居家办公之战席卷全球 | 经济学人商业
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Summer，女，QE在职，梦想能仗走天涯 翻译/音乐/健康
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Business | The WFH showdown
居家办公之决战时刻
英文部分选自经济学人20230715期商业板块
Business | The WFH showdown
居家办公之决战时刻
The fight over working from home goes global
居家办公之战席卷全球
Employees want to toil in the kitchen. Bosses want them back in the office
员工想在自家厨房办公，老板却想员工重回办公室
Remote work has a target on its back. Banking CEOs, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic. For staff at America’s biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs, five-day weeks are back for good. Big tech firms are also cracking the whip. Google’s return-to-work mandate threatens to track attendance and factor it in performance reviews. Meta and Lyft want staff back at their desks, demanding at least three days of the week in the office by the end of the summer. With bosses clamping down on the practice, the pandemic-era days of mutual agreement on the desirability of remote work seem to be over.
远程办公已成众矢之的。摩根大通的杰米·戴蒙（Jamie Dimon）等一众银行CEO决意让居家办公成为疫情时代的遗风。美国最大的银行和高盛集团（Goldman Sachs）等华尔街巨头的员工又重回五天工作制。科技巨头也在收紧规定。谷歌的返岗命令威胁会追踪员工考勤，并将其纳入绩效考核。Meta和网约车巨头来福车公司（Lyft）也想让员工回到办公桌前，要求夏天结束后，员工每周线下办公至少三天。老板对居家办公重拳出击，曾经疫情期间劳资双方都希望远程工作的日子似乎已然结束。
注释：
1.have a target on one’s back: to be the focus of someone’s anger
2.crack the whip: to use your authority to make someone else behave better or work harder
3.关于Meta和Lyft返岗要求的新闻：
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/business/lyft-return-to-office.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-01/meta-office-workers-to-return-three-days-per-week-this-fall
Fresh data from a global survey shows how far this consensus has broken down. Across the world, employers’ plans for remote work fall short of what employees want, according to WFH Research, a group that includes Stanford University and Ifo Institute, a German think-tank, which tracks the sentiment of full-time workers with at least a secondary education in 34 countries.Bosses fear that fully remote work dents productivity, a concern reinforced by recent research. A study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than office-frequenting peers; another found that employees at a big Asian IT firm were 19% less productive at home than they had been in the office. Communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft showed that professional networks within the company ossified and became more isolated as remote work took hold.
一项全球性调查的最新数据表明了这一昔日劳资共识已崩塌到何种地步。居家办公研究组（WFH Research）调查发现在全球范围内，雇主提供的远程办公安排未能满足雇员的需求。该研究小组吸引了斯坦福大学和德国智库伊弗经济研究所（Ifo Institute）等机构的参与，追踪调查了中等教育及以上文化程度的全职员工的看法，调查范围覆盖34个国家。老板担心完全远程办公会降低工作效率，而最近的研究也进一步证实了这一担忧。一项针对印度数据录入员的研究发现，居家办公的员工生产效率比经常在办公室办公的员工低18%；另一项研究发现，亚洲某家大型IT公司的员工居家办公的工作效率比曾经在办公室工作时低19%。微软公司近62,000名员工的通讯记录显示，远程办公的推广使得公司内部的职场人际网络僵化，同事之间更加疏远。
Yet all the pressure from above has done little to dent employees’ appetite for remote working.They want to be able to work more days from the comfort of their living rooms than they currently do, according to WFH Research. On average, workers across the world want two days at home, a full day more than they get. In English-speaking countries, which have the highest levels of home-working, there is an appetite for more. And the trend is spreading to places where remote work has been less common (see chart). Japanese and South Korean employees, some of the most office-bound anywhere, want more than a quarter of the week to themselves. Europeans and Latin American crave a third and half, respectively.
然而，上述种种压力并没有削弱员工对居家办公的渴望。WFH Research的调查显示，员工希望在自家客厅舒适惬意地居家办公的天数能更多些。平均而言，全球各地的员工希望每周能有两天居家办公，这比实际情况多出一整天。英语国家拥有全球最高的远程办公率，但人们渴求拥有更多的居家办公日。如今，这一趋势正蔓延到远程办公不太常见的地区（详见图表）。日本和韩国员工的线下办公率最高，如今希望一周有超过四分之一的时间可以居家办公。欧洲和拉美地区的员工则分别希望一周有三分之一和一半的时间能居家办公。
Desire for more remote work is not surprising. The time saved not having to battle public transport or congested roads allows for a better work-life balance. On average, 72 minutes each day is saved when working remotely, which adds up to two weeks over a year, according to a paper by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, who helps run WFH Research, and colleagues.Employees also report that they feel most engaged when working remotely, according to a poll last year by Gallup. On average globally, workers value all these benefits to the tune of an 8% pay rise, implying that some would take a pay cut to keep the privileges.
员工希望拥有更长的远程办公时间，这一点不足为怪。居家办公无需在公共交通或道路拥堵上浪费时间，员工可以更好地平衡工作与生活。WFH Research研究组成员、来自斯坦福大学的尼古拉斯·布鲁姆（Nicolas Bloom）及其同事合著的论文显示，远程办公平均每天能省下72分钟，相当于一年能省下2周的时间。盖洛普咨询公司（Gallup）去年的民意调查显示，员工认为自己在远程办公时的投入度最高。全球平均而言，员工认为远程办公带来的好处相当于薪水涨了8个点，这意味着有些人愿意用降薪来换居家办公。
Until recently, as firms desperately sought workers amid the post-pandemic hiring bonanza, employees’ demands and employers’ plans seemed to be converging in America, the best-studied market.This convergence is tailing off. At the same time, the pandemic has entrenched work-from-home patterns. At the moment, a third of workers surveyed by WFH Research have a hybrid or fully remote arrangement. Those practices will not be easy to unwind.
一直到前不久，由于公司在后疫情时代招工潮中的迫切寻求，在美国这个被研究得最为充分的市场上，员工的需求和雇主的计划似乎还正在趋同。然而，这种趋同正在减弱。与此同时，因为疫情，居家办公模式已深入人心。根据WFH Research的调查，目前有三分之一的受访员工采用混合或完全远程办公模式。要改变这些做法并非易事。
It is no coincidence that the crackdown on remote work is happening as some industries cool. Job cuts across Wall Street and Silicon Valley have handed power back to businesses. However, even in tech and finance some employees are standing their ground. In May Amazon said that 300 employees staged walkouts over the e-empire's return-to-work policies (the organisers said it was closer to 2,000).
在一些行业发展降温之际，远程办公遭到打击并非巧合。华尔街和硅谷的裁员潮使得权力重新回到了企业手中。然而，即使在科技和金融领域，一些员工仍在坚持自己的立场。5月份，亚马逊表示有300名员工罢工，抗议该电商巨头的返岗政策（组织者称实际人数接近2000人）。
Other firms are quietly adapting with the times. HSBC, a British bank, is planning to relocate from its 45-storey tower in Canary Wharf to smaller digs in the City of London. Deloitte and KPMG, two professional-services giants, want to reduce their office footprint in favour of more remote work. The gap between the two sides of the work-from-home battle may yet narrow. The question is whether the bosses or the bossed will yield the most.
其他公司则在悄然适应时代变化。英国汇丰银行（HSBC）计划将总部从位于金丝雀码头的45层高楼迁至伦敦金融城的小办公楼。德勤（Deloitte）和毕马威（KPMG）这两家专业服务巨头则希望减少办公场所面积，更多地采用远程办公。远程办公之争中双方的分歧可能会逐渐缩小。问题是，老板或员工孰会做出更多让步。
YY，愿逆风如解意，容易莫摧残
Leon，男，驻外民工，经济学人读者
Benjamin，MTI to be，初学翻译的翻译小学生
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观点|评论|思考
本周感想
居家办公似乎成了一个劳资双方博弈的前线。
在之前的三年间，居家办公是资方不得已而为之的举措，也是他们试图剥削劳方的救命稻草，所以有许多报道称疫情期间居家办公的工作时间变长了，甚至变成了全天候，但资方对此却默不作声，或是顾左右而言他。
但疫情之后，居家办公就逐渐沦为了鸡肋，资方有堂而皇之的理由取消这一特殊的工作方式。但在某些尚未取得伟大胜利的地区，自然居家办公仍然是一个充分且不容辩驳的理由。那里的资方就开始有些惶恐，害怕这种方式被继承下去，就好像一周五天上班制那般，成为了一种获得广泛认可的工作模式，当然这也是抗议斗争没有完全胜利的一个弊端。
居家办公得以讨论的实质并非这种工作模式优劣本身，而是全球经济下行的大背景，这种背景下资方的成本控制，尤其是人力资源的最大化利用是成本控制的关键，显然居家办公并不是一种人力资源最大化利用的优选，所以为了减成本，所有劳动者必须要在资本皮鞭可及的范围内真真切切地卖力劳动。
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