Passage 2 Job-Related Unhappiness
如何處理工作中的不滿情緒？ 《經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人》
[00:00]Suicide, proclaimed Albert Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus",
[00:06]is the only serious philosophical problem.
[00:10]In France at the moment it is also a serious management problem.
[00:16]A spate of attempted and successful suicides
[00:19]at France Telecom-many of them explicitly prompted
[00:23]by troubles at work-has sparked a national debate
[00:27]about life in the modern corporation.
[00:32]There are some reasons for this melancholy trend.
[00:35]France Telecom is making the difficult transition from state monopoly
[00:41]to multinational company. It has shed 22,000 jobs since 2006,
[00:49]but two-thirds of the remaining workers enjoy civil-service-like job-security.
[00:55]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.
