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Employees name top workplace frustrations

Perhaps encouraged by the response to a recent column about the reasons GenXers are unhappy at work (a piece that elicited over 430 reader comments and generated a follow-up slideshow on the subject), BusinessWeek recently launched on an online survey, asking all readers to voice their workplace pet peeves for publication in a mid-August special issue.

So far, nearly 8,500 readers commented or cast their votes, allowing the news magazine to narrow the top workplace complaints down to these six:

  • 1. Balancing work-life duties without going crazy
  • 2. Staying entrepreneurial and taking risks in an era of uncertainty
  • 3. Managing your time so e-mail and Crackberries don’t control you
  • 4. Negotiating a stultifying bureaucracy-and getting things done
  • 5. Dealing with generational tension in the workplace
  • 6. Coping with clueless-or toxic-bosses

Already, today’s record-high gas prices have led more companies to implement flex schedules and work-from-home options. Now it seems, with the (not-so-surprising) revelation that trying to balance work-life duties is the number one worker agitation, businesses have yet one more reason to implement such policies.

What about you? Do you offer – or have you recently started to offer – work-life balance benefits at your own company? Why or why not? And what about these other peeves, wherein the solution isn’t so obvious? Do they surprise you? How might you respond were it your own employees voicing these complaints?

Mary Lorenz

About Mary Lorenz

Mary is a copywriter for CareerBuilder, specializing in B2B marketing and corporate recruiting best practices and social media. In addition to creating copy for corporate advertising and marketing campaigns, she researches and writes about employee attraction, engagement and retention. Whenever possible, she makes references to pop culture. Sometimes, those references are even relevant. A New Orleans native, Mary now lives in Chicago, right down the street from the best sushi place in the city. It's awesome.
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Curtman40 120 pts

OMG it is 5 years later and these issues are more present today than ever. The workplace has definitely changed, general stress is caused by uncertainty everyone is tensed about whether they will be able to keep there job or not. It is kind of sad to say the least, however it has motivated me to become an entreprenuer I mean I am starting from the bottom so the good news is that I can't go no lower.

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