By Carmie Dulguime*

AT LEAST 50 percent of my daily news feed from my Facebook “friends” is about their games updates. Someone just bought a harvester in Farm Ville. Another one needs help in ordering a hit on Mafia Wars. Yet another one took a photo of her pet in Pet Society and made it her profile pic (uhrm, that would be me). Time stamps of these feeds indicate that these games are being played during office hours. Talk about stress-busting at work!

Playing online games during office hours were frowned upon in offices about six years ago. Today, the atmosphere has changed radically. Companies are beginning to embrace the idea of letting their employees play at work for, believe it or not, productivity and motivation purposes. Perhaps these companies realized they could not stop their employees from stealing company time by playing online even with sophisticated software installed in the system to monitor employees’ activities online.

Thanks to companies like Snowfly, Inc., online gaming during office hours are now legitimized because of the advantageous effects of its web-based incentive software programs. It developed a gaming program called Capstone which rewards employees for playing. In return, the company gets real-time results that help determine the productivity and morale level of its workforce. Too good to be true? It’s a win-win situation for both employees and the company, if you ask me.

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THERE REALLY is no easy way to break somebody’s heart (just ask James Ingram and all the sawi sa pag-ibig right now), and this is true too in the corporate world.

My balikbayan friend from the US was just telling me last Sunday how her friend, also a Pinay, agonized going to work every day at Lehman Brothers before the big collapse, not knowing if she would still have a job the next day. I also heard of another friend who worked at a California bank which has closed shop last year, and yes, it is hard to be told you just lost your job.

But just as it is so heartbreaking to be told you have been fired or have lost your job through no fault of your own, it is equally, if not more, heartbreaking to be the boss having to decide a subordinate’s fate and tell him about it.
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Some jobs are really hard to fill. Just ask employers in the country who have difficulty finding the right person for jobs such as:
* accountant and auditor
* computer professional
* commercial and technical sales representative
* mechanical engineer
* professional nurse

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