经济学人下载:巴托比专栏--被疫情颠覆的日常,远程办公是我们最后的倔强(1)

Business 

商业版块

Bartleby 

巴托比专栏

Managing by Zooming around 

无处不在的Zoom远程管理

The pandemic is forcing executives to work harder 

新冠大流行迫使高管们更加努力地工作

Businesses are still struggling to understand which of the pandemic’s effects will be temporary and which will turn out to be permanent. Three new reports attempt to analyse these longerterm trends. One is from Glassdoor, a website that allows workers to rank their employers. Another is from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consultancy. The third is from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), a British professional body. Read together, they imply that firms stand to benefit— but that managers’ lives are about to get more difficult. 

企业仍在努力消化大流行带来的影响中，哪些是暂时的，哪些将是永久性的。新发布的三份报告试图分析这些长远影响。其中一份报告来自Glassdoor，这是一个允许员工对公司进行评级的网站。另一份报告来自管理咨询公司波士顿咨询集团。第三份报告来自英国专业机构特许管理学会。将三份报告放在一起阅读，就会发现它们都暗示着公司将从中受益，但管理者的生活将变得更加艰难。

One change that is all but certain to last is employees spending more of their time working at home. The Glassdoor report finds that less commuting has improved employee health and morale. Splitting the week between the home and the office is also overwhelmingly popular with workers: 70% of those surveyed wanted such a combination, 26% wanted to stay at home and just 4% desired a full-time return to the office. Perhaps as a consequence, remote work has not dented productivity—and indeed improved it in some areas. Flexible work schedules can be a cheap way to retain employees who have child-care and other home responsibilities. 

一个几乎肯定的持续性变化是，员工居家办公的时间将增多。Glassdoor的报告发现，减少通勤有助于提高员工的健康状况和士气。居家办公和办公室办公的组合方式也受到了绝大多数员工的青睐：70%的受访者希望采取这样的组合方式，26%的人希望居家办公，只有4%的人希望回到办公室全职办公。或许结果会是，远程工作并没有降低生产率，反而在某些领域确实提高了生产率。灵活的工作时间安排可能是一种较为划算的方式，让公司能够留住那些有孩子要照顾并承担其他家庭责任的员工。

Telecommuting offers other potential cost savings, and not just the reduced need for office space. Remote workers do not need to live in big cities where property is expensive. If they live in cheaper towns and suburbs, companies need not pay them as much. Glassdoor estimates that software engineers and developers who leave San Francisco could eventually face salary cuts of 21-25%; those quitting New York could expect reductions of 10-12%. As the report points out, remote employees are, in essence, competing with a global workforce and are thus in a much weaker bargaining position. 

远程办公节省了其他的潜在成本，而不仅仅是减少了对办公空间的需求。远程员工不需要住在房价昂贵的大城市。如果他们住在房价低廉的城镇和郊区，公司就不必支付那么多的工资。Glassdoor估计，离开旧金山的软件工程师和开发人员最终可能面临21-25%的降薪；而那些离开纽约的工程师和开发人员则可能会面临10-12%的降薪。正如报告指出的那样，远程员工本质上是在与全球劳动力竞争，因此，他们的谈判地位非常不利。

This point is reinforced by the BCG report, which finds that the pandemic has increased the willingness of companies to work with freelancers. Previously, many managers worried that legal and compliance issues prevented them from using outside staff. The pandemic forced firms to adjust their business models rapidly, and simultaneously led to growth in the pool of talented freelancers, as full-time employees had to be laid off. BCG says that “by embracing flexibility in whom they hire, internally or externally, companies can finally speed up operations and deliver faster on strategy.” 

波士顿咨询公司的报告进一步证实了这一点。该报告显示，新冠大流行让公司更愿意与自由职业者合作。此前，出于对法律和合规问题的担忧，许多管理者不愿雇佣外部员工。这次的大流行迫使公司迅速调整其商业模式，大量全职员工遭到解雇，同时自由职业者人才库正在壮大。波士顿咨询公司表示，“通过在公司内部或外部灵活聘用员工，公司最终可以加快运营速度，更快地实施战略。”