叮咚，老板喊你回去坐班了 | 经济学人财经

The working-from-home illusion fades

居家办公潮水褪去

英文部分选自经济学人20230701期财经版块

The working-from-home illusion fades

居家办公潮水褪去

It is not more productive than being in an office, after all

毕竟，居家办公并不比在办公室效率更高

A gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been among the most forceful in summoning workers to their offices, but in recent months even many tech titans—Apple, Google, Meta and more—have demanded staff show up to the office at least three days a week. For work-from-home believers, it looks like the revenge of corporate curmudgeons. Didn’t a spate of studies during the covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?

办公地点正从虚拟会议室回归实体办公室。一直以来，华尔街都在要求员工回归办公室，态度非常强硬。但近几个月来，连苹果、谷歌、Meta等科技巨头，也要求员工每周至少到办公室工作三天。对于居家办公的拥趸来说，这看起来像是“老古板”企业执拗的报复。在疫情期间，难道不是有大量研究都表明远程办公通常比在办公室“埋头苦干”更具生产力吗？

注释：

1.Summon:  to call upon for specified action

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/summon

2.Curmudgeons：n.坏脾气的人 

a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old manSource: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curmudgeons

Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when it was published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then both doctoral students at Harvard University. They found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.

不幸的是，最新研究大多不支持这一观点——恰恰相反，虽然办公室存在种种缺陷，但仍至关重要。 我们不妨从一篇工作论文谈起。这篇文章发表于2020年，由当时正在哈佛攻读博士学位的纳塔利娅·伊曼纽尔（Natalia Emanuel）及艾玛·哈林顿（Emma Harrington）撰写，引起了广泛关注，。他们的研究发现：一家在线零售商的员工居家办公后，每小时处理的电话数增加了8%。然而，今年5月纽约联储发表的该论文修订本却没有获得多少关注——修订版中，居家工作的效率反而下降了4%。

注释：

1.Working paper: 我们可以将working paper翻译为工作论文，它与其它论文的主要区别是working paper还没有被正式发表，是一篇文章的初稿或初期版本。Source: https://www.workessay.com/20210201-11/

2.'Working' Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and Market Provision of Remote Work (JMP) When Covid-19 closed down the retailer’s on-site call-centers, a difference-in-difference design suggests the transition from on-site to remote work increased the productivity of formerly on-site workers by 8% to 10% relative to their already remote peers.

Source: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/eharrington/files/remote_work.pdf

3.Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work“When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. ”Source: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1061

The researchers had not made a mistake. Rather, they received more precise data, including detailed work schedules. Not only did employees answer fewer calls when remote, the quality of their interactions suffered. They put customers on hold for longer. More also phoned back, an indication of unresolved problems.

并非是最初的研究搞错了。只不过，他们（这次）收集了更精确的数据，包括详细的工作时间表。在远程办公期间，员工接听的电话数量减少，且通话服务质量也受到了影响。客户等待的时间变长了，客户再次致电的次数也增多，这表明很多问题之前并未得到妥善解决。

The revision comes hot on the tails of other studies that have reached similar conclusions. David Atkin and Antoinette Schoar, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sumit Shinde of the University of California, Los Angeles, randomly assigned data-entry workers in India to labour either from home or the office. Those working at home were 18% less productive than their peers in the office. Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth, both of the University of Essex, found a productivity shortfall, relative to prior in-office performance, of as much as 19% for the remote employees of a large Asian it firm. Another study determined that even chess professionals play less well in online matches than face-to-face tilts. Yet another used a laboratory experiment to show that video conferences inhibit creative thinking.

修订版论文问世前，其他研究也得出了类似的结论。麻省理工学院的大卫·阿特金（ David Atkin）和安托瓦内特·斯科尔（Antoinette Schoar）以及加州大学洛杉矶分校的苏米特·辛德（Sumit Shinde）将印度的数据输入工人随机分配为居家办公或办公室工作。结果发现，居家办公的生产率比办公室办公低18%。芝加哥大学的迈克尔·吉布斯（Michael Gibbs）以及埃塞克斯大学的弗里德里克·门格尔（Friederike Mengel）和克里斯托夫·西姆罗斯（Christoph Siemroth）发现，一家大型亚洲IT公司的远程办公效率比在办公室里低19%。另一项研究确定，国际象棋专业人士在线比赛的表现也不如面对面比赛。还有一项研究通过实验室实验表明，视频会议会抑制创造性思维。

注释：

1.on someone's tail：紧跟，跟踪

2.tilt：〔意欲赢得某物的〕企图，尝试The team is preparing for another tilt at the European Cup.球队正在准备再一次问鼎欧洲杯。

The reasons for the findings will probably not surprise anyone who has spent much of the past few years working from a dining-room table. It is harder for people to collaborate from home. Workers in the Fed study spoke of missing their “neighbours to turn to for assistance”. Other researchers who looked at the communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft observed that professional networks within the company become more static and isolated. Teleconferencing is a pale imitation of in-the-flesh meetings: researchers at Harvard Business School, for example, concluded that “virtual water coolers”—rolled out by many companies during the pandemic—often encroached on crowded schedules with limited benefits. To use the terminology of Ronald Coase, an economist who focused on the structure of companies, all these problems represent an increase in co-ordination costs, making collective enterprise more unwieldy.

但凡前几年经历过居家为主的办公模式，都不会对上述研究结果感到惊讶。居家办公加大了合作难度。美联储论文显示，其研究对象常常表示居家办公无法“随时求助邻座同事”。研究人员分析了微软近6.2万名员工的通信记录后发现，公司内部职场交流和互动变得更为静态和离散。电话会议和线下会议比起来简直相形见绌：例如，哈佛商学院研究人员的结论表明，许多公司在疫情期间推出的“线上聊天室”经常占用宝贵的工作时间，且好处有限。用专注于公司结构的经济学家罗纳德·科斯（Ronald Coase）的话来说，这些问题都意味着协调成本增加，集体企业更加臃肿笨拙。

注释:

1.virtual water coolers：Virtual water coolers are spaces where distributed team members can come together to experience those in-office meetups that aren't possible in the world of remote work.

2.unwieldy：（制度，机构）过于庞大运作不便的

Some of the co-ordination costs of remote work might reasonably be expected to fall as people get used to it. Since 2020, many will have become adept at using Zoom, Webex, Teams or Slack. But another cost may rise over time: the underdevelopment of human capital. In a study of software engineers published in April, Drs Emanuel and Harrington, along with Amanda Pallais, also of Harvard, found that feedback exchanged between colleagues dropped sharply after the move to remote work. Drs Atkin, Schoar and Shinde documented a relative decline in learning for workers at home. Those in offices picked up skills more quickly.

人们对远程办公习以为常后，一些协调成本可能会有所下降。自2020年以来，很多人已经能把Zoom、Webex、Teams或者Slack运用自如。但长此以往，另一成本可能上升：人力资本发展不足。伊曼纽尔（Emanuel）博士与哈林顿（Harrington）博士，以及同样是来自哈佛的阿曼达·帕莱斯（Amanda Pallais）在四月发表的一份关于软件工程师的研究发现，远程工作后，同事之间的交流反馈量骤然下降。阿特金（Atkin）、肖尔（Schoar）以及辛德（Shinde）博士的研究表明，居家办公降低了员工在学习方面的表现。那些在办公室工作的人则能更快地习得新技能。

The origins of the view that, contrary to the above, remote working boosts productivity can be traced to an experiment nearly a decade before the pandemic, which was reported by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and others in 2013. Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office.

认为远程办公能提高生产力的观点源于2013年的一项实验。在这项开展于新冠疫情近十年前的研究中，斯坦福大学的尼古拉斯·布鲁姆（Nicholas Bloom）及其合作者发现，中国在线旅行社Trip.com呼叫中心的员工在远程办公时，工作表现提高了13%（如今的媒体报道依旧会出现该数字）。然而，这一研究的两大问题常被忽略：首先，超过三分之二的绩效提高源于更长的工作时长而非更高的工作效率；其次，由于远程办公的员工更难得到晋升，Trip.com最终取消了这一工作模式。2022年，布鲁姆博士重访Trip.com这一案例，以研究混合办公实验的效果。本次实验的结果并不理想：尽管员工在办公室待的时间更久，敲的代码更多，但生产力的提高微乎其微。

The price of happiness

幸福的代价

There is more to work (and life) than productivity. Perhaps the greatest virtue of remote work is that it leads to happier employees. People spend less time commuting, which from their vantage-point might feel like an increase in productivity, even if conventional measures fail to detect it. They can more easily fit in school pickups and doctor appointments, not to mention the occasional lie-in or midmorning jog. And some tasks—notably, those requiring unbroken concentration for long periods—can often be done more smoothly from home than in open-plan offices. All this explains why so many workers have become so office-shy.

单凭生产力远远无法囊括工作（和生活）的意义。也许远程工作的最大优点在于能让员工更加快乐。也许通勤时间减少对员工而言本身就意味着生产力的提升，即使传统上用于衡量效率的指标未能捕捉到这一点。他们有更多时间接送孩子和看医生，甚至可以偶尔睡个懒觉或在上班中途去晨跑。此外，一些需要长时间连续集中注意力的任务通常在家中完成会比在开放式办公室更加顺利。正因为这些原因，很多员工对办公室变得更加抗拒。

注释：

1. vantage point 1.N-COUNT 可数名词 （便于观察的）有利位置 A vantage point is a place from which you can see a lot of things.

2. office-shy/ work-shy: disliking office/work and trying to avoid it when possible.

Indeed, several surveys have found employees are willing to accept pay cuts for the option of working from home. Having satisfied employees on slightly lower pay, in turn, might be a good deal for corporate managers. For many people, then, the future of work will remain hybrid. Nevertheless, the balance of the work week is likely to tilt back to the office and away from home—not because bosses are sadomasochists with a kink for rush-hour traffic, but because better productivity lies in that direction.

事实上，一些调查发现，有些员工宁愿降薪也不愿去办公室。对企业管理者来说，既能提高员工的满意度，又能减少工资支出，何乐而不为呢？因此，对于许多人来说，未来的工作模式很可能依旧是混合型的。只不过，大的趋势是，要去办公室的日子越来越多，能留在家里的时间越来越少。这并不是因为老板们被高峰时段的交通虐得很爽，而是因为这样才能获得更高的生产力。

注释：

sadomasochist n. Someone who enjoys both sadism and masochism 施虐受虐狂.

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