什麼纔是一份“好工作”?大綱

MY FIRST, CHARMED week as a student at Harvard Business School, late in the summer of 2001, felt like a halcyon time for capitalism. AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and Napster were benevolently connecting the world. Enron and WorldCom were bringing innovation to hidebound industries. President George W. Bush — an H.B.S. graduate himself — had promised to deliver progress and prosperity with businesslike efficiency.

2001年夏末，我作爲哈佛商學院學生度過的第一週十分愉快，感覺像是資本主義的一段昔日美好時光。美國在線時代華納(AOL Time Warner)、雅虎(Yahoo)和納普斯特(Napster)好心地連接着世界。安然(Enron)和世界通信公司(WorldCom)爲墨守成規的行業帶來了創新。喬治·W·布什總統——他本人也是哈佛商學院的畢業生——曾承諾要以務實的效率實現進步和繁榮。

The next few years would prove how little we (and Washington and much of corporate America) really understood about the economy and the world. But at the time, for the 895 first-years preparing ourselves for business moguldom, what really excited us was our good luck. A Harvard M.B.A. seemed like a winning lottery ticket, a gilded highway to world-changing influence, fantastic wealth and — if those self-satisfied portraits that lined the hallways were any indication — a lifetime of deeply meaningful work.

接下來的幾年將證明，我們（以及華盛頓和大部分美國企業）對經濟和世界的真正瞭解是多麼地少。但在當時，對895名正在準備讓自己成爲商業大亨的一年級新生來說，真正讓我們興奮的是我們的好運。哈佛的工商管理碩士學位就像是一張中獎的彩票，一條通往改變世界影響力的鍍金高速公路，驚人的財富，以及——如果走廊兩旁那些自鳴得意的肖像能說明什麼的話——一份終身從事的意義深遠的工作。

So it came as a bit of a shock, when I attended my 15th reunion last summer, to learn how many of my former classmates weren’t overjoyed by their professional lives — in fact, they were miserable. I heard about one fellow alum who had run a large hedge fund until being sued by investors (who also happened to be the fund manager’s relatives). Another person had risen to a senior role inside one of the nation’s most prestigious companies before being savagely pushed out by corporate politics. Another had learned in the maternity ward that her firm was being stolen by a conniving partner.

因此，當我去年夏天參加第15次同學會時，我感到有些震驚。因爲我發現，以前的同學中有許多人對自己的職業生活並沒有欣喜若狂——事實上，他們很痛苦。我聽說，一位校友曾經營一支大型對衝基金，直到他被投資人起訴（而那些人正好是他的親戚）。另一個人曾在美國最負盛名的公司之一擔任高級職務，後來則被公司政治無情地擠走了。還有一個在產房裏得知，她的公司被一個陰險的合夥人偷走了。

Those were extreme examples, of course. Most of us were living relatively normal, basically content lives. But even among my more sanguine classmates, there was a lingering sense of professional disappointment. They talked about missed promotions, disaffected children and billable hours in divorce court. They complained about jobs that were unfulfilling, tedious or just plain bad. One classmate described having to invest $5 million a day — which didn’t sound terrible, until he explained that if he put only $4 million to work on Monday, he had to scramble to place $6 million on Tuesday, and his co-workers were constantly undermining one another in search of the next promotion. It was insanely stressful work, done among people he didn’t particularly like. He earned about $1.2 million a year and hated going to the office.

當然，這些都是極端的例子。我們中的大多數都過着相對正常、基本滿足的生活。但即使在我那些比較樂觀的同學中間，職業上的失望情緒也揮之不去。他們談論着錯失的晉升機會、疏遠的孩子以及離婚法庭的可計費時數。他們抱怨工作沒有成就感、單調乏味，或者乾脆就是糟糕。一位同學描述，他每天必須投資500萬美元——這聽起來並不可怕，直到他解釋說，如果他週一只投了400萬，那麼他將不得不在週二努力投入600萬。而爲了謀求下一次晉升機會，他的同事們總是在互相詆譭。那是一項壓力巨大的工作，並且要在他不特別喜歡的人中間完成。他一年能掙大約120萬美元，他討厭上班。

“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.” He recognized the incredible privilege of his pay and status, but his anguish seemed genuine. “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says,” he told me. There’s no magic salary at which a bad job becomes good. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said.

“我覺得自己在糟蹋生命，”他告訴我。“我死後，會有人在意我多賺了一個百分點的回報嗎？我的工作感覺完全沒有意義。”他承認自己的收入和地位帶來了不可思議的特權，但痛苦似乎也是真實的。“如果你每天12個小時做一份你討厭的工作，在某個時候，你的工資根本無法安慰到你，”他說。沒有什麼神奇的薪水能讓一份糟糕的工作變好。他曾經收到過一家初創公司的工作邀請，本來很想去，但薪水只有原來的一半，他覺得自己被一種生活方式拴住了，根本無法接受減薪。“當我告訴妻子這件事的時候，她大笑起來，”他說。

After our reunion, I wondered if my Harvard class — or even just my own friends there — were an anomaly. So I began looking for data about the nation’s professional psyche. What I found was that my classmates were hardly unique in their dissatisfaction; even in a boom economy, a surprising portion of Americans are professionally miserable right now. In the mid-1980s, roughly 61 percent of workers told pollsters they were satisfied with their jobs. Since then, that number has declined substantially, hovering around half; the low point was in 2010, when only 43 percent of workers were satisfied, according to data collected by the Conference Board, a nonprofit research organization. The rest said they were unhappy, or at best neutral, about how they spent the bulk of their days. Even among professionals given to lofty self-images, like those in medicine and law, other studies have noted a rise in discontent. Why? Based on my own conversations with classmates and the research I began reviewing, the answer comes down to oppressive hours, political infighting, increased competition sparked by globalization, an “always-on culture” bred by the internet — but also something that’s hard for these professionals to put their finger on, an underlying sense that their work isn’t worth the grueling effort they’re putting into it.

在我們重聚之後，我想知道我在哈佛的同班同學——哪怕只是我在班上的朋友——的情況是否屬於異常。於是我開始尋找這個國家職業心理的有關數據。結果發現，我同學的不滿並非特例；即使在經濟繁榮的時期，也有比例高得讓人吃驚的一部分美國人存在職業痛苦。在20世紀80年代中期，大約61%的員工對自己的工作感到滿意。從那以後，這個數字大幅下降，在50%左右徘徊；最低是在2010年，只有43%的員工感到滿意，以上數據來自世界大型企業聯合會(Conference Board)。其餘的人則說，他們大多數時候都對工作不開心，或者最多也就是不確定。甚至是在賦予崇高自我形象的專業人士當中，比如醫學和法律從業者，其他的一些研究也注意到了他們身上不滿情緒的上升。爲什麼會這樣呢？根據我跟同學的對話，以及開始查閱的研究，答案可以歸結爲難以忍受的工作時數、政治內耗、全球化帶來的競爭加劇、互聯網孕育出的“永遠在線文化”——但還有這些職場人士也說不清的原因，那是一種隱隱的感覺——他們的工作不值得他們投入那麼多辛苦。

This wave of dissatisfaction is especially perverse because corporations now have access to decades of scientific research about how to make jobs better. “We have so much evidence about what people need,” says Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (and a contributing opinion writer at The Times). Basic financial security, of course, is critical — as is a sense that your job won’t disappear unexpectedly. What’s interesting, however, is that once you can provide financially for yourself and your family, according to studies, additional salary and benefits don’t reliably contribute to worker satisfaction. Much more important are things like whether a job provides a sense of autonomy — the ability to control your time and the authority to act on your unique expertise. People want to work alongside others whom they respect (and, optimally, enjoy spending time with) and who seem to respect them in return.

這種不滿情緒之所以尤其反常，是因爲企業現在可以接觸到數十年來關於如何改善工作的科學研究。賓夕法尼亞大學(University of Pennsylvania)的管理學和心理學教授、同時也是《紐約時報》觀點文章撰稿人的亞當·格蘭特(Adam Grant)表示，“關於人們的需求，我們有大量證據。”當然，基本的財務安全是至關重要的，同樣重要的是工作飯碗的安全感。然而，有趣的是，根據多項研究，一旦你能爲自己和家人提供經濟上的支持，額外的工資和福利並不一定會提高員工的滿意度。更重要的事情是，諸如工作是否能提供自主權——能夠控制時間的能力，以及根據自己的獨特專長行事的權力。人們希望與他們尊重的人一起工作（最好還能一起消磨時間），以及對方似乎也尊重他們。

And finally, workers want to feel that their labors are meaningful. “You don’t have to be curing cancer,” says Barry Schwartz, a visiting professor of management at the University of California, Berkeley. We want to feel that we’re making the world better, even if it’s as small a matter as helping a shopper find the right product at the grocery store. “You can be a salesperson, or a toll collector, but if you see your goal as solving people’s problems, then each day presents 100 opportunities to improve someone’s life, and your satisfaction increases dramatically,” Schwartz says.

最後，員工想要感到他們付出的勞動是有意義的。“你不需要是在治癒癌症，”加州大學伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)管理學訪問教授巴里·施瓦茨(Barry Schwartz)說。我們想要感到我們在讓世界變得更好，即便只是像幫購物者在雜貨店找到對的產品這樣的小事情。“你可以是一名銷售，或收費員，但如果你把你的目標看成是幫人解決問題，那麼每天都會有100個機會幫助他人改善生活，而且你的滿足感會大幅提升，”施瓦茨說。

One of the more significant examples of how meaningfulness influences job satisfaction comes from a study published in 2001. Two researchers — Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale and Jane Dutton, now a distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Michigan — wanted to figure out why particular janitors at a large hospital were so much more enthusiastic than others. So they began conducting interviews and found that, by design and habit, some members of the janitorial staff saw their jobs not as just tidying up but as a form of healing. One woman, for instance, mopped rooms inside a brain-injury unit where many residents were comatose. The woman’s duties were basic: change bedpans, pick up trash. But she also sometimes took the initiative to swap around the pictures on the walls, because she believed a subtle stimulation change in the unconscious patients’ environment might speed their recovery. She talked to other convalescents about their lives. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” she told the researchers. “That is not really part of my job description, but I like putting on a show for them.” She would dance around, tell jokes to families sitting vigil at bedsides, try to cheer up or distract everyone from the pain and uncertainty that otherwise surrounded them. In a 2003 study led by the researchers, another custodian described cleaning the same room two times in order to ease the mind of a stressed-out father.

表明意義如何影響工作滿意度的一個更顯著的例子，來自2001年發表的一項研究。兩名研究人員——耶魯大學的艾米·沃茲涅夫斯基(Amy Wrzesniewski)和如今爲密歇根大學(University of Michigan)傑出榮休教授的珍·達頓(Jane Dutton)——想要弄明白爲何一家大醫院的某些保潔員比其他人更有幹勁。於是她們開始進行訪談。她們發現，出於設計和習慣，保潔職工中的一些成員將他們的工作視爲不僅是清潔，也是一種治療的形式。例如，一位女保潔員要拖腦損傷病房的地板，那裏很多住院病人都昏迷不醒。這位女性的職責很簡單：換便盆、撿垃圾。但有時候她也會主動擦拭牆上的畫，因爲她相信，昏迷病人環境中一個微妙的刺激改變也可能幫他們加速恢復。她跟其他康復患者聊他們的生活。“我很喜歡讓病人開心，”她告訴研究人員。“這其實並不屬於我的崗位職責，但我喜歡爲他們表演一番。”她會來回舞動，給在牀邊守夜的家人講講笑話，儘量讓每個人振作起來，或讓他們暫時忘掉平日籠罩在身上的疼痛與不確定感。在兩位研究員所領導的一項2003年的研究中，另一名護工談及把同一房間清潔兩次，以便讓一位壓力過重的父親能夠放鬆心神。

To some, the moral might seem obvious: If you see your job as healing the sick, rather than just swabbing up messes, you’re likely to have a deeper sense of purpose whenever you grab the mop. But what’s remarkable is how few workplaces seem to have internalized this simple lesson. “There are so many jobs where people feel like what they do is relatively meaningless,” Wrzesniewski says. “Even for well-paid positions, or jobs where you assume workers feel a sense of meaning, people feel like what they’re doing doesn’t matter.” That’s certainly true for my miserable classmate earning $1.2 million a year. Even though, in theory, the investments he makes each day help fund pensions — and thus the lives of retirees — it’s pretty hard to see that altruism from his window office in a Manhattan skyscraper. “It’s just numbers on a screen to me,” he told me. “I’ve never met a retiree who enjoyed a vacation because of what I do. It’s so theoretical it hardly seems real.”

對一些人而言，其中的寓意似乎一目瞭然：如果你將你的工作視爲治癒病患，而不僅是清掃雜物，那麼任何時候你拿起拖把，都可能會有一種更深的目標感。但值得注意的是，將這一簡單經驗加以內化的工作場所似乎少之又少。“有太多的工作是那種人們感到他們所做的是相對無意義的，”沃茲涅夫斯基說。“即使是待遇優厚的職位，或者你以爲員工會有一種意義感的工作，其實人們感到他們在做的根本不重要。”對於我那些一年掙120萬美元卻痛苦不堪的同學來說，無疑真是如此。儘管理論上，他每天所做的投資能幫助籌集養老資金——因而也能幫到退休者的生活——但這種利他性很難從他在曼哈頓摩天大樓的玻璃幕牆辦公室看到。“那對我來說只是屏幕上的數字，“他告訴我說。“我從沒見過一位退休者能因我所做的而享受假期。這太理論化了，看上去幾乎不是真的。”

THERE IS A raging debate — on newspaper pages, inside Silicon Valley, among presidential hopefuls — as to what constitutes a “good job.” I’m an investigative business reporter, and so I have a strange perspective on this question. When I speak to employees at a company, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. My stock-in-trade are sources who feel their employers are acting unethically or ignoring sound advice. The workers who speak to me are willing to describe both the good and the bad in the places where they work, in the hope that we will all benefit from their insights.

如今在報紙上，在硅谷中，在那些有望參選總統的人裏，展開了一場關於什麼纔是一份“好工作”的激烈辯論。我是一名商業調查記者，因此我對這個問題有着奇怪的視角。當我和公司僱員交談時，通常都是因爲哪裏出了差錯。幹我這一行，依賴的是那些覺得僱主行爲不道德或忽視合理建議的線人。和我交談的員工願意講述他們工作的地方的好與壞，以期我們都能從他們的深刻見解中獲益。

What’s interesting to me, though, is that these workers usually don’t come across as unhappy. When they agree to talk to a journalist — to share confidential documents or help readers understand how things went awry — it’s not because they hate their employers or are overwhelmingly disgruntled. They often seem to love their jobs and admire the companies they work for. They admire them enough, in fact, to want to help them improve. They are engaged and content. They believe what they are doing matters — both in coming to work every day and in blowing the whistle on problems they see.

而令我感興趣的則是這些員工通常看起來並非不開心。當他們同意和記者交談——分享機密文件或幫助讀者理解事情如何出了差錯——原因並非他們討厭僱主或極其不滿。他們通常似乎是熱愛他們的工作，也欣賞他們所效力的公司。事實上，他們欣賞到了足以讓他們想要幫其改進的程度。他們參與其中也樂在其中。他們相信他們所做的是重要的——無論是天天來上班，還是揭發他們所看到的問題。

Do these people have “good jobs”? Are they luckier or less fortunate than my $1.2 million friend, who couldn’t care less about his firm? Are Google employees who work 60 hours a week but who can eat many of their meals (or freeze their eggs) on the company’s dime more satisfied than a start-up founder in Des Moines who cleans the office herself but sees her dream become reality?

這些人做的是“好工作”嗎？和我那位年薪120萬美元卻對公司漠不關心的朋友相比，他們是更幸運還是更不幸？谷歌那些每週工作60個小時但相當一部分餐食（或冷凍卵子）的支出由公司承擔的員工，會比一個需要自己清掃辦公室的德梅因初創公司創始人更滿足嗎？

As the airwaves heat up in anticipation of the 2020 election, Americans are likely to hear a lot of competing views about what a “good job” entails. Some will celebrate billionaires as examples of this nation’s greatness, while others will pillory them as evidence of an economy gone astray. Through all of that, it’s worth keeping in mind that the concept of a “good job” is inherently complicated, because ultimately it’s a conversation about what we value, whether individually or collectively. Even for Americans who live frighteningly close to the bone, like the janitors studied by Wrzesniewski and Dutton, a job is usually more than just a means to a paycheck. It’s a source of purpose and meaning, a place in the world.

隨着媒體爲2020年大選預熱，關於什麼是“好工作”，美國人可能會聽到許多相互矛盾的觀點。有些人會把億萬富翁當作美國偉大榮光的榜樣來讚美，也有人會批評他們是美國經濟誤入歧途的證據。在所有這一切當中，要記住，“好工作”的概念本質上是複雜的，因爲歸根結底，這場對話關乎我們最重視什麼，無論是從個人還是從集體角度。即使是對於沃茲涅夫斯基和達頓研究中的護工那樣一貧如洗的美國人，工作也往往不僅僅是一種掙錢的手段。它是目的與意義的源泉，是一個人在世界上的立足之處。

There’s a possibility, when it comes to understanding good jobs, that we have it all wrong. When I was speaking to my H.B.S. classmates, one of them reminded me about some people at our reunion who seemed wholly unmiserable — who seemed, somewhat to their own surprise, to have wound up with jobs that were both financially and emotionally rewarding. I knew of one person who had become a prominent venture capitalist; another friend had started a retail empire that expanded to five states; yet another was selling goods all over the world. There were some who had become investors running their own funds.

在對“好工作”的理解上，我們有可能完全是錯的。和哈佛商學院的同學們交流的時候，一個同學讓我想起我同學會裏的一些人，他們好像一點也不痛苦——讓他們自己也有點驚訝的是，他們似乎終於找到了一份在經濟和情感上都有回報的工作。我認識一個人，他成爲著名的風險投資家；還有一個朋友建立了一個零售帝國，擴張到五個州；還有一個朋友在世界各地銷售商品。有些人已經成爲管理着自己的基金的投資者。

And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.

他們當中許多人都有一個共同點：當初他們往往是班裏的失敗者，畢業後沒能得到自己想要的工作。他們完全被麥肯錫公司、谷歌、高盛和蘋果，還有那些大風投公司和著名的投資公司無視了。這迫使他們努力去找工作，所以在職業生涯的早期，他們不得不努力權衡生活中必不可少的需要。這些大器晚成的人們似乎學到了巴里·施瓦茨等人所宣揚的職場意義。並不是因爲他們的工作場所格外能給人帶來啓發，或者哈佛商學院教會了他們什麼特別的東西（對此我有發言權）。相反，他們從挫折當中吸取了教訓。最終他們往往會比其他人更富有、更強大、更滿足。

That’s not to wish genuine hardship on any American worker, given that a setback for a poor or working-class person can lead to bankruptcy, hunger or worse. But for those who do find themselves miserable at work, it’s an important reminder that the smoothest life paths sometimes fail to teach us about what really brings us satisfaction day to day. A core goal of capitalism is evaluating and putting a price on risk. In our professional lives, we hedge against misfortune by taking out insurance policies in the form of fancy degrees, saving against rainy days by pursuing careers that promise stability. Nowadays, however, stability is increasingly scarce, and risk is harder to measure. Many of our insurance policies have turned out to be worth as much as Enron.

這不是在說我希望任何美國工人陷入真正的困境，因爲窮人或工人階級一旦遭遇挫折，很可能會導致破產、飢餓或更糟的事情。但對於那些感覺在工作中很痛苦的人來說，這是一個重要的提示：一帆風順的人生道路有時並不能教會我們，什麼纔是每天都能帶來真正滿足感的東西。資本主義的一個核心目標是對風險進行評估和定價。在職業生涯中，我們以高學歷作爲投保，從而對衝遭遇不幸的風險；我們追求穩定的職業，以此未雨綢繆。然而，到了今天，穩定已經越來越稀缺，風險變得更難衡量。我們的許多保單最終被證明並不比安然公司更值錢。

“I’m jealous of everyone who had the balls to do something that made them happy,” my $1.2 million friend told me. “It seemed like too big a risk for me to take when we were at school.” But as one of the also-rans myself — I applied to McKinsey, to private-equity firms and to a real estate conglomerate and was rejected by them all — I didn’t need any courage in making the decision to go into the modest-paying (by H.B.S. standards) field of journalism. Some of my classmates thought I was making a huge mistake by ignoring all the doors H.B.S. had opened for me in high finance and Silicon Valley. What they didn’t know was that those doors, in fact, had stayed shut — and that as a result, I was saved from the temptation of easy riches. I’ve been thankful ever since, grateful that my bad luck made it easier to choose a profession that I’ve loved. Finding meaning, whether as a banker or a janitor, is difficult work. Usually life, rather than a business-school classroom, is the place to learn howto do it.

“我很嫉妒那些有膽量去做讓自己開心的事的人，”我那個年薪120萬的朋友告訴我。“上學時，這樣的風險對我來說似乎太大了。”但是作爲失敗者中的一員——我曾經申請過麥肯錫、幾家私募公司和一家房地產集團，但都遭到了拒絕——決定進入薪酬最低的新聞領域（以哈佛商學院的標準而言）不需要我付出任何勇氣。一些同學覺得我忽視了哈佛商學院爲我在高級金融業和硅谷打開的大門，這是一個巨大的錯誤。他們不知道，那些門其實一直都是關着的——結果，我避免了受到輕鬆發財致富的誘惑。從那以後，我一直心存感激，感激這樣的壞運氣讓我更輕鬆地選擇了自己喜歡的職業。無論是銀行家還是清潔工，尋找人生意義都是一項艱難的工作。這通常要在生活中去學習，而不是在商學院的課堂裏。