is also a close friend, there could be a degree of biasness during performance review. The manager could give a better score to his friend regardless of his actual performance. This will be extremely unfair to the rest. Nevertheless, I think this problem can be mitigated easily as long as there is an established guideline within the corporation) to maintain the integrity of each worker.
In conclusion, it is undeniable that not separating the personal and professional / work lives poses the risk of jeopardizing the professionalism at work. Nonetheless, I do not think that they can be separated easily especially when we have to spend almost half of our time at work.
Band 8 IELTS essay sample 2
Some people enjoy making friends with their office mates and spending their free time with them. Others, however, do not approve of this practice and are more interested in having friends outside their office circle. I concur with both views as they both have their merits and demerits.
My views are strengthened by a few experiences in my personal life. For instance, at my workplace, all the employees usually hang out after an exhausting day. This helped us understand each other better and I was able to befriend a tester from our team. At first, we used to have contrasting opinions but as time went by and friendship blossomed between us, we were able to coordinate better and resolve the issues together. Gatherings at the office not only aid us in finding new companions but also creates a cheerful and delightful environment. In addition to this, it can be beneficial in tackling loneliness, a major concern lurking around every corner of the office. Most people now spend nearly half of their day at work, so if they have friends in office, it makes life and work a lot less stressful for them.
On the other hand, some people believe that private lives and professional lives should not be mixed. They are of the opinion that excessive indulgence in such activities can be detrimental. In order to keep the conversation going, people usually tend to gossip and belittle others. If the workplace is conservative, and word gets out about the rumoured backbiting, it will do more harm than good to an individual’s career. Moreover, many cases of infidelity are the result of such get-togethers. For example, in India, there have been many instances where colleagues who go to drink after work, unwittingly cheat on their significant others under the intoxicated state. Based on the elaborate discussion in the paragraphs above, we can conclude that although befriending people at the workplace assists in getting our work done and forming a team, overindulgence can ruin not only our professional career but also threaten our intimate relationships.
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