每天一篇经济学人 | Walking in employees' shoe...

Any manager worth their salt knows the value of spending time “walking in their customers’ shoes”. There are many ways to do it. You can observe customers in their natural habitat. Pernod Ricard’s boss recently told Bloomberg, a news service, about his habit of bar-hopping in order to see what people want to drink. Such research is a lot less fun if your company makes soap dispensers for public toilets but the same principle applies.

任何称职的经理都知道花时间“站在客户的角度思考”的价值。有很多方法可以做到这一点。你可以在顾客的生活地观察他们。保乐力加(世界知名烈酒和葡萄酒集团)的老板最近告诉彭博社(一家新闻服务机构)，他经常去酒吧看看人们想喝什么。如果你的公司生产公共厕所的皂液器，那么这样的研究就不那么有趣了，但同样的原则也适用。

You can be a customer yourself, buying your company’s products, ringing your own helplines and enduring the same teeth-grinding muzak. Or you can hear from your customers directly. Jeremy Hunt, who has just been appointed Britain’s finance minister but was once its longest-serving health secretary, started each day in that job by reading a letter of complaint from a patient or their family, and writing back to each correspondent personally. If you cancel one internal meeting a week and use that time to hear from customers instead, you will come out ahead on the trade.

你可以自己成为顾客，购买你公司的产品，拨打自己的热线电话，忍受同样的磨牙音乐。或者你可以直接听客户的反馈声。刚刚被任命为英国财政大臣的杰里米•亨特曾是任职时间最长的卫生大臣，他上任后的每一天都是阅读病人或其家属的投诉信，并亲自给每位回信。如果你每周取消一次内部会议，用这段时间来听取客户的意见，你就会在交易中获得优势。

This idea does not apply only to customers. It can also be useful inside the organisation. Walking in employees’ shoes is a way for bosses to understand what impedes productivity, what saps morale and what makes workers feel valued. A sense of affinity can come from living in the same community as other members of staff. Recent research found that ceos in Denmark who lived within 5km of their offices seemed to foster better work environments than those who lived farther away. But short of moving house, how else can managers get inside workers’ heads?

这个想法不仅适用于客户。它在组织内部也很有用。站在员工的角度思考，老板可以了解是什么阻碍了生产力，是什么削弱了士气，是什么让员工感到受到重视。这种亲近感可以来自于与其他员工生活在同一个社区。最近的研究发现，在丹麦，住在离办公室5公里以内的 CEO 似乎比住得更远的 CEO 能营造更好的工作环境。但除了搬家，管理者们还能怎样了解员工的想法呢?

Even if a boss genuinely wants to hear the unvarnished truth, employees may not be comfortable delivering it. Anonymous surveys can help encourage honesty, as can exit interviews, but even in these settings, workers may temper their views. Reviews on sites like Glassdoor can be brutal, but the motives of the people posting them are not always transparent. Corporate-messaging apps like Slack can provide a partial window into how some teams are getting on, but surveillance is not a form of empathy. And none of this is the same as knowing what it is actually like to be an employee.

即使老板真的想听赤裸裸的真相，员工也可能不愿意说出来。匿名调查和离职面谈有助于鼓励员工诚实，但即使在这些情况下，员工也可能会改变自己的观点。Glassdoor(美国的一家做企业点评与职位搜索的职场社区)等网站上的评论可能很残酷，但发布评论的人的动机并不总是透明的。像Slack这样的企业即时通讯应用可以让我们部分了解一些团队的进展情况，但监控并不是一种共情的方式。这些都和了解作为一名员工的真实感受是不一样的。

It is very hard for managers to replicate the experiences of normal employees. Rooms will magically become available if the boss asks for one; everyone else has to roam around the building like wildebeest that have become separated from the herd. Managers do not have to remind people of their names. They are less likely to suffer some of the common feelings that undermine workers’ enthusiasm for their jobs: rare is the boss who feels overlooked or underappreciated. And they are also much less likely than employees to encounter incivility from colleagues.

管理者很难“复现”普通员工的经历。如果老板要房间，房间就会神奇地变空; 其他所有人都必须在大楼里四处游荡，就像与兽群分离的牛羚一样。管理者们不需要提醒人们他们的名字。他们不太可能经历一些损害员工工作热情的常见感受: 很少有老板感到被忽视或不被赏识。此外，他们遇到同事不文明行为的可能性也比员工小得多。

One option is to appear on “Undercover Boss”, an entertaining reality-tv show in which executives put on preposterous disguises, work in their own organisations and discover what life is really like for their workers. If you go down this route you will learn a lot, but you will have to admit to an audience of millions that you have absolutely no idea what is going on in your own organisation. (A less involved option is not to bother with the cameras and to wear your own home-made disguise in the office, though there is a risk your moustache will fall off at a pivotal moment.)

一种选择是参加“卧底老板”，这是一档娱乐电视真人秀节目，在节目中，管理者们进行荒谬的伪装，在自己的组织中工作，发现员工的真实生活是什么样的。如果你沿着这条路走下去，你会学到很多东西，但你必须向数百万听众承认，你完全不知道自己所在的组织正在发生什么。(一个不那么麻烦的选择是，在办公室里不用担心摄像头，穿你自制的伪装，尽管你的胡子可能会在关键时刻掉下来。)

Even without disguises it is good for managers to spend time doing the same work as their underlings. (It is also good for them to stop referring to people as underlings.) Airlines and retailers have run schemes that involve executives working in front-line roles in airports and on shopfloors. DoorDash, a delivery app, has a programme called WeDash that requires salaried employees to make regular drop-offs. And bosses can do things for themselves that people without assistants must navigate alone. Filling out expense forms is a chore: everyone should have to do their own, at least occasionally. By default bosses should fly in the same airline class as their colleagues do. And so on.

即使没有伪装，管理者花时间和下属做同样的工作也是有好处的。(对他们来说，停止称“下属”也有好处。) 航空公司和零售商实施了让高管在机场和商店一线工作的计划。送货应用DoorDash有一个名为WeDash的项目，要求受薪员工定期送货。老板可以自己做一些那些没有助手的人必须独自完成的事情。填写费用表是一件苦差事: 每个人都应该自己填写，至少偶尔要填写。默认情况下，老板应该和同事乘坐同一舱位。等等。

If managers can learn a few things by walking in employees’ shoes, there is also value in workers thinking about what life is like as a boss. It is not all business-class travel and people agreeing with you. Imagine getting in a lift and conversation around you always dying. Imagine being grumbled about all the time, or knowing that your absence causes a general lightening of the mood. Imagine not being able to kick a difficult decision upstairs. The boss wears much nicer shoes but they can still pinch.

如果管理者能从员工的角度学到一些东西，那么让员工思考作为老板的生活是什么样子也是有价值的。并不是所有的旅行都是商务舱的，人们也并不是都同意你的观点。想象一下，坐电梯时，周围的人的对话戛然而止。想象一下，总是被人抱怨，或者知道你的缺席让心情变得轻松。想象一下，不能把一个艰难的决定让“上级”处理。老板穿的鞋好得多，但还是夹脚。