我在报社的日子:混日子员工欢乐多

When I had been at the FT for about a year, a young woman who had just joined the paper invited me out for a drink. I had barely taken a first sip of acidic white wine when she declared herself terminally bored with writing mundane corporate news stories and asked if I was too. No, I replied. I found it very interesting.
在我加入英国《金融时报》约有一年的时候，一名刚刚加入这家报业公司的年轻女孩邀请我一起出去喝一杯。我几乎还没来得及啜上一口酸味白葡萄酒，她就已经宣布自己对于撰写平淡的公司新闻故事感到彻底厌倦，并询问我是否也有同感。不，我回答道，我觉得这是一件很有趣的事。

“I really envy you,” she said, fixing her big, round eyes on me. I settled back into my seat, preparing to be told what a brilliant financial journalist I was. Instead she said: “You seem so happy just bumbling along. I wish I could be like that, but I can’t – I’ve always been a compulsive overachiever.”
“我真的很羡慕你，”她一边说一边用她又大又圆的眼睛看着我。我在自己的座位上坐好，等着听她夸赞我是一名多么出色的财经记者。谁知她却说道：“你似乎对这样子混着感到很开心。我希望自己也能像你一样，但我做不到——一直以来我都要求自己取得超越常人的成就。”

As an insecure, rabidly ambitious 25-year-old, I wasn’t terribly pleased to be put in the bumbler class. Neither was I fooled by the faux-envy. Yet I now discover that she was on to a general truth that almost never gets acknowledged: bumblers make happier workers and may be worthy objects of envy.
当时作为一名缺乏信心、同时又极有抱负的25岁青年，我对自己被归入“瞎忙活型”(bumbler)的行列感到很不开心。她那虚假的羡慕也没能将我骗过。如今我却发现，她提到了一个几乎从未有人承认过的一般事实：“瞎忙活”的员工在工作中更容易感到愉快，或许他们确实是值得羡慕的对象。

Last week I was sent a new piece of research showing that the worst-performing employees are often the most engaged ones. This is a radical departure from the standard view that performance and engagement go hand in hand: high performers are meant to be the motivated ones and the all-round cheerleaders, while low performers are supposed to belong to the awkward squad and be disaffected and grumpy.
我近期收到的一份最新研究报告显示，表现最差的员工常常是那些在工作当中最投入的人。这一结果严重偏离了认为业绩表现应与员工投入程度成正比的标准看法：表现优异的员工本应是在工作中充满动力的人，或者是多才多艺的啦啦队长型员工，而表现落后的员工则被认为是一群笨拙的人，他们常常心怀不满并且脾气很坏。

Instead, according to the consultancy Leadership IQ, the feeblest workers in almost half the companies surveyed fared much better than the high-flyers on three measures of engagement. They were more likely “to give 100 per cent”, they were more likely to recommend their company to others, and they were more inclined to think that their bosses treated people fairly.
但咨询公司Leadership IQ提供的资料显示，在接受调查的近半数公司中，能力最弱的员工在三项有关投入程度的指标上表现得远比抱负极高的员工要好得多。他们更有可能“100%地投入工作”，更愿意将自己的公司介绍给其他人，并且他们更倾向于认为自己的老板对待员工的方式是公平的。