Question

A company is considering changing its policy concerning daily working hours. Currently, this company requires all employees to arrive at work at 8 a.m. The proposed policy would permit each employee to decide when to arrive from as early as 6 a.m. to as late as 11 a.m.

The adoption of this policy would be most likely to decrease employees productivity if the employees' job functions required them to _______.

• A. work without interruption from other employees
• B. consult at least once a day with employees from other companies
• C. submit their work for a supervisors eventual approval
• D. interact frequently with each other through out the entire workday
• E. undertake projects that take several days to complete

Answer 1

Answer: (D)

interact frequently with each other through out the entire workday

Going through the options, we note that A is incorrect because the time people come in (central to the argument) has no relation whatsoever with whether people get interrupted or not, option B is out because consulting with other companies is a non-issue as people would still putting in at least 6 hours of work on a normal day, and option C is also incorrect because it implies that the supervisor would 'eventually' sign off on everybody's work, it is not time bound. However, if C had stated that the supervisor would need to sign off that very day, then C could have been the answer. Option E is also incorrect as people would still be at work 5 days a week so this should not be an issue. This leaves us with D - if the workers are required to interact with each other throughout the ENTIRE day, then the adoption of the given policy would most likely decrease the employee's productivity. Thus, D is the correct answer.