一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day8 passage2
Passage 2 Job-Related Unhappiness
如何处理工作中的不满情绪? 《经济学人》
Suicide, proclaimed Albert Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus",
is the only serious philosophical problem.
In France at the moment it is also a serious management problem.
A spate of attempted and successful suicides
at France Telecom-many of them explicitly prompted
by troubles at work-has sparked a national debate
about life in the modern corporation.
There are some reasons for this melancholy trend.
France Telecom is making the difficult transition from state monopoly
to multinational company. It has shed 22,000 jobs since 2006,
but two-thirds of the remaining workers enjoy civil-service-like job-security.
This is forcing it to pursue a toxic strategy:
[01:00]teaching old civil servants new tricks
[01:03]while at the same time putting new hires on short-term contracts.
[01:09]Yet the problem is not confined to France.
[01:12]The most obvious reason for the rise in unhappiness is the recession,
[01:17]which is destroying jobs at a startling rate and spreading anxiety
[01:22]throughout the workforce.
[01:25]But the recession is also highlighting longer-term problems.
[01:30]Unhappiness seems to be particularly common in car companies,
[01:34]which suffer from global overcapacity, and telecoms companies,
[01:39]which are being buffeted by a technological revolution.
[01:44]In a survey of its workers in 2008,
[01:47]France Telecom found that two-thirds of them reported being "stressed out"
[01:54]and a sixth reported being in "distress".
[01:58]A second source of misery is the drive to improve productivity,
[02:04]which is typically accompanied by an obsession with measuring performance.
[02:09]Giant retailers use "workforce management" software to monitor
[02:14]how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart,
[02:19]and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours.
[02:24]The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates
[02:30]and performance targets. In Japan some firms even monitor
[02:35]whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.
[02:39]Can anything be done about this epidemic of unhappiness? There are some people,
[02:46]particularly in Europe,
[02:48]who think that it strengthens the case for expanding workers' rights.
[02:53]But doing so will not end the upheaval wrought
[02:58]by technological innovation in the telecoms sector or overcapacity
[03:04]in the car industry.
[03:06]And the situation in France Telecom was exacerbated by the fact
[03:11]that so many workers were unsackable. The solution to the problem,
[03:17]in so far as there is one, lies in the hands of managers
[03:22]and workers rather than governments.
[03:26]Companies need to do more than pay lip service
[03:30]to the human side of management.
[03:33]They also need to learn from the well-documented mistakes of others
[03:38](France Telecom has belatedly hired Technologia,
[03:42]a consultancy which helped Renault with its suicide problem).
[03:48]Bob Sutton of Stanford University argues
[03:51]that companies need to do as much as possible to come clean with workers,
[03:58]even if that means confirming bad news.
[04:02]He also warns that bosses need to be careful about the signals they send:
[04:08]in times of great stress ill thought-out turns of phrase
[04:13]can lead to a frenzy of anxiety and speculation.