09.13｜經濟學人閱讀｜扉頁文章 Office politics
經濟學人The Economist是一份英國的英文新聞周報，分八個版本於每周五向全球發行，編輯部位於倫敦，創辦於1843年9月。
經濟學人是一本綜合性新聞評論刊物，有商業、國家和地區、經濟和金融、科學和技術五大類。其中文章文風緊湊且嚴謹，對語言精準運用，展現出一種克制的風趣幽默，常運用雙關語調侃。
經濟學人對於英語考試的重要性不言而喻，其文章常常出現在雅思託福、SAT、GRE、GMAT、考研英語、四六級、MTI和CATTI的閱讀理解真題中。
今天羚羊君（公眾：aa-acad）給大家分享的是經濟學人2020年9月12日期刊中扉頁文章的第一篇：Office politics。
這篇文章主要論述了疫情導致員工在家上班，辦公室被迫閒置的情況。筆者認為辦公室上班終將被遠程辦公取代。政府應擁抱遠程辦公的新技術，而不是強迫員工前往辦公室。
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Office politics
辦公室政治
Most people associate the oce 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 Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the oce is obsolete—and are coming to radically dierent conclusions (see Brieng). Some 84% of French oce workers are back at their desks, but less than 40% of British ones are. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, says the company’s sta can work from home 「forever」 but Reed Hastings, the founder of Netix, says home-working is 「a pure negative」. As rms 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.
大多數人將辦公室與常規工作聯繫在一起，但是辦公室正迅速成為經濟不確定性和社會激烈爭執的來源。在世界各地，工人，老闆，房東和政府都在努力弄清辦公室是否已經過時了，並且得出了截然不同的結論。法國約84％的辦公人員回到了辦公桌前，但在英國回到辦公室的不到40％。Twitter負責人傑克·多爾西表示，該公司的員工可以「永遠」在家工作，但Netix的創始人裡德·黑斯廷斯表示，在家工作是「純粹消極的」。隨著公司對辦公室的態度分歧，人們對價值30萬億美元的全球商業地產市場的擔憂進一步加劇。有些員工夢想著沒有考勤沒有經理監督的龐羅斯式的未來，也有一些人對晉升，薪資和工作安全感到威脅和憂慮。
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The disagreement reects uncertainty about how eective 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 oces 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 oce. 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.
分歧反映出，人們對於社會隔離程度以及疫苗普及的時間並不確定。還不止於此：這次疫情揭示了許多20世紀建造的辦公室仍在被使用，儘管這些辦公室裡大規模採用了可以改變白領工作的科技成果。結果，這場災難性的疫情使技術和社會實驗不得不延遲，辦公室既不會照常運營，也不會對辦公室造成致命打擊。這個時代充滿希望，但也帶來威脅，不僅是對公司文化的威脅。政府不應該抵制變革，而應該是更新過時的就業法並開始對城市中心進行重新構想。
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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, sta 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 oce.
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 oces, or suer from discrimination within them. Ofce-bound workers nd it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.
兩百年前，蒸汽機將工人帶到使用新機器的工廠。 隨著大企業在19世紀後期出現，需要對員工進行管理。給員工們舉行了計劃會議，並散發了備忘錄，發票和其他文書，以記錄員工的所作所為。所有這些都要求員工們要生活在一起，並創造了人們乘汽車或火車上下班的交通方式，以便在中央辦公室開會。
但這個系統一直有些明顯的缺點，隨著時間的流逝，其中一些缺點變得越來越嚴重。大多數人討厭通勤的麻煩和花費，通勤對於普通的美國工人來說每周要花費四個小時。有些人不喜歡辦公室的聲音和形式，或者不喜歡辦公室內部的歧視。在辦公室工作的員工發現照顧孩子變得更加困難，隨著越來越多的家庭中，父母都在職，這一問題就變得日益嚴重。
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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 rms whose technology powers remote working, are both nearly a decade old. Yet inertia has allowed the oce to escape serious disruption. Before covid-19 struck, for example, exible-oce 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 o sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.
您可能會認為新技術會動搖這種不令人滿意的現狀。畢竟，pdf電子文檔僅誕生於1991年，帶寬成本在2000年代暴跌，而Zoom和Slack這兩家公司的技術為遠程工作提供了技術支持，它們都已經有近十年的歷史了。然而，慣性使辦公室得以避免嚴重的打擊。例如，在新冠疫情出現之前，聯合辦公室的公司（包括陷入困境的WeWork）在全球市場中所佔的份額很小，不到5％。在客戶採用遠程工作技術之前，大多數公司都不願意就使用這種技術。或以不動產資產和租賃的形式寫下沉沒成本。
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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 rm synonymous with oce printers spewing unread pages, has many of its sta working from home. As more people adopt remote-working technologies there is a powerful network eect, 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 conrm their identity and open an account.
新冠疫情顛覆了所有這一切。疫情之前，只有3％的美國人定期在家工作。而現在有很多人都嘗試過在家工作。甚至是Xerox，這是一家列印未讀頁面的公司，它的許多員工都在家工作。隨著越來越多的人採用遠程工作技術，這將產生強大的網絡效應，每個新客戶都將使服務變得更加有用。微軟Team，Zoom，Google Meet和Cisco Webex共同擁有超過3億用戶。政府工作也開始遠程辦公了。民事法院開始遠程運作。公證人可以線上進行，一些銀行已經不再需要新客戶進入分支機構來確認其身份並開設帳戶。
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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 oce」, which people attend, but less frequently. In Germany, for example, 74% of oce workers now go to their place of work, but only half of them are there ve 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 oce; megacities with long, expensive journeys may see fewer.
當疫苗出現時，疫苗能給社會造成多少改變？最好的參照物來自已經控制住疫情的國家。那裡的人們「可以選擇自己的辦公室」，但這樣的並不多。例如，根據摩根史坦利的調查，在德國，現在有74％的員工去辦公室工作，但其中只有一半的員工每周會去辦公室五天。這種平衡將取決於行業和城市。在交通方便的地方，去辦公室的員工就會多。但如果是大城市，交通堵塞且昂貴，那麼去辦公室的人就會很少。
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Companies will have to adapt to this pattern of sporadic attendance in which the oce is a hub, not a second home. There is a risk that over time a rm’s social capital erodes, creativity ags, hierarchies ossify and team spirit fades, as Mr Hastings fears (see Business section). The answer is more targeted sta interactions, with groups gathering at specic 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 rms will need to rejig their property: sober investors expect a reduction of at least 10% in the stock of oce space in big cities. With the typical corporate lease lasting at least half a decade, this will take time to play out.
公司將不得不適應這種零星的出勤模式，在這種模式中，辦公室是樞紐，而不是員工的第二個家。正如黑斯廷斯先生所擔心的那樣，隨著時間的流逝，企業的社會資本會受到侵蝕，創造力的下降，階層的僵化以及團隊合作精神的淡化。解決方法是更有針對性的員工互動，在特定時間聚集的團體可以增進友誼並交換信息。將在線互動「遊戲化」以促進自發性的新技術最終可能會取代Zoom的功能。當他們調整文化時，企業將需要調整其資產：聰明的投資者會將大城市的辦公空間存量至少減少10％。由於典型的公司租約至少五年，這些優勢需要時間才能發揮出來。
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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 oce. But rather than resist technological change, it is far better to anticipate its consequences. Two priorities stand out.
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 rms 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.
對政府而言，他們十分希望可以時光倒流以減少經濟損失，從城市中心咖啡館的倒閉到紐約地鐵系統面臨的160億美元預算缺口。英國政府試圖勸說員工回到辦公室。但是，與其抗拒技術變革，不如預見其後果要好得多。這其中有兩個優先事項。
首先，將需要對大量的僱傭法進行現代化修改。零工經濟表明舊的僱傭法已經過時了。現在有關工人的權利和責任的新問題迫在眉睫：企業是否可以監視遠程辦公的員工以評估他們的生產效率？如果員工在家中受傷，誰應該負責？白領獲得的津貼會讓其餘的勞動力不滿和怨恨。
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The second priority is city centres. For a century they have been dominated by towers lled 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 ats and recreation. If you step back into the oce this month, sit down and log on to your computer—but don’t get too comfortable.
第二要務是市中心。一個世紀以來，市中心一直被裝有轉椅和大量黃頁的塔樓所佔據。現在，複雜的城市規劃規則將需要進行系統的檢修，以允許將建築物和地區重新開發以用於新的用途，包括休閒和娛樂。如果您本月回到辦公室，請坐下並打開計算機，但不要感到太舒服。
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