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Is There a Place for Time in Corporate Utopia?

Employees in SAS Institute live in a workers’ Utopia. On the company’s wooden campus in North Carolina is everything a person could need: doctors, dentists, on-site childcare, masseurs…

SAS has just been chosen by Fortune magazine as one of the best companies to work for in the US. Like the other 99 companies singled out, SAS is not content to reward employees with a mere pay cheque. Instead, the company is dead set on making their lives easier.

Indeed, there is little these good employers will not do to take the load off their workers’ shoulders. Some provide subsidized housekeeper. Some deliver readycooked gourmet meals to employees’ doors in the evening. Other offer haircuts, free Viagra, cut-price sushi, free ergonomic chairs. One company even provides $10,000 towards the cost of adopting a child.

Not content with above, some employers are helping their staff fill their leisure hours too. Many offer swimming pools and fitness centres, some arrange guitar lessons or provide garden allotments. Some even lay on company holidays, whisking workers and their partners off to luxury island locations.

And that is not all: some companies also set the standards for employees to follow in their private lives. At First Tennessee, employs get a $130 cash bonus if they are seen to be practicing 10 specified healthy behaviour patterns.

For these forward-looking employers the vexed problem of work/life balance – assumed to be one of the greatest workplace issues facing us – is magically eliminated. These companies are mounting a take-over bid for their employees’ lives with the result that the issue of balance no longer arises.

And at these companies hardly anyone ever leaves. Which might mean everyone is gloriously happy. Or it might mean the prospect of severing one’s entire life from an employer is so daunting that it seems easier to stay put.

Amid all this bounty there is just one thing that none of these companies offer. And that is time. If employers really want to show that they are helping employees balance their lives, the answer is not to do their shopping, fix their teeth and issue them with laptops so that they can work “flexibly” right through the night. It is to ensure that people do not work too hard. To write it into the company’s culture that no one will be expected to work more than, say, 40 hours a week on average. And for the Chief Executive to show the way.

Certainly this would not be easy and probably not cheap either. But an employer that tackled the long-hours culture would be reaching the parts that all the free hairdos, Viagra and guitar lessons in the world will never reach.

FINANCIAL TIMES World business newspaper.

Answer these questions about the article.

1.How can employees at First Tennessee earn $130? What do you think they have to do to earn this money?

2.What is the problem of work/life balance? How are companies in the article trying to solve the problem? Have they been successful?

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3.What two reasons does the writer give for employees remaining with one of these companies? Which do you think is the more likely one? Why?

4.“SAS is not content to reward employees with a mere pay cheque.” Does this mean

What satisfying and dissatisfying factors have you written down? Are the employees working for these companies happy?

Ex. 8. Translate these phrases into English:

Уроки игры на гитаре; массажист; зубной врач; детский сад на предприятии; дачные участки; оплачиваемая домработница; денежная премия; больной/спорный вопрос; заполнить часы досуга; установить нормы, которым надо следовать; льготы; привилегии; вести здоровый образ жизни; довольствоваться; снять груз с плеч; проблема равновесия между работой личной жизнью; консультации у специалистов.

Ex. 9. Discuss these questions with a group.

1.How much should companies be involved in the lives of their employees?

2.How can businesses help to improve the balance between employees’ working and leisure hours?

Ex.10. Listen to the interview (Market Leader Upper Intermediate, Rec. 5.1) and answer the questions bellow.

A. To understand recording in a better way you have to work with vocabulary: match the words to their Russian equivalents.

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B. Listen to the interview and answer these questions:

2.Which groups of workers are most satisfied and which are least satisfied?

3.Which factors are the most motivating at work?

Ex. 11. Make a project “The Company I would like to work for”. Invent a number of fringe benefits to ease the employees’ lives and motivate them to work harder. Convince all the rest of your group that Your Company is the best.

Ex. 12. Do you remember Shakespeare’s words: “…What’s in a name that which we call a rose? By any other name as sweet as smell…”? We can ask: What’s in a title…? Job titles – are they of any importance in providing job satisfaction? Discuss the following questions.

1.Do job titles give a good idea about what someone actually does?

2.To what extent do you judge someone by their job?

3.Which would motivate you more: a pay rise or a better job title? Why?

4.Why might job titles cause problems among staff?

5.What do you think people with the following titles do at work?

Ex. 13. Read the article. Compare your answers to Exercise 12 with what the writer says. Does any from the article surprise you?

Job Satisfaction is All in a Name.

Bosses who are cash-strapped but want a decent typist without having to give them a pay rise would do well to call them “Digital Data Executives”.

A report published yesterday revealed that office workers have become so

“snobby” about job titles that they would be willing to forgo an increase in salary for a more “professional”-sounding position.

According to the study by Office Angels, the secretarial recruitment consultancy, job-title snobbery creates such envy that 90 per cent of employers and 70 per cent of employees said that it caused staff division.

Filling clerks long to be known as “Data Storage Specialists”, photocopying clerks as “Reprographics Engineers”, secretaries as “Executaries” and post-room workers as “Office Logistics Co-ordinators”.

The report found that 70 per cent of office workers questioned replied that they might give up a bigger pay cheque for a more “motivational or professional” job title to make their job role seem more dynamic and inspirational. It also found that 70 per cent of staff believed the people they meet outside work instantly judged them by their job title.

From The Times