每天一篇经济学人 | The power of small gesture...

The power of small gestures

小手势的力量

Bartleby

巴托比

Small acts of appreciation can delight employees. But they are not meant to be industrialised

小小的赞赏之举能让员工开心。但这并不意味着要“工业化”赞赏

When labour markets are tight, the perks tend to get better. Spotify is rolling out a new corporate-subscription package, enabling firms to offer the streaming service to their employees. If you are sufficiently high up at Goldman Sachs, you are now entitled to take as much holiday as you want (this is a nominal perk; no one who cherishes work-life balance gets to climb the ladder at Goldman in the first place). Salesforce has a ranch in California to which it can send workers for in-person get-togethers. If you work long enough for Blue Origin, you might get blasted into space. 

【1】high-up 高官

【2】get-together 聚会

当劳动力市场紧张时，福利往往会变得更好。Spotify正在推出一种新的企业订阅套餐，公司能够向其员工提供流媒体服务。如果你在高盛的职位足够高，你现在有权想休多少假就休多少假(这只是名义上的福利；任何一个珍视工作与生活平衡的人都无法在高盛获得晋升)。Salesforce在加州有一个牧场，可以派员工到那里参加面对面的聚会。如果你在蓝色起源太空公司工作的时间足够长，你可能会被发射到太空。

For firms that don’t own rockets or ranches, it can seem hard to compete. The good news is that small gestures of appreciation can have an outsized effect on employee satisfaction and loyalty. The bad news is that they are not meant to be scaled up. 

对于那些没有火箭或牧场的公司来说，似乎很难与之竞争。好消息是，赞赏的小举动会对员工的满意度和忠诚度产生巨大的影响。坏消息是，它们不打算“扩大赞赏规模”。

Several pieces of research look at the effect that acts of thoughtfulness can have on staff. In one recent study by academics at King’s College London and Harvard Business School, a group of social workers was randomly divided in two: members of one group got a letter of thanks for their work from their line manager, and members of the other got nothing. A month later, recipients of the letter reported feeling much more valued than their counterparts. 

有几项研究着眼于体贴的行为对员工的影响。在伦敦国王学院和哈佛商学院的学者们最近进行的一项研究中，一群社会福利工作者被随机分为两组:一组的成员得到了部门经理的感谢信，而另一组的成员什么也没有得到。一个月后，收到感谢信的人表示，他们觉得自己比其他人更受重视。

In similar vein, a study in 2010 found that university fundraisers who were personally thanked for their work by a senior member of staff made many more calls to ask alumni for donations in the week following this small act of recognition than they had in the week before. There was no statistically significant change for an unthanked control group. 

与此类似，2010年的一项研究发现，如果大学的筹款人因自己的工作表现得到一名资深工作人员的亲自感谢，那么在这一小小的赞赏举动之后，他们在一周内打电话请求校友捐款的次数要比前一周多得多。未得到感谢的对照组没有统计学上的显著变化。

Another study involved workers at a Coca-Cola facility in Madrid, some of whom had secretly been told to perform acts of kindness to a subset of their colleagues (bringing someone a drink, say, or emailing them a note of thanks). Both givers and receivers of these acts reported feeling higher levels of job satisfaction; and the receivers ended up doing other colleagues more favours, too. 

另一项研究的对象是马德里可口可乐工厂的员工，他们中的一些人被秘密告知要对一部分同事表现出善意(比如给别人带杯饮料，或者给他们发一封感谢信)。这些行为的给予者和接受者都报告称，他们的工作满意度更高；而接受者最终也为其他同事提供了更多的帮助。

Such studies carry two lessons for employers. One is that recognition can have a meaningful impact on workers. The other is that this impact is amplified if shows of appreciation are personal and unexpected. In their haste to act on the first lesson, plenty of companies completely forget the second. 

这些研究给雇主们带来了两个教训。其一是，赞赏可以对员工产生有意义的影响。另一种是，如果赞赏是私人的、意想不到的，这种影响会被放大。许多公司在匆忙遵循第一个教训的过程中，完全忘记了第二个教训。

Many firms now run formal employee-recognition initiatives, from rewards programmes to award schemes. Vendors offer clients a variety of services, including internal noticeboards on which colleagues can publicly thank each other for their work and bestow points that can be redeemed for gifts and experiences. The website of one vendor offers managers advice on what to say to employees to make them feel recognised, because absolutely nothing says “authenticity” like a script. (Sample quote: “Congratulations on your great victory! Only you could have pulled it off!”, which sounds like a Hallmark card for Napoleon.) 

【1】award 奖；奖项；奖金；奖品

[释义] a prize or an amount of money that is given to someone following an official decision

许多公司现在都有正式的员工赞赏计划，从“rewards programmes”(积分奖励计划？)到“award schemes”(奖金奖励计划？)。供应商为客户提供各种各样的服务，包括内部公告栏，同事们可以在上面公开感谢对方的工作，并赠送积分，这些积分可以兑换礼物和经验。一家供应商的网站为管理者们提供建议，告诉他们该对员工说什么才能让他们感到被认可，因为绝对没有什么比“脚本”更能体现“真实性”了。(引用范例:“祝贺你取得了伟大胜利！只有你才能办成这件事！这听起来像是给拿破仑的贺曼贺卡。)

Industrialising appreciation misses the point completely. Automated birthday and work-anniversary congratulations are about as personal as an invoice. Platforms on which peers publicly recognise the hard work of others are liable to encourage performative displays of praise. That is especially likely if every compliment shows up on an analytics dashboard for the boss; one employee-engagement firm tracks shows of gratitude and breaks these “recognition occasions” into a series of ghastly categories like “Owning the Results” and “Building Trust Like a Family”. 

“工业化”赞赏则完全没有抓住重点。自动的生日和工作周年庆祝贺就像一张发票一样个人化。在同行们可以公开赞赏他人的辛勤工作的这样的平台上，很容易鼓励对他人进行有表述性的表扬。如果每一句赞美都出现在老板的分析仪表板上，这种情况就更有可能发生；一家员工敬业度公司跟踪员工的感恩表现，并将这些“赞赏场合”划分为一系列可怕的类别，如“拥有结果”和“像家人一样建立信任”。

Award schemes also require careful handling. They are great if you win and somewhat less motivating if you don’t stand a chance. In one study from 2014, academics looked at the effect of an award programme on Zambian health-care trainees; they found that comparison with others worsened performance, especially for less able workers. 

奖金奖励计划也需要谨慎。如果赢得奖金，他们会很好，如果你没有机会赢得(奖金)，他们会有点缺乏动力。在2014年的一项研究中，学者们研究了一项奖励计划对赞比亚医疗保健培训人员的影响；他们发现，与他人比较会使员工表现更差，尤其是能力较差的员工。

The secret to showing appreciation is that scarcity matters. It should involve effort: a handwritten note is better than an email, which is better than an algorithm. It should feel personal, not part of a scheme cooked up by the human-resources department. And it should be sufficiently rare to register as meaningful; thanking everyone for everything turns gratitude into a commodity. In other words, appreciation is not a big-data project. Individual managers can harness the power of small gestures to make a real difference to their teams. The best thing firms can do is to hire the sort of people who recognise as much.

表达感激的秘诀在于，稀缺很重要。它应该需要花费精力：手写便条比电子邮件好，电子邮件总比算法好。它应该是私人的，而不是人力资源部门制定的计划的一部分。它应该足够罕见，从而被认为是有意义的；感谢每一个人，感谢每一件事，会把感激变成一种商品。换句话说，感激不是一个大数据项目。单一管理者可以利用小手势的力量，为他们的团队带来真正的改变。公司能做的最好的事情就是雇佣那些不吝啬赞赏的人。