经济学人双语精读：为什么员工忠诚度可能被高估？

2024年4月18日 文摘

Bartleby
巴托比

Why employee loyalty can be overrated
为什么员工忠诚度可能被高估

Many a fickle makes a muckle
朝三暮四大有好处

  • fickle 指人的忠诚、兴趣、感情、意见等“反复无常的、易变的、靠不住的”，略含有一丝欺骗狡猾之意，但更强调因无力保持真实、坚定或确定而不稳定和不可靠（参见：小词详解 | fickle）
  • muckle 大量、许多；大量的、许多的

Job interviews are an opportunity to see allegiances shift in real time. A candidate will usually refer to a prospective employer as “you” at the start of an interview (“What do you want to see from someone in this position?”). But occasionally the pronoun changes (“We should be thinking more about our approach to below-the-line marketing. Sorry, I mean ‘you’ should be”). That “we” is a tiny, time-travelling glimpse of someone imagining themselves as the employee of a new company, of a fresh identity being forged and of loyalties being transferred.
求职面试让人有机会实时观察忠诚的转向。在面试刚开始时，面试者通常会用“你们”来称呼可能的未来雇主（“你们希望这个职位上的人具备什么素质？”）。但时不时地，这个人称代词会发生变化（“我们应该多多思考我们线下营销的方法。抱歉，我的意思是“你们”）。这个“我们”是带人穿越时空的微小一瞥，让人目睹某人想象自己是一家新公司的员工，一个崭新的身份正在成形，忠诚正在转移。

  • allegiance （对政党、宗教、统治者的）忠诚，效忠，拥戴
  • prospective 有望的、可能的、预期的、潜在的；即将发生的、行将来临的
  • glimpse 一瞥；一看；短暂的感受（或体验、领会）
  • forge 表示“锻造、制作”，即加热金属材料后使用锤子和砧对其进行敲打加工或锻造成形（参见：小词详解 | forge）

Loyalty is seen as a virtue in most situations: among friends, family and football fans. Employee loyalty, however, is more complex. It is more transactional. Friends don’t give each other performance reviews or fire each other for cost reasons. It is less reciprocal. A worker can feel attachment to a company and a company can feel precisely nothing. (Which is why people often feel more loyal to team members and individual bosses than to their organisations.) And too much of it can impose high costs.
在大多数情况下，忠诚都被视为一种美德：在朋友、家人和足球迷之间。然而，员工的忠诚要更复杂。它更具交易性质。朋友之间不会做绩效评估，或因为成本原因炒对方鱿鱼。它也更不对等。员工可能对公司生出依恋之情，而公司却可能完全不为所动。（这就是为什么比起对于所在的组织，人们通常对团队成员和老板个人更忠诚。）而且，过多的员工忠诚可能造成高昂的代价。

  • reciprocal 互惠的、相应的

Wage bumps and careers are built on people changing jobs. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which tracks wage growth in America, in April job switchers were being paid 7.6% more than a year earlier; job stickers were being paid only 5.6% more. A little promiscuity on the part of other people can help those who choose to stay where they are. A paper by Nathan Deutscher, a Treasury official in Australia, found that higher rates of job-hopping in local Australian labour markets were associated with faster wage growth both for workers who switched jobs and for those who did not. Loyalty is nice; so is bargaining power.
涨工资和事业发展是建立在人们换工作的基础上的。亚特兰大联邦储备银行追踪了美国的工资增长，根据其数据，4月换工作的人的工资比去年同期高出7.6%，而守着老工作的人的薪水只高出5.6%。其他人稍微朝秦暮楚一点，那些不挪窝的人可能也会沾光。澳大利亚财政部官员内森·德意切尔（Nathan Deutscher）的一篇论文发现，在澳大利亚，不管是换了工作的还是没换工作的劳动者，当地劳动力市场上的跳槽率升高与他们的工资增长加快都存在关联。忠诚蛮好，议价能力也是。