经济学人 | Time management 时间管理（2023年第23期）

文章来源：《经济学人》Mar 27th 2023 期 Business 栏目 Time management

The words “flexible schedule” have an attractive ring to them. They conjure up a post-pandemic workplace full of motivated workers, organising their time in the most productive and family-friendly way, and of enlightened bosses, attracting and retaining talented employees. But flexibility is in the eye of the beholder. Its appeal can vary depending on the type of job someone is in, and on whose interests are being served.

“弹性工作时间”这个词对他们来说很有吸引力。他们想象出疫情后的工作场所充满了积极的员工以及开明的老板，员工们在以最富有成效和最有利于家庭的方式安排他们的时间，老板们则在吸引和留住有才华的员工。但“弹性”取决于旁观者的看法。它的吸引力可能因某人所从事的工作类型以及为谁的利益服务而有所不同。

If you are a blue-collar worker in an industry that operates in shifts, for example, flexibility sounds less like nirvana and more like chaos. For low-wage employees in restaurants and call centres, predictability is much more important than flexibility. Various American cities have introduced laws that, among other things, require employers to give workers a set amount of notice when setting their shift rotas.

例如，如果你是一个轮班行业的蓝领员工，灵活性听起来不太像天堂，更像是混乱。对于餐馆和呼叫中心的低薪员工来说，可预测性比灵活性重要得多。美国许多城市都出台了法律，其中包括要求雇主在确定员工轮班时提前给予一定的通知。

Recent research by Kristen Harknett of the University of California, San Francisco, and her co-authors into the effect of “fair workweek” legislation in Seattle found that the requirement for two weeks’ notice of schedules improved workers’ reported sense of well-being. It can also improve performance. A study conducted by Joan Williams of the University of California College of the Law, also in San Francisco, and others concluded that introducing more stable employee schedules increased sales and productivity at The Gap, a retailer.

加州大学旧金山分校的克里斯汀·哈克尼特和她的共同作者最近对西雅图“公平工作周”立法的影响进行了研究，提前两周通知工作时间的规定提高了员工幸福感。它还可以提高效率。加州大学法学院的琼·威廉姆斯和其他人进行的一项研究得出结论，引入更稳定的员工时间表可以提高零售商The Gap的销售额和生产率。

Certainty matters less for other workers. Research conducted by Donald Sull at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors found that predictable schedules had a marked effect on retention for blue-collar employees but did not affect white-collar ones. For desk-bound workers, the question is different: less whether flexible scheduling is appealing, more whose version of it prevails.

确定性对其他员工来说就没那么重要了。麻省理工学院的唐纳德•萨尔及其共同作者进行的研究发现，可预测的工作时间对蓝领员工的留存有显著影响，但对白领员工没有影响。对于坐在办公桌前工作的人来说，问题就不一样了:灵活的时间安排是否有吸引力不那么重要，更重要的是谁的时间安排更受欢迎。

In the minds of some bosses, flexibility means that the work week has no defined boundaries. If their day starts at 4:30am on a Peloton, so can yours (minus the Peloton). If there is a blank space in your calendar, they grab it. If they have a question on a Sunday, they send it over by email—and then text, WhatsApp and voicemail, just to make sure that the weekend is genuinely disturbed. It is a wonder they don’t turn up at the doorstep. A recent paper by Maria Ibanez of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University found that offering schedule flexibility on job adverts increases the likelihood that people will apply. But it also discovered that applications decrease markedly when adverts require workers to work at managers’ discretion.

在一些老板的心目中，弹性意味着每周的工作时间没有明确的界限。如果他们的一天是从早上4：30骑Peloton开始，那么你也可以(不骑Peloton)。如果你的日历上有空白处，他们就会占取你的时间。如果他们在周日有问题，他们会通过电子邮件发送，然后发短信、WhatsApp和语音邮件，只是为了确保周末真的被打扰。他们没有出现在门口真是个奇迹。美国西北大学凯洛格商学院的Maria Ibanez最近的一篇论文发现，在招聘广告上写弹性时间安排可以增加人们申请的可能性。但研究还发现，当招聘广告要求员工按照管理者的意愿工作时，申请人数会显著减少。

If workers balk at the boss’s version of flexible scheduling, managers have a different worry: that giving employees too much control over their hours can backfire. Asynchronous working, which involves individuals contributing to a project in their own time, is all very well. But if teams are to function effectively then they sometimes have to work as a group. Managers can have perfectly legitimate reasons to contact employees at odd hours and to expect an immediate response. Compressing work weeks into four days might well give workers more time to pursue their love of kayaking but be less brilliant for customers.

如果员工们对老板的弹性工作时间犹豫不决，管理者们就会有不同的担心:让员工对自己的工作时间有太多的控制权可能会适得其反。异步工作，即让个人在自己的时间内为一个项目做出贡献，这非常好。但如果团队要有效运作，有时就必须作为一个团队工作。管理者们可以有完全正当的理由在下班时间联系员工，并期待他们立即回复。把一周的工作时间压缩到四天可能会让员工有更多的时间去追求他们热爱的皮划艇，但对客户来说就不那么明智了。

Just as a blend of home and office is a sensible answer to demands for flexibility in location, a mixed approach is the right way to think about flexible schedules. Brian Elliott runs research into the future of work for Slack, a messaging firm. He specifies “core collaboration hours” for his own team, which is when most meetings and group activities happen. The company has instituted “focus Fridays”, a day when there are no internal meetings and employees get on with their own tasks. If Mr Elliott does need to contact people outside working hours, he does so by text so they are not logged in all the time.

就像家庭和办公室的混合是对地点灵活性需求的明智答案一样，混合的方法是考虑灵活的工作时间的正确方法。布莱恩•埃利奥特在即时通讯公司Slack负责对未来工作的研究。他为自己的团队指定了“核心协作时间”，也就是大多数会议和小组活动发生的时间。该公司设立了“专注周五”，在这一天没有内部会议，员工们只管自己的工作。如果埃利奥特确实需要在工作时间之外联系别人，他会通过短信联系，这样他们就不用一直登录。

Boundaries of this sort will upset the absolutists. Managers have to think harder about interrupting people. Workers cannot pick and choose their hours at will. But a bit of thought can stop people from being their own worst enemies. For bosses, getting a swift answer to an unimportant question causes more trouble than it is worth. For employees, the flexibility to work outside standard hours is double-edged: Laura Giurge of London School of Economics and Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University have found that choosing to work at a weekend or on a bank holiday reduces motivation precisely because these days are associated in their minds with non-work activities. For flexibility to be genuinely useful, it requires a firm skeleton.

这种界限会让绝对主义者感到不安。管理者们必须更加认真地考虑如何打断员工。员工们不能随意选择工作时间。但是一点点的思考可以阻止人们成为自己最大的敌人。对于老板来说，迅速回答一个不重要的问题相比其价值而言，带来的是更多的麻烦。对于员工来说，在标准工作时间之外工作的灵活性是一把双刃剑: 伦敦经济学院的劳拉·吉厄奇和康奈尔大学的凯特琳·伍利发现，选择在周末或银行假日工作会降低积极性，因为在他们的头脑中，这些日子与非工作活动有关。要让灵活性真正发挥作用，它需要一个坚实的框架。