翻译天堂  2016-11-05

The culture of long hours fails to deliver the goods

When engineers talk about “asset integrity”, what they usually refer to is the good practice of servicing and repairing equipment before it breaks. Companies that use a lot of machinery take this very seriously; companies that mostly just use people rarely do.

当工程师谈到“资产完整性”的时候，他们通常指的是在设备损坏前维护和修理设备的良好做法。使用大量机器的企业非常重视这一点；而主要只使用人力的公司则鲜少重视此事。

Although to my knowledge no other nation than Japan has a word for death by overwork — karoshi — we probably need one. For while it is tempting to imagine the phenomenon is unique to Japan, it may simply be that it is the first country to look deeply enough to identify it. Coined in the 1970s, the word returned to Japanese newspapers last month when the Tokyo Labour bureau ruled that the suicide of Matsuri Takahashi, a young employee of the advertising agency Dentsu, had been caused by overwork. She had worked 105 hours of overtime in a single month.

尽管据我所知，除日本以外，没有哪个国家有专门指代工作过度劳累所致死亡的词语——“Karoshi”（过劳死），我们很可能需要一个这样的词。因为尽管人们很容易以为这种现象是日本独有的，实情可能是日本是第一个看得足够深入从而认识到这个问题的国家。这个在上世纪70年代发明的词语上个月重现于日本报端，东京劳动局(Tokyo Labour bureau)裁定，广告公司电通(Dentsu)的年轻雇员Matsuri Takahashi自杀是因工作过度劳累导致。她生前曾在一个月里加班了105个小时。

Most of the chief executives I know — predominantly in the US and UK — routinely work a 12 or 15-hour day, six or seven days a week. Few of them are familiar with studies that routinely show that productivity is not linear. After about 40 hours a week fatigue sets in, provoking mistakes. Any extra hours spent are needed to clear up the mess: reversing poor decisions, soothing ruffled feathers. The classic, but comic, expression of this was produced by the efficiency expert, Frank Gilbreth. He found he could shave faster if he used two razors but then wasted all the time he saved covering the cuts with plasters.

我认识的大多数首席执行官——主要是在美国和英国——通常每天工作12或者15个小时，每周工作6天或者7天。其中很少有人熟悉通常表明工作效率并非线性的研究。在一周工作约40个小时以后，人就会开始感到疲劳，导致人出错，然后又需要花时间来收拾烂摊子：修正错误的决定，平复愤怒的情绪——到头来是白忙活一场。有关这一点，效率专家弗兰克•吉尔布雷思(Frank Gilbreth)有一个经典又好笑的描述。他发现如果他同时使用两片刀片刮胡子，刮得会更快，但之后他不得不把节省出来的全部时间，浪费在用创口贴处理刀片留下的小伤口上。

While a few chief executives love to boast of their powers of endurance, many insist their jobs simply require long days, weeks and months. They acknowledge it sets a poor example and a few have learnt to keep weekend emails stored in their outbox. But the speed with which the death, in 2013, of a Bank of America intern working in the City of London was interpreted as death by overwork showed how fully everyone knew that the economic crisis and relative scarcity of good jobs was taking its toll on those at the bottom of the heap.

尽管有少数首席执行官喜欢吹嘘自己的忍耐力，很多首席官都坚称，他们的岗位就是需要长时间工作。他们承认，这树立了一个糟糕的榜样，有少数首席执行官已经学会把在周末拟好的电子邮件储存在发件箱里。但2013年在伦敦金融城(City of London)工作的那名美国银行(Bank of America)实习生的死，如此快地被理解为过劳死，表明每个人都完全清楚，经济危机和好工作的相对稀缺正在摧残那些处于金字塔底层的人。

This mirrors what Professor Michael Marmot, the British epidemiologist, discovered when he conducted a longitudinal study of 10,000 Whitehall civil servants: that stress tended to concentrate at the top and the bottom of the pyramid. But when Marianna Virtanen continued the study to look at the long-term consequences of that stress, she found working 11 or more hours a day doubled the risk of a “major depressive episode”. A lifetime of long hours was also associated with cognitive loss in middle years: reasoning, problem solving, creativity were all poorer.

这与英国流行病学家迈克尔•马尔莫(Michael Marmot)教授对1万名白厅公务员进行的纵向研究的发现一致：压力似乎集中于金字塔的顶端和底层。但当玛丽安娜•弗塔嫩(Marianna Virtanen)继续研究这种压力的长期后果时，她发现每天工作11个小时或者更久，会使人出现“重度抑郁期”的风险加倍。一辈子长时间工作也与中年时期认知能力下降（推理能力、解决的问题能力和创造力都出现退化）存在相关性。

All of this damage is invisible. If it were not — if some of the wear and tear resulted in visible injury — perhaps companies would take more care. But it is very hard for most people to accept that thinking is a physical activity, performed by the brain — which, like every organ, has limits to its capacity. We can see machinery break down, we notice broken arms and legs. We do not see broken minds — until it is too late. A proliferation of supposed antidotes to overwork — mindfulness, resilience training — may promise some respite but few of these programmes are any kind of a cure. Designed to increase endurance, they perpetuate the problem. We know machines have limits; we like to imagine that we do not.

这些损害都是看不见的。如果并非如此，也就是说，如果一些损害会导致可见的伤害，也许企业会更加注意。但大多数人很难接受这一观点，即思维活动是由大脑完成的一种生理活动，而大脑，就像每一个器官一样，它的能力是有限度的。我们可以看到机械损坏，我们可以注意到断胳膊断腿。我们看不到破碎的心灵——直到已经为时太晚。正念、韧性训练等人们以为可以消除过劳的项目的流行，或许能带来一些暂时的缓解，但这些项目很少能称得上治本的对策。这些项目旨在提高人的忍耐力，反而会让问题持续得更久。我们知道机器有极限；但我们却喜欢想象我们自身没有极限。

Tough corporate cultures that measure performance by the hour inevitably lead to fatigue and tunnel vision, and adversely affect problem-solving. They are efficient in the sense that they reduce costs but dangerous in spheres where reputation and judgment count. If we want creativity, originality and mastery of complex problems, we must accept the physical limitations of the human brain. As long as we ignore more than 100 years of research into human productivity and manage people as though they were robots with faulty batteries, we waste talent and sacrifice our own integrity.

靠工作时间来衡量员工表现的严酷企业文化不可避免地会导致疲劳和视野狭窄，不利于解决问题。从减少成本的角度来看，这样的企业文化是有效的，但在声誉和判断很重要的领域，这样的企业文化很危险。如果我们想要创造性、原创性以及掌握复杂问题，我们必须接受人脑存在生理极限。如果我们无视100多年来对人类工作效率的研究，把人当做配备着有缺陷的电池的机器人一样去管理，我们就浪费了人的才能，牺牲了我们自身的健康。

The writer is an entrepreneur, consultant and author of ‘Wilful Blindness’

作者是企业家、咨询师，著有《视而不见》(Wilful Blindness)