[讨论] IA009。自我感觉还可以，高人能否给看看。觉得例子有点牵强。

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

Discuss the extent 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.

The extent to which employees should keep their private lives and interests separated from the workplace is the answer to the question - which task should have higher priority at the workplace, personal life or job? In my point of view, I strongly agree with the speaker and there are many instances supporting my view.

First, bringing private life and personal activities to the job is a distraction to the very employee himself or herself. If the distraction is a long-term effect, it will drag the working efficiency of the person and will result in poor performance. Both private and professional life require significant amount of attention. Unlike personal activities, job tasks have a timing constraint, normally 8 hours a day. Hence, it has been already challenging for many employees to try to accomplish work in time with the undivided attention. Now, if we bring in the private life into the picture, an employee's workload is suddenly doubled with still the same amount of time. Consequently, his job performance will suffer inevitably. Moreover, bringing in personal activities to the workplace also creates distraction to the coworkers. Therefore, the collective output of the team will be lowered.

Second, a potential conflict of interest arises when an employee tries to attain to his or her personal business at the workplace. Imagine what if an employee's family business is running a real estate firm while the employee is in charge of administrating land and building division of the same city. The United States legislation branch sets a great example to avoid the conflict of interest when a candidate is holding an official position. The rules explicitly stated that an elected official couldn’t directly manage or run companies that aim to make profits. A list of prominent leaders who have strictly complies to this rule includes Vice President Cheney who quitted as CEO of Halliburton when he decided to join the president campaign and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who separated from his media company, Bloomberg L.P when he was elected. It is obvious that by handling private business at work, an employee is subjected to favor his or her own personal interest and therefore creates a conflict of interest case.

In conclusion, it is for the best that employees should separate private lives and personal activities away from the workplace because this private business certainly will cause distraction to the employees. In addition, conflict of interest is always a possibility if personal and professional life is mixed.