职场英语：自由的工作环境反而让人效率低？

　　如今，在现代职场中，自由为王。

　　Research has shown that personal autonomy at work increases job satisfaction, which leads to higher engagement, and correlates with lower employee turnover¹.

　　研究表明，个人在工作中的自主性可以增加工作满意度，带来更高的参与度，并且与降低人员流动率有关。

　　Given the choice, many employees prefer working remotely and having some control over their schedules.

　　在选择上，许多职员更喜欢远程工作，希望对自己的日程有一定的控制权。

　　In some professions, like programming, more are working from home than ever before; some are even beginning to demand it.

　　在一些职业领域，如编程，与过去相比，更多人在家里办公;甚至有一些人开始要求在家办公。

　　The idea has gained so much traction² that even Japan’s highly traditional workplaces are adopting it.

　　这种观念特别受欢迎，甚至在日本推崇传统的工作场所也在采用。

　　But all that autonomy might come at a cost. A new working paper shows that when workers deviate³ from an organization’s prescribed schedule of when they should complete their tasks, there is a drop in productivity.

　　然而，所有的自主权可能都是有代价的。一份关于工作的新论文指出，当职员偏离了一个组织规定的应何时完成工作的日程的时候，他们的工作效率就会下降。

　　The study from Harvard Business School shows autonomy might hurt productivity. This decline in productivity correlated with experience—the more experienced the workers were, the less their productivity was impacted to do tasks. However, the productivity decline still remained significant for even the most experienced workers.

　　哈佛商学院的研究表明，自主性也许会影响工作效率。而工作效率的下降与经验有关，越有经验的职员，他们的工作效率受到的影响就越小。然而，即使是最有经验的职员，工作效率依然会明显下降。

　　While the study did not determine exactly why this was happening, researchers suggest that one possible reason could be the time taken to make the decision of what to do next, in order to improve the speed of work, actually hampers⁴ productivity.

　　虽然这项研究并未完全确定为什么会发生这种情况，但研究人员指出，其中一个原因可能在于为了提高工作效率而决定下一步要做什么所需的时间，实际上却阻碍了工作效率。

　　While taking the decision-making out of daily work might improve productivity for employees performing routine tasks, the evidence suggests that creative people’s brains work differently and the results might look different for companies whose employees perform more creative tasks.

　　不过，对于做常规工作的职员来说，在日常工作中不进行决策可能会提高工作效率。有证据指出，创新性人才的头脑的工作方式是不同的，对于员工从事更多有创意性的工作的公司而言，实验结果看上去可能会有所不同。

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