激励员工新思路:别再搬乔布斯的金句了 | 经济学人商业

财富   2024-12-13 08:07   日本  

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导读


本期思维导图作者:

Cece,消防人+经济学人粉丝


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精读|翻译|词组

Business | Bartleby

商业|巴托比专栏


英文部分选自经济学人20241207期商业板块

Business | Bartleby

商业|巴托比专栏

How to inspire people

如何激励人们

The answer is not another video of Steve Jobs

别再靠乔布斯的金句视频了

Motivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a networking site ostensibly for people at work, to find “inspirational” content. There may be people who need only to read “We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are” written in a nice font to feel amped up on a Monday morning. But there will be just as many who want to snigger or vomit. For bosses interested in how to motivate the people around them, there are better options than searching for quotes by Paulo Coelho.

领英(LinkedIn)看似是一个面向职场人的社交平台,但只要在上面刷上一小会儿就能看到鼓舞人心的内容,例如励志名言,史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)谈论各类话题的视频,抑或是从河里救起小象的片段。也许有些人只需要看到一句字体精美的安于现状岂能实现理想,就能在周一早晨充满干劲。但同样也有很多人对此嗤之以鼻甚至无比反感。对老板来说,想要了解如何激励员工,比起在网上搜索保罗·科埃略(Paulo Coelho)的名言,还有更好的选择。

注:
保罗
·科埃略(Paulo Coelho),1947824日出生于巴西里约热内卢
,巴西著名作家。1988年出版著名寓言小说《牧羊少年奇幻之旅》(the Alchemist),畅销170个国家,销量6500万册,被译成70种语言,位居《纽约时报》畅销榜长达427周,成为20世纪最重要的文学现象之一。他的作品语言富有诗意和哲理,内容涉及宗教、魔法、神秘传说等,带有奇幻色彩。他的著作全球销量已经超过2.1亿册,是历史上作品最畅销的葡萄牙语作家。
At some level, advice on how to inspire employees is silly. It’s usually either blindingly obvious—be good at your job, be passionate about the work, make the people on your teams feel valued—or jarringly inauthentic. But much more practical insights can be found in a forthcoming book called “Inspire”, by Adam Galinsky, an academic at Columbia Business School.

从某种程度上来说,那些有关如何激励员工的建议显得有些愚蠢。要么是显而易见的常识,比如告诉你要做好本职工作,要对工作充满热情,要让团队成员能看到自己的价值;要么就夸夸其谈,让人反感。但即将出版的新书《激励》(Inspire)提供了更为实用的建议。该书作者是哥伦比亚商学院的教授亚当·加林斯基(Adam Galinsky)。

Take, for example, the importance of vivid imagery as a way of bringing an organisation’s purpose to life. Lots of firms use a succession of tediously abstract words to convey their goal: “change”, “innovate”, “connect” and so on. The result is less a mission than a mood board. Mr Galinsky cites an experiment by Andrew Carton of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors that showed the effect of more concrete language. In it, teams were asked to design toys and given a vision statement to guide their behaviour. Teams who were handed a statement with more visual language—to create toys that “…make wide-eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile”—produced more engaging toys than teams who were given something more generic.

比如,书中提到形象的语言很重要,可以生动表达公司的意图。许多公司用一连串乏味的抽象词汇来表述目标,例如 改变创新链接” 等等。这些词与其说是公司任务,不如说是一个情绪板。加林斯基提到由宾夕法尼亚大学的安德鲁·卡登(Andrew Carton)等人所做的一项实验,该项实验显示了具体语言的影响。参与实验的团队要依据一份愿景声明来设计玩具。一些团队拿到的声明更加视觉化----“设计目标是:让小朋友们睁大眼睛、咯咯大笑,让父母露出骄傲的微笑,另一些团队拿到的说明则更加宽泛笼统。最终前者设计出的玩具更具吸引力。

注:情绪板,也称为灵感板,可以用来捕捉灵感,收集和组织各种视觉元素,如图片、颜色、文字等,以便帮助设计师整理思路。愿景声明,是一种商业文件,主要陈述一个组织的当前和未来目标。公司的愿景必须与其使命、战略计划、文化和核心价值观保持一致。
Mr Galinsky also points to the power of counterfactual thinking to inspire a sense of meaning. In research he conducted with Laura Kray of the University of California, Berkeley and other co-authors, participants were asked to reflect on important events in their lives, such as their choice of college. Some were also asked to think about how things would have turned out if this event had not taken place. This group attributed greater meaning to the event in question, whether because they concluded fate had played a part in it or because it forced them to think through its consequences more explicitly. This type of counterfactual thinking can also be used to strengthen employees’ ties to firms: prompting people to imagine a world in which their company does not exist seems to increase a sense of attachment.

加林斯基还在书中指出,反事实思维能够激发意义感。在他与加州大学伯克利分校的劳拉·克雷(Laura Kray)等合著者的研究中,参与者需要回顾生活中诸如选择大学之类的重要事件。其中一组参与者还要思考如果这件事没有发生,他们的人生会如何发展。或是因为觉得命运作祟,或是因为实验情景下必须想得更透彻,这组参与者给自己的人生大事赋予了更深的意义。这种反事实思维也可以用来加强员工与公司的联系:让员工想象一个没有自己公司的世界,这似乎会增加一种依附感。

注:所谓反事实思维,就是与事实相反的假想。一个人外出没带雨伞赶上下雨,被淋得像个落汤鸡。他想,要是带雨伞就不会挨浇了。如果说下雨挨浇是既成事实,想象带雨伞不会挨浇就是与事实相反的思维,也就是心理学家所说反事实思维。

Perhaps the most striking idea in Mr Galinsky’s book is that, instead of bosses motivating people from above, individuals can do it for themselves. One example is a piece of research he conducted with Julian Pfrombeck from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and other co-authors. In this study some Swiss citizens who had newly registered with a government employment agency were asked to undertake a 10- to 15-minute exercise in which they reflected on values that mattered to them. They were three times more likely to find a job than those who did not do the exercise.

加林斯基书中最让人眼前一亮的观点大概就是:老板无需自上而下激励员工,员工可以进行自我激励。他与香港中文大学的朱利安·普罗姆贝克(Julian Pfrombeck)等人进行的一项研究就是典型案例。这项研究的参与者是最近在政府就业部门登记的一组瑞士公民,他们被要求花上1015分钟思考对自己很重要的一些价值观。最终,这些参与者的求职成功率比其求职者高出三倍。

A forthcoming paper, by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, finds that this kind of intervention can have dramatic effects in a business setting. A subset of almost 3,000 employees at a consumer-goods firm were randomly assigned to take part in a workshop that helped participants to reflect on pivotal moments in their lives, to articulate what mattered to them and to think about how their current jobs matched their own sense of purpose.

伦敦经济学院的纳瓦·阿什拉夫(Nava Ashraf)和奥里安娜·班德拉(Oriana Bandiera)与芝加哥大学的弗吉尼亚·米尼(Virginia Minni 和路易吉·津加莱斯(Luigi Zingales)即将发表的论文指出,这种活动会在企业里也会产生巨大影响。在一家近3000名员工的消费品公司里,研究者随机指派一组人参加一场研讨会,让这组员工认真体悟生活中的重要时刻、说出对自己重要的事情,思考当前的工作和个人志向的匹配度。

The academics found that taking part in this exercise substantially increased the probability of exits from the firm, particularly among lower performers; increased internal job transfers; and improved the performance of those who stayed in their jobs. A heightened sense of what is meaningful to individuals provides the best explanation for these outcomes. Those whose jobs do not inspire them decide to leave or move; those who find that their purpose and their job are in sync put in more effort. Once they accounted for the productivity of employees who replaced the leavers, the overall impact of this experiment on the firm’s performance was positive.

研究者发现,参加活动后,公司员工的离职可能性大幅增加,尤其是业绩差的员工。公司内部的岗位调动也相应增加,此外,岗位不变的员工业绩有所提升。这些现象最好的解释就是员工更加了解了哪些事情对自己有意义。在工作中受不到激励的人会决定离职或转岗;而认为工作和志向一致的人会更加努力。研究者将接任员工的产出列入公司总业绩后,发现这项实验的总体影响是积极的。

Managers play a huge role in motivating their people. But inspiration can be bottom-up as well as top-down. Don’t just tell your team what Jobs said. Ask why their jobs matter to them.

管理者在激励员工上发挥巨大作用。但是激励既可以自上而下,也可以自下而上。别光向团队成员重复乔布斯的金句了,还是问问他们工作的意义吧。
翻译组:
Jack Jan,实践出真知

Crystal SISU小菜鸡,扎根生长也自然流淌
CassieECNU口译小菜鸡,体制内摸爬滚打教书匠


校对组:
雪迪,开眼看世界

Mosy,绘本、演讲、戏剧英文教育践行者
Yu Yang,架一艘译舰巡航无数内心的曲折宇宙

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感想

本期感想

Very,男,电气民工,经济学人资浅爱好者


人是一种奇怪的动物,有时候会依理性行事,有时却又凭着性子,任性无比。究竟何时理性何时任性,却又道不明白。

偶尔会和老婆吵闹,明明如此行事有百利而无一害,也是理性之选,而她就是不愿,辩得大半天最后却来了句,我就想要如此。好吧,只能暗暗安慰自己:千金难买老婆心头之好。但当我有时想任一下性子时,她却道:你太任性了,应该凭着家里的实际情况而定,不能由着你来。

徐早以前,也有一种观点,认为理性和感性是一种对立面,且万物都会有其中之一的属性,如女的为感性,男的则是理性。进一步而言,理性是之于秩序,感性则对应混沌。如此就形成了某种朴素的哲学观。但若以现在科学的实践来看,秩序往往是少数或者偶然,混沌则是多数与必然。大概与熵增的原理相关。

但为何我们总是偏爱秩序而不喜混沌呢?也许这和我们的惰性有关。驱动人类进步的一大动力便是我们的惰性,或者说万物总是偏向惰性。秩序,或者是有序,会大大减少我们理解世界的负担,稍作推理便能猜测后续;若是处理混沌,则不是普通推演就能得到,所以人们才偏爱秩序,抗拒混沌。


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现在很多人都不知道自己热爱什么,追求什么,只是找到一个标签后就认为找到了人生的意义。我们是谁不重要,我们想成为谁很重要!当你什么都没有的时候,你想尽可能多的包装自己;当你内心充盈足够自信的时候,你只想做你自己,而且是更好的自己。
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