Loneliness affects productivity!

IN contemporary business matters and international contexts when the world economy has been globalized, organizations are faced with complexities, competition and a shortage of skills. This results in the need for a diverse workforce to enrich human capital through different skills, knowledge, experience and languages in order to come up with creative solutions to business changes. This strategy generally involves recruiting from the international labor market in order to find people with the required diverse talents. However, ironically this means collecting people from different nationalities, belief systems and ages in the same workplace which results in big gaps and weak relations between them, due to the differences they are seeing and expressing every day. Generally speaking, employees will feel lonely even if they are not working alone because their minds create walls that separate them from their colleagues, and this loneliness and separation will bring depression into the workplace. Since employees are the engines of an organization that moves it forward, it is important to help them get over the feeling of loneliness. If this is not done, the company will have a high turnover rate and low productivity due to low employee satisfaction and engagement. Organizations are responsible for creating a friendly corporate culture based on trust, where each employee is able to see his/her role in the big family picture. This can be done by adopting vertical integration by aligning an employee’s objectives with the organization’s objectives, so that employees can clearly see their contribution and improve their engagement within the organization. This can also be done by adopting a horizontal integration by building teams that work together to achieve one objective. Each member in the team recognizes the benefits of others in developing a creative solution. This is not only a matter of attending training courses, but requires employees to take time to see their colleagues as human beings; no nationality, no religion, no gender, just brothers and sisters from a global family working for the same organization. Ali Al-Aradi, Dubai