原文:http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzU1MDQwNTgzMg==&mid=2247491683&idx=1&sn=11f9071cd9e263fd3da191e08c26fa18&chksm=fba3b3c4ccd43ad2a791ffa0d8f6f512fdba88e8bb1b0cfb1d433b0788f3de270431473a7d69#rd
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Tracy,女,设计爱好者,推理烧脑粉
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听力|精读|翻译|词组
Work and Office politics
工作与办公室政治
英文部分选自经济学人20200911期Leaders版块
Work and Office politics
工作与办公室政治
The fight over the future of the workplace has just begun
未来的工作场所之战刚刚拉开帷幕
Most people associate the office with routine and conformity, but it is fast becoming a source of economic uncertainty and heated dispute. Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the office is obsolete—and are coming to radically different conclusions. Some 84% of French office workers are back at their desks, but less than 40% of British ones are. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, says the company’s staff can work from home “forever” but Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, says home-working is “a pure negative”. As firms dither, the $30trn global commercial-property market is stalked by fears of a deeper slump. And while some workers dream of a Panglossian future without commutes and Pret A Manger, others wonder about the threat to promotions, pay and job security.
大多数人将办公室与例行公事和循规蹈矩联系在一起,但它正迅速成为经济不确定性和激烈争论的源头。世界各地的工人、老板、房东和政府都在试图搞清楚办公室是否过时了——并得出了截然不同的结论。大约有84%的法国办公室职员回到了他们的办公桌前,但在英国只有不到40%。Twitter负责人杰克•多尔西(Jack Dorsey)表示,该公司的员工可以“永远”在家工作,但Netflix创始人里德•黑斯廷斯(Reed Hastings)表示,在家工作是一件“完全负面的事情”。随着各公司的犹豫不决,价值30万亿美元的全球商业地产市场正被对更严重衰退的恐惧所笼罩。当一些过于乐观的员工梦想着一个没有通勤和便宜快餐的未来时,其他人则担心这对升职、薪酬和工作保障造成威胁。
注:Panglossian:naively or unreasonably optimistic. 盲目乐观
Pret A Manger: an international sandwich shop franchise chain based in the United Kingdom, popularly referred to as Pret. 总部位于英国的一家三明治连锁店
The disagreement reflects uncertainty about how effective social distancing will be and how long it will take before a covid-19 vaccine is widely available. But it is about more than that: the pandemic has revealed just how many offices were being run as relics of the 20th century, even as it triggered the mass-adoption of technologies that can transform white-collar work. As a result the covid calamity will prompt a long-overdue phase of technological and social experimentation, neither business as usual nor a fatal blow to the office. This era holds promise but also brings threats, not least to companies’ cultures. Instead of resisting change, governments need to update antiquated employment laws and begin reimagining city centres.
这种分歧反映对两件事的不确定性,一是社交距离的将达到什么样的效果;二是在新冠肺炎疫苗的广泛普及之前这样的社交距离还要持续多久。但它的意义不止于此:这场流行病暴露出到底有多少办公室还像20世纪的遗迹般运行着,虽然疫情也引发了足以改变白领工作的技术进行大规模应用。其结果是,新冠肺炎引发的灾难将推动一个迟来已久的技术和社会实验阶段,这既不是一如往常,也不是对办公室的致命打击。尤其是对企业文化来说,这个时代既充满希望,又遍布威胁。政府需要更新陈旧的就业法律并开始重新构想城市中心,而非抵制变革。
Two hundred years ago steam power brought workers to factories where they could use new machines. As corporate giants emerged in the late 19th century, staff were needed to administer them. They held planning meetings and circulated memos, invoices and other paperwork to record what they had done. All this required workers to be close together and created the pattern of people commuting by car or train in order to meet in a central office.
两百年前,蒸汽动力把工人们带到了工厂,在那里他们可以操作新机器。随着19世纪末企业巨头的出现,企业需要员工来进行管理。员工们召开计划会议,分发备忘录、发票和其他文件,以记录他们所做的事情。所有这一切都要求员工们能够工作在一起,并且为了在总公司会面而创造了开车或乘坐火车通勤的工作模式。
This system always had glaring shortcomings, some of which have become worse over time. Most people hate the hassle and expense of commuting, which eats up over four hours a week for the average American worker. Some dislike the noise and formality of offices, or suffer from discrimination within them. Office-bound workers find it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.
该体系一直都存在着一些显而易见的弊端,有些随着时间推移越发严重。通勤路上的手忙脚乱和日积月累的交通费用令大多数人苦不堪言,美国工人每周平均耗费在通勤上的时间就超过了四个小时。有的人厌恶办公室里的吵闹喧哗和种种规矩,还有的人则遭受着办公室歧视。被束缚在办公室的员工们发现照顾孩子更加困难,随着双职工家庭越来越多,这个问题也呈上升趋势。
You might think that new technologies would have shaken up this unsatisfactory status quo. After all, the pdf electronic document was born in 1991, the cost of bandwidth collapsed in the 2000s, and Zoom and Slack, two firms whose technology powers remote working, are both nearly a decade old. Yet inertia has allowed the office to escape serious disruption. Before covid-19 struck, for example, flexible-office companies (including the troubled WeWork) had a tiny global market share of under 5%. Most businesses were unwilling to switch wholesale to remote-working technologies before their clients did; or to write off sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.
你可能认为新技术本应该可以改变这种令人不满的状况。毕竟1991年就有了pdf格式的电子文档,21世纪初带宽成本大大降低,Zoom和Slack这两家聚焦远程办公技术的公司成立都差不多有十年之久了。但守旧使得办公室体系沿用至今。例如,新冠疫情爆发前,弹性工作制企业(包括存在诸多问题的共享办公企业WeWork)仅占全球市场份额的不到5%。大多数企业都不愿意大规模的采用远程工作技术,除非客户先改变。它们也不原意把房地产资产和租赁当作沉没成本注销掉。
注:In business, a sunk cost fallacy can cost a business greater financial losses. It would be more rational to write off these sunk costs, rather than wasting more money on developing a product which will never make a profit.沉没成本会给公司带来更大的损失。注销沉没成本才是明智的,而不是浪费更多钱在不能盈利的事物上。
Covid-19 has upended all this. Before the pandemic only 3% of Americans worked from home regularly; now a huge number have tried it. Even Xerox, a firm synonymous with office printers spewing unread pages, has many of its staff working from home. As more people adopt remote-working technologies there is a powerful network effect, with each new customer making the service more useful. Together Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex now have well over 300m users. Bureaucratic hurdles to remote work have been blasted out of the way. Civil courts are operating remotely. Notaries have gone online and some banks have eliminated the need for new customers to enter a branch to confirm their identity and open an account.
上述局面在新冠疫情出现后翻转了。以前只有3%的美国人经常在家办公,而现在许多员工已经尝试了在家办公。就连作为办公室打印机代名词的施乐公司(Xerox)也允许很多员工在家办公(办公室的繁文缛节造成了无数的纸张浪费)。远程办公技术不断普及,随着新用户的加入,网络效应显著,服务价值提升。Microsoft Teams、Zoom、Google Meet和Cisco Webex的用户总数远超3亿。线上办公程序性障碍一扫而空。民事法庭远程审案,公证人员在线办公,部分银行网点无需新客户前往柜台就能核实身份、开立账户。
How much of this change will stick when a vaccine arrives? The best available guide is from countries where the virus is under control. There the picture is of an “optional office”, which people attend, but less frequently. In Germany, for example, 74% of office workers now go to their place of work, but only half of them are there five days a week, according to surveys by Morgan Stanley. The exact balance will depend on the industry and city. In places with easy commutes more workers will go to the office; megacities with long, expensive journeys may see fewer.
这些变化有多少能在疫苗普及后保留下来?目前最多只能参考那些抗疫得力的国家的情况:“自选办公”,人们来上班,但出勤率不高。比如摩根斯坦利调查显示,现在德国有74%的上班族重返工作岗位,不过其中只有半数人每周到岗五天。具体数字还要看各行业和地区的具体情况。通勤便利的地区出勤率更高;通勤路程长、花费贵的大城市到岗人数会更少。
Companies will have to adapt to this pattern of sporadic attendance in which the office is a hub, not a second home. There is a risk that over time a firm’s social capital erodes, creativity flags, hierarchies ossify and team spirit fades, as Mr Hastings fears . The answer is more targeted staff interactions, with groups gathering at specific times to refresh friendships and swap information. New technologies that “gamify” online interactions to prompt spontaneity may eventually supersede the stilted world of Zoom. As they retool their cultures firms will need to rejig their property: sober investors expect a reduction of at least 10% in the stock of office space in big cities. With the typical corporate lease lasting at least half a decade, this will take time to play out.
企业需要适应间歇性出勤的工作模式,让办公室发挥枢纽功能,而非员工的“另一个家”。但这种模式存在风险,像黑斯廷斯担心的那样,长期以往会给公司带来社会资本减值、创造力衰退、阶层固化,以及团队精神缺失的恶果。应对方案是有针对性地组织员工互动,在特定时间安排团组形式的集会,方便成员们增进交情,互通信息。新技术能给线上互动提供游戏化体验,促进用户自发参与,或终将淘汰Zoom统治下的刻板世界。公司在重塑企业文化的同时,还要调整办公空间,冷静的投资人们预计大城市写字楼的存量将至少下降10%。而企业租赁期一般5年起步,改变尚需时日。
For governments the temptation is to turn the clock back to limit the economic damage, from the collapse of city-centre cafés to the $16bn budget shortfall that New York’s subway system faces. Britain’s government has tried to cajole workers back to the office. But rather than resist technological change, it is far better to anticipate its consequences. Two priorities stand out.
疫情不仅让市中心的小餐馆倒闭,也让纽约地铁系统肩负160亿美元的预算缺口,对各国政府而言,最大的愿望恐怕就是时光可以倒流,好让经济损失没那么严重。英国政府就极力劝诱大家恢复线下办工,不过与其抵制技术变革,倒不如预测这种变革带来的结果。其中,要属下列两件事最为重要。
First, a vast corpus of employment law will need to be modernised. Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new prickly questions about workers’ rights and responsibilities loom: can firms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest of the workforce.
首先,大批劳工法需要修改,以适应现代社会。零工经济已经证明现在的劳工法跟不上时代了。不过,如今还有一些棘手的新难题日益逼近,有关劳动人员的权利与义务:员工远程办公的话,公司能够考查他们并评估他们的生产效率吗?要是员工在家受伤了,谁来担这个责任?只要有人认为白领们拿着额外津贴,都会让其他劳动人员心生怨恨。
The second priority is city centres. For a century they have been dominated by towers filled with swivel chairs and tonnes of yellowing paper. Now complex urban-planning rules will need a systematic overhaul to allow buildings and districts to be redeveloped for new uses, including flats and recreation. If you step back into the office this month, sit down and log on to your computer—but don’t get too comfortable.
其次,市中心的建设也尤为重要。过去一个世纪,各种高楼大厦耸立于市中心,大厦里面全是各种转椅,以及成千上万日渐泛黄的办公用纸。而如今,根据综合楼群的城市规划方案,需要对建筑物和街区进行系统性全面改造,以用于新用途(包括住家和娱乐在内)。如果本月你就要回到办公室,坐在办公椅上,登录电脑,切记不要太安于现状。
翻译组:
Trista,女,暴富不是梦想,是未来的现实
Fionana,女,经济学人伪粉,就爱乱翻书
Yuki,女,翻译在读,庄严发誓绝对不干好事
Mai,男,经济学博士,世界那么大,我想活得久一点
校对组:
Neil, 男,外贸民工,经济学人铁粉
Carole,女,死宅,日常思考人生无果
Wesley,男,英语老师,经济学人铁粉
Hannah,女,英语教书匠,经济学人粉丝
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观点|评论|思考
本次感想
Vincent 男,狱警,电子与法学双硕,爱好诗歌与哲学
汪曾祺大致这么说过,我们这个民族,长期以来,生于忧患,已经很“皮实”了,对于任何猝然而来的灾难,皆可用一种“儒道互补”的精神对待之。这种“儒道互补”的真髓,即“不在乎”。若再以此“不在乎”去观量此文,凭直觉经验,不禁觉得,真的要去调研办公方式的改变吗?因为焦虑吗?可人类社会自有应变之道啊。男女情爱多发端于冬夏两季节,何也?情人之爱,一是如狼爱羊,美丽色相之引导;二是温暖积蓄之心渐长,依偎取暖需求之引导;而春秋两季,人多思考,反而不易产生关乎情爱的想法。深谙办公室恋情之道的very如是说。可见,人尚且在应对季节的变化时,自然而然地完成了规划,更遑论来回切换于工作、生活之中,做好时间管理。布劳威尔说:直觉经验就是数字经验,推算经验,时间经验。时间经验是,推算经验是,数字经验是,之后。1之后是2,2之后是3。现在之后是,今天之后是,时间是连续的,一点一点向前进展的。数学经验无法简化为逻辑。既然不为逻辑,就不受排中律的限制,这样悖论就不成为问题。解决问题的方法就是消灭它。问题不成为问题,就解决了。
胡乱说一通后,发现,篮球撤去梯子,剪掉篮网的底袋,其实用了50年。哥德尔说过,你不可以用L以外的语言来形容L。你一旦用L以外的语言来形容L,就免不了产生语言的谬误。后来very说,解决此问题也有好办法,她可以什么也不说,就用丝巾缠着他的手,他就会留下。他强壮而温暖的胸怀,他结实的大腿,他的唇他的齿,都是她的了。
苏格拉底早预言过“向上之路”是艰难的,相比文明智慧,一些愚蠢或狂暴的事件对历史进程的影响更大一些。值得一提的是,从工业现代化之后的社会环境转变以来,免不了一些从鸡犬相闻往来故人变为唯理性是从缺乏社会联结的城市空间,如此“nostalgia”情怀背书,悲观论调。但是亦要看到,现代化生活为人类提供的自由,以及对于发掘更大潜能的暗示,都是充满积极意味的。人与人的精神联结,可以是跳脱出基于空间位置的亲近而转向情感价值观上的相似性,比如我与very哥,虽然相隔遥遥,却共同爱好古代奇书的连环画册,他说即如我说一般。
面对未来,应该是理性和忧畏都在,生存的喜乐和不确定也在。没有一件事情是重要的,除非你觉得非如此不可。唐三藏,江流儿。它来临,一切偶然的出现皆皈依为必然。
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