2023年经济学人 居家办公的效率还是不如坐班(1)（在线收听）

    Finance & economics

    财经版块

    Don’t be workshy

    不要怕去上班

    Whoops, working from home is detrimental to productivity after all.

    唉，居家办公总归还是不利于提高工作效率。

    A gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room.

    从视频会议到公司会议室的反向迁移正在逐步进行中。

    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.

    在把员工召集到办公室方面，华尔街的公司一直是态度最强硬的，但最近几个月，就连许多科技巨头--苹果、谷歌、Meta等--也要求员工每周至少有三天在办公室坐班。

    For work-from-home believers, it looks like the revenge of corporate curmudgeons.

    对于居家办公的信徒来说，这种举动看起来像是公司里的暴躁老头的报复。

    Didn’t a spate of studies during the covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?

    新冠肺炎大流行期间的大量研究不都表明，远程办公往往比在办公室里辛苦工作更有效率吗？

    Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential.

    但对居家办公信徒来说，不幸的是，新的研究大多与此相反，表明办公室虽然存在许多缺陷，但仍然必不可少。

    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.

    可以先从一篇论文初稿看起，这篇论文在2020年发表时受到了极大的关注，作者是当时在哈佛大学读博士的娜塔莉亚·伊曼纽尔和艾玛·哈林顿。

    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.

    她们发现，一家在线零售商的员工从办公室坐班变为居家办公后，他们每小时处理的电话数量增加了8%。

    Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

    受关注较少的是她们这篇论文的修订版，由纽约联邦储备银行在5月份发表。

    The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.

    在修订版中，效率提高反而变成了效率下降4%。

    The researchers had not made a mistake.

    研究人员没有弄错。

    Rather, they received more precise data, including detailed work schedules.

    相反，他们收到了更准确的数据，包括详细的工作时间表。

    Not only did employees answer fewer calls when remote, the quality of their interactions suffered.

    员工在远程办公时不仅接听的电话更少，而且他们的沟通质量也更差。

    They put customers on hold for longer.

    他们让客户等待的时间更长。

    More also phoned back, an indication of unresolved problems.

    再次回拨电话的次数也更多，表明还有问题尚未解决。

    The revision comes hot on the tails of other studies that have reached similar conclusions.

    修订版紧随已得出类似结论的其他研究而出现。

    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.

    麻省理工学院的大卫·阿特金和安托瓦内特·肖尔以及加州大学洛杉矶分校的苏米特·辛德随机分配一些印度的数据录入人员在家或在办公室工作。

    Those working at home were 18% less productive than their peers in the office.

    那些在家工作的人的工作效率比在办公室里工作的人低18%。

    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.

    芝加哥大学的迈克尔·吉布斯和埃塞克斯大学的弗雷德里克·孟格尔和克里斯托弗·西姆罗斯发现，一家大型亚洲IT公司的员工，与之前在办公室里的工作表现相比，他们远程办公的效率下降了19%。

    Another study determined that even chess professionals play less well in online matches than face-to-face tilts.

    另一项研究发现，即使是国际象棋专业棋手在网络比赛中的表现也不如面对面的比赛。

    Yet another used a laboratory experiment to show that video conferences inhibit creative thinking.

    还有人用实验室实验证明，视频会议抑制创造性思维。

    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.

    那些过去几年里大部分时间都在餐厅饭桌上工作的人，可能对这些研究发现的原因并不感到惊讶。

    It is harder for people to collaborate from home.

    人们在家里更难进行协同工作。

    Workers in the Fed study spoke of missing their “neighbours to turn to for assistance”.

    美联储研究论文中的工作者谈到，他们失去了“可以求助的工作上的邻居”。

    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.

    其他研究人员观察了微软近6.2万名员工的交流记录，发现公司内部的职业关系网变得更加静态和孤立。

    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.

    远程会议要远逊于面对面会议：例如，哈佛商学院的研究人员得出结论，许多公司在疫情期间推出的“虚拟饮水机谈话”经常会侵占忙碌的工作时间，带来的好处也并不多。

    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.

    用专注研究公司结构的经济学家罗纳德·科斯的话来说，所有这些问题都表明协调成本在增加，从而使整个企业变得更加不灵活。