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?

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• Posted by: Mary Lorenz on June 18, 2008
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• Categories: Employee Retention, Generational Hiring, Survey Results