经济学人 | 员工的福祉是企业成功的关键

每日双语经济学人 · 公众号 · · 2019-08-11 08:00

正文

(本文选自《经济学人》20190803期)

背景介绍：

企业的高管们往往不太关心员工是否快乐，他们更关注的是股东们是否开心。然而，最新的一项研究发现，一家企业能否成功，往往得看他们的员工是否快乐。

Employee happiness and business success are linked

员工的快乐与企业的成功相关联

What explains the connection?

如何去解释这种关联呢?

Our staff are our most important asset. Many managers have intoned this mantra over the years but plenty of employees have probably thought to themselves that, deep down, executives place a higher value on the machines on the factory floor or cash in the bank.

员工是我们最重要的资产。多年来，许多经理都在念叨着这句话，但许多员工在内心深处可能是这样认为的：高管们更看重的是工厂里的机器或银行里的现金。

That impression can only be reinforced when executives refer to the need to maximise “shareholder value”. The implication is that keeping equity investors happy is a company’s main priority. Employees fall into the lesser category of “stakeholders”, along with component suppliers.

而当高管们提起要将“股东利益”最大化时，这种印象尤为强烈。这意味着公司的首要任务是让股票投资者满意。员工和零部件供应商都属于“利益相关”较小的范畴。

To many American businesspeople, the concept of “stakeholder capitalism” is often seen as a woolly European notion. The assumption is that firms which focus on stakeholders will struggle to survive in the Darwinian world of multinational business.

在许多美国商人看来，“利益相关者资本主义”的概念是一种模糊的欧洲概念。人们认为，专注于利益相关者的公司将很难在弱肉强食的跨国企业的世界中生存下来。

It is easy to be cynical about some of the language used by those who argue that employees should be treated better.

那些主张员工应该得到更好待遇的人所说的话很容易受到人们的冷嘲热讽。

However, hard-headed executives will only be won round by hard facts. A convincing case can be found in a recent paper by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel de Neve. The study, based on data compiled by Gallup, a polling organisation, covers nearly 1.9m employees across 230 separate organisations in 73 countries.

但头脑冷静的高管们只相信事实。在克里斯蒂安·克雷克尔、乔治·沃德和詹-伊曼纽尔·德内夫最近发表的一篇论文中，我们能够看到一个让人信服的例子。这项研究是基于民意调查机构盖洛普汇编的数据，涵盖了73个国家230个独立机构的近190万名员工。

The authors studied four potential measures of corporate performance: customer loyalty, employee productivity, profitability and staff turnover. They found that employee satisfaction had a substantial positive correlation with customer loyalty and a negative link with staff turnover. Furthermore, worker satisfaction was correlated with higher productivity and profitability.

作者研究了衡量企业绩效的四个潜在指标:客户忠诚度、员工生产率、盈利能力和员工流动率。他们发现员工满意度与客户忠诚度呈显著正相关，与员工流动率呈负相关。此外，更高的生产率和利润率也和员工满意度相关。

Of course, correlation does not prove causality. It could be that working for a successful firm makes employees more contented, rather than the other way round. However, the authors cite studies of changes within individual firms and organisations which seem to show that improvements in employee morale precede gains in productivity, rather than the other way round.

当然，具有相关性并不代表其具有因果关系。也许在一家成功的企业工作能让员工更满足，而并非是反过来的，这也是有可能的。但是，作者引用的对个别公司和组织内部变化的研究似乎表明，生产率因员工士气的提高而提高，并非是反过来的。

What might explain the link? One school of thought, known as human relations theory, has long argued that higher employee well-being is associated with higher productivity, not least because happy workers are less prone to absenteeism or quitting.

怎样解释这种关联呢？一种人际关系理论学派长期以来一直认为，员工的满意度越高，生产率就越高，尤其是因为快乐的员工往往不会旷工和辞职。

However, as the authors of the paper admit, there is very little research on the best measures that managers can take to improve employee well-being, or indeed which are the most cost-effective.

然而，正如该论文的作者所承认的那样，有关管理者能够采取的改善员工福祉的最佳措施或最具成本-效益的措施的研究还很少。

In service industries, staff really are a company’s most important asset. And that is why smart executives will realise that a contented workforce is a necessity for corporate success.

在服务行业，员工确实是公司最重要的资产。这就是为什么聪明的高管会意识到，满意的员工是企业成功的必要条件。

(红色标注词为重难点词汇)

本文翻译：Vinnie

校核：Vinnie

编辑：Vinnie

小编说

为什么员工快乐与否和企业能否成功相关联呢？其中的道理不难理解，只有当公司更加关注员工、更能为员工着想，员工才会有更积极的工作态度，生产率才会有所提高。

重难点词汇：

mantra ['mæntrə] n. 咒语；颂歌

reinforce [,riɪn'fɔrs] vt. 加固；强化；补充 vi. 求援；得到增援 n. 加强；加固物

woolly ['wʊli] adj. 羊毛的；模糊的；似羊毛的 n. 羊；毛织衣服

cynical ['sɪnɪkl] adj. 愤世嫉俗的；冷嘲的