Open office, closed minds| 经济学人双语精读笔记

本文选自经济学人20180728期 business 版块。译文源自官方译文 经济学人商论

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Bartleby

Open office, closed minds

It is more about cost-cutting than collaboration


“LONELINESS is a crowded room,” as Bryan Ferry of the band Roxy Music once warbled, adding that everyone was “all together, all alone”. The open-plan office might have been designed to make his point. That is not the rationale for the layout, of course. The supposed aim of open-plan offices is to ensure that workers will have more contact with their colleagues, and that the resulting collaboration will lead to greater productivity.

  Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, two Harvard Business School academics, set out to test this proposition*. The authors surveyed interactions between colleagues in two unnamed multinational companies which had switched to open-plan offices. They did so by recruiting workers to wear “sociometric” badges. These used infra-red sensors to detect when people were interacting, microphones to determine when they were speaking or listening to each other, another device to monitor their body movement and posture and a Bluetooth sensor to capture their location.

  At the first company, the authors found that face-to-face interactions were more than three times higher in the old, cubicle-based office than in an open-plan space where employees have clear lines of sight to each other. In contrast, the number of e-mails people sent to each other increased by 56% when they switched to open-plan. In the second company, face-to-face interactions decreased by a third after the switch to open-plan, whereas e-mail traffic increased by between 22% and 50%.

  Why did this shift occur? The authors suggest that employees value their privacy and find new ways to preserve it in an open-plan office. They shut themselves off by wearing large headphones to keep out the distractions caused by nearby colleagues. Indeed, those who champion open-plan offices seem to have forgotten the importance of being able to concentrate on your work.

  Employees also find other ways of communicating with their fellow workers. Rather than have a chat in front of a large audience, employees simply send an e-mail; the result (as measured at one of the two companies surveyed) was that productivity declined.

Cubicles do not offer a great work environment either; they are still noisy and cut off employees from natural light. But at least workers have more of a chance to give their work area a personal touch. Allowing plenty of room for pictures of children, office plants, novelty coffee mugs—these are ways of making people feel more relaxed and happy in their jobs.

Such comforts are completely denied when companies shift to “hot-desking”, as 45% of multinationals plan by 2020, according to CBRE, a property firm, up from 30% of such companies now. Workers roam the building in search of a desk, like commuters hunting the last rush-hour seat or tourists looking for a poolside lounger. If you planned to spend a morning quietly reading a research paper or a management tome, tough luck; the last desk was nabbed by Jenkins in accounts.

  Hot-desking is a clear message to low-level office workers that they are seen as disposable cogs in a machine. Combine this with the lack of privacy and the office becomes a depressing place to work. Workers could stay at home but that negates the intended benefits of collaboration that open-plan offices bring.

  The drive for such offices is reminiscent of the British enthusiasm for residential tower blocks after the second world war. One British wartime survey found that 49% wanted to live in a small house with a garden; only 5% wanted a flat. But flats they got. Architects, who fancied themselves as visionaries like Howard Roark, the “hero” of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, competed to create concrete temples for the masses to occupy. As David Kynaston, in his book    “Austerity Britain” recounts, the desires of the actual residents were dismissed.


  The real reason post-war architects built flats rather than homes is that it was a lot cheaper. And the same reason, not the supposed benefits of mingling with colleagues, is why open-plan offices are all the rage. More workers can be crammed into any given space.

  Some people like them, of course, just as some like living in tower blocks. The only option for everyone else is to kick up a stink until executives change their minds and provide some personal space. In other words: workers of the world, unite. So you can separate again.


* “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration”, Philosophical Transactions, The Royal Society





巴托比

开放的办公室,封闭的心灵

更多是为削减成本,而非协作


“孤独是挤满人的房间,”Roxy Music乐队的布莱恩·费瑞(Bryan Ferry)曾这样唱道,“济济一堂,独来独往。”开放式办公室的设计大概是为了印证他的观点吧。当然,这不会是提倡这种布局的理由。采用这种办公室据说是为了确保员工和同事能有更多接触,并由此促进协作,带来更高的生产率。

哈佛商学院的两位学者伊森·伯恩斯坦(Ethan Bernstein)和斯蒂芬·特尔班(Stephen Turban)着手检验这种说法*。他们动员两家改为开放式办公的跨国公司(研究报告隐去了公司名称)的员工佩戴一部“社交测量仪”,以此观察他们的互动情况。这些仪器用红外线传感器探测员工之间何时发生互动,用麦克风判断他们何时在交谈或在听对方说话,用另一种部件监测他们的身体移动和姿势,用蓝牙传感器确定他们的位置。

作者发现,在第一家公司,面对面互动在满是小隔间的旧办公室要比在能一眼望见彼此的开放式空间里多出三倍多。相比之下,改成开放式办公区后员工互相发送的电子邮件数量却增加了56%。在第二家公司,面对面互动在改为开放式办公后减少了三分之一,发送电子邮件的数量增加了22%到50%。

为什么会发生这种转变?作者认为,员工重视自己的隐私,当他们身处开放式办公室中,就会寻找新的办法来保护隐私。他们戴上大大的耳机来隔绝身边同事的干扰。其实,那些提倡开放式办公室的人似乎忘记了让人能专注于自己的工作有多重要。

员工们还开始用其他方式和同事交流。他们不会在众人面前聊天,只要发封电子邮件就好;结果(在其中一家公司测量到的情况)就是生产率下降了。

隔间也不能提供完美的工作环境:周围还是很吵,有些员工接触不到自然光。但起码员工有更多机会给自己的工作区域增添一点个人色彩。有足够的空间供他们摆放孩子们的照片、绿植、造型新奇的咖啡杯,这些都能让人们在工作中感到更放松快乐。

如果企业转而采用非固定办公桌,这点慰藉就会被完全剥夺。房地产公司世邦魏理仕(CBRE)的数据显示,45%的跨国公司计划到2020年这么办(目前比例为30%)。为了找张办公桌,员工们在大楼里走来走去,就像上班族在通勤高峰时段寻找车上最后一个座位,或是游客在泳池边找张躺椅。要是你打算花一个上午安安静静地看一篇研究报告或是一本大部头管理著作,真不走运,最后一张桌子已经被财务部的詹金斯抢占了。

非固定办公桌向基层员工传达了一个明确的信息:他们被视为机器中可随意替换的齿轮。再加上没有隐私,办公室变成了一个让人沮丧的工作场所。员工们也可以呆在家里,但这就抹杀了开放式办公室原本想要在协作方面带来的好处。

对这种办公布局的推动让人想起二战后英国对高层住宅楼的热情。英国一项战时调查发现,49%的英国人希望住在带花园的独栋小宅院里,只有5%的人想住在公寓里。但他们得到的只有公寓。建筑师们把自己想象成安·兰德(Ayn Rand)的《源泉》(The Fountainhead)一书中的主人公、英雄式人物霍华德·洛克(Howard Roark)那样的理想主义者,竞相建造钢筋水泥的神庙,供广大民众居住。正如大卫·基纳斯顿(David Kynaston)在《紧缩英国》(Austerity Britain)中所忆述的,那些实际居住者的愿望被忽略了。

战后建筑师建造公寓而非宅院的真正原因是公寓要便宜得多。同样,开放式办公室风靡的原因并不是能让员工打成一片这种人们假想的好处,而是能在给定的空间里塞进更多员工。

当然,有些人喜欢开放式办公室,就像有些人喜欢住高楼大厦一样。对所有其他人来说,唯一的选择就是起而反抗,直到高管们改变主意、提供一些个人空间。换句话说就是:全世界无产者联合起来。这样你们就可以再次分开。

*《开放式办公场所对人类协作的影响》,《哲学汇刊》,英国皇家学会

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