【雅思课外精读】办公室政治：如何应对办公室革命？

　　【雅思课外精读】办公室政治：如何应对办公室革命？ *注：本文摘自9月12日《经济学人》

　　Office politics

　　办公室政治

　　The fight over the future of the workplace has just begun

　　对未来工作地点的争论才刚刚开始

　　1. 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 Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the office is obsolete—and are coming to radically different conclusions.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遵守规则联系在一起。但是办公室正在带来经济的不确定性和激烈的争论。世界各地的工人，老板，房东和政府都想知道办公室是不是已经过时了，他们得出了截然不同的结论。84%的法国人回到了办公桌之前，但在英国只有不到40%。Twitter负责人Jack Dorsey表示，Twitter的员工“永远“在家工作。但是Netflix的创始人Reed Hastings表示，在家工作”不可能。“由于各公司在这个问题上的分歧，人们对价值30万亿元的全球商业地产市场的担忧进一步加剧。虽然一些员工梦想着没有通勤和快餐的美好未来，但是也有人担心这对升职，薪资和各种工作保障产生影响。

　　2. 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 massadoption 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.

　　这种分歧反映了人们对社交距离有效性和疫苗普及时间的不确定。不仅如此，此次疫情还展现了很多20世纪建造的办公室现在仍在使用，尽管这些办公室里面催生了可能改变白领工作模式的科技成果。此次疫情将推动一场科技和社会的革命，这既不像平常的工作，也不是对办公室的致命打击。疫情既带来了希望，也带来了威胁，尤其是对公司文化的威胁。政府不该抵制变革，而要更新早就过时的就业法规，重新规划城市。

　　3. 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，蒸汽机把工人带到了工厂，在那里他们可以使用新机器。19世纪末各种大企业出现，对员工的需求也在增加。工人们召开计划会议，分发备忘录，发票和其他文件，以记录他们所做的事情。所有这些都要求员工们要住得很近，因此人们为了在办公室见面而开车或者火车通勤的上班模式形成了。

　　4. 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 fromdiscrimination within them. Office-bound workers find it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.

　　但是这种模式有明显的缺点，随着时间的推移，其中的一些缺点逐渐恶化。大多数人讨厌通勤带来的麻烦和支出，普通美国人每周要花4小时在通勤上。有些人则是不喜欢办公室嘈杂的环境和各种繁文缛节，有的则是在办公室收到了歧视。在办公室工作的员工很难能够照顾到孩子，而且如今越来越多的家庭夫妻都要出去工作，这个问题也就变得越来越严重。

　　5. 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 remoteworking technologies before their clients did; or to write off sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.

　　你可能会认为，新技术的出现会改变这种让人不满的现状。毕竟PDF电子文档1991年出现，21世纪初，带宽成本大幅下降，而Zoom和Slack这两家公司的技术为远程工作提供了技术支持，它们都已经有近十年的历史了。然而，惯性使办公室得以避免严重的打击。在新冠疫情出现之前，灵活办公的公司（包括麻烦缠身的WeWork）在全球市场中所占的份额很小，不到5％。在客户采用远程工作技术之前，大多数公司都不愿意使用这种技术。或以不动产资产和租赁的形式核销沉没成本。