理想的用人之道 The Good Jobs Strategy
At the Aspen Ideas Festival — an annual summer gabfest that presents all sorts of interesting ideas, from the improbable to the important — one of the big themes this year was jobs. How will America close the skills gap? Where will the good middle-class jobs of the future come from? I heard pleas for infrastructure spending as a job strategy, and creating jobs by unleashing our energy resources. There were speakers who believed that innovation would bring good jobs, and speakers who feared that some of those innovations — in robotics, for instance — would destroy good jobs.
阿斯彭思想節(Aspen Ideas Festival)是每年夏季舉行的論壇活動，與會者會探討各類有趣的觀點，有些不太可能實現，有些則非常重要。今年的活動有一個大主題，那就是就業。美國如何縮小技能差距？未來我們上哪裏找好的中產階級職位？我聽到有些人呼籲政府增加基礎設施投入和開發我們的能源資源，以創造工作崗位。有些發言者認爲創新可以帶來好工作，而有些發言人則擔心有些創新——比如機器人技術——會讓人們找不到好工作。And then there was Zeynep Ton.
還有澤伊內普·湯恩(Zeynep Ton)的發言。A 40-year-old adjunct associate professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., Ton brought one of the most radical, and yet one of the most sensible, ideas to Aspen this year. Her big idea is that companies that provide employees a decent living, which includes not just pay but also a sense of purpose and empowerment at work, can be every bit as profitable as companies that strive to keep their labor costs low by paying the minimum wage with no benefits. Maybe even more profitable. Getting there requires companies to adopt what Ton calls “human-centered operations strategies,” which she acknowledges is “neither quick nor easy.” But it’s worth it, she says, both for the companies and for the country. Surely, she’s right.
40歲的湯恩是麻省理工學院斯隆管理學院(Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.)客座副教授，她爲本屆阿斯彭思想節帶來了最爲激進但也最合乎情理的觀點之一。她的重要理念是，相比於通過付給員工最低標準工資且不提供任何福利、勉強維持最低人力支出的企業，那些讓員工過上體面生活的企業，盈利能力一點也不會低。而體面生活意味着不僅僅給工資，還要讓員工有使命感、有力量。要實現這一點，企業需要採用湯恩提出的“以人爲本的運營策略”，她認爲採用這種策略，見成效不會太快，而且也不會容易操作。但這種付出會很值得，她表示，不管是對於企業，還是這個國家來說，都是如此。她無疑是對的。
As Ton explained to me last week in Aspen — and as she has written in a book she published last year titled “The Good Jobs Strategy” — her thesis comes out of research she did early in her academic career on supply chain management in the retail industry, focused especially on inventory management. What she and her fellow researchers discovered is that while most companies were very good at getting products from, say, China to their stores, it was a different story once the merchandise arrived. Sometimes a product stayed in the back room instead of making it to a shelf where a customer could buy it. Or it was in the wrong place. Special in-store promotions weren’t being executed a surprisingly high percentage of the time. She saw this pattern in company after company.
就像湯恩上週在阿斯彭對我所說，她的論點來自她早前所做的有關零售業供應鏈管理的研究，尤其是在庫存管理方面。她在自己去年出版的著作《理想用人策略》(The Good Jobs Strategy)中也講到這一點。她和當時一起做研究的同事發現，儘管大多數公司都擅長進貨，比如從中國買入，但是一旦貨品運到店裏，情況就不一樣了。有時候一件貨品會在庫房裏一直存放，而不是擺到貨架上，讓顧客可以購買。或者是放錯地方。店內展開特別促銷活動的次數少得驚人。這樣的公司她見到太多太多。As she took a closer look, Ton says, she realized that the problem was that these companies viewed their employees “as a cost that they tried to minimize.” Workers were not just poorly paid, but poorly trained. They often didn’t know their schedule until the last moment. Morale was low and turnover was high. Customer service was largely nonexistent.
湯恩講道，在進一步瞭解之後，她意識到問題出在這些企業把員工看作“需要儘量減少的支出”。員工不僅薪資微薄，而且幾乎沒有什麼培訓機會。他們經常是在最後一刻才知道自己的排班情況。整體士氣低下，人員流動頻繁。Yet when she asked executives at these companies why they put up with this pattern, she was told that the only way they could guarantee low prices was to operate with employees who were paid as little as possible, because labor was such a big part of their overhead. The problems that resulted were an unavoidable by-product of a low-price business model.
但是，當她問起這些公司的管理人員，爲何要忍受這樣的運作模式，得到的答案是，他們能保證店內商品低價的唯一方式就是用盡量少的錢僱人，因爲勞動力支出是大頭。而由此產生的各種問題都是採用低價商業模式無法避免的副作用。Unconvinced that this was the only approach, Ton decided to search for retail companies — the same kind of companies that needed low prices to succeed — that did things differently. Sure enough, she found some.
湯恩不相信只有這一種選擇，她開始尋找採用了不同方式的零售企業，也就是說，同樣需要採取商品低價策略才能獲得成功的企業。結果，她當然找到了一些。The two companies she talks about most frequently in this regard are a Spanish grocery chain called Mercadona and QuikTrip, a Tulsa, Okla.-based chain of convenience store/gas stations that competes with the likes of the 7-Eleven chain.
這方面她談論最多的兩家企業，一個是西班牙日用品連鎖店品牌Mercadona，一個是總部在俄克拉荷馬州塔爾薩市的便利店/加油站連鎖品牌QuikTrip，它的競爭對手是像7-11這樣的便利連鎖店。What first struck her about Mercadona is that the annual turnover was an almost unheard-of 4 percent. Why do employees stay? “They get decent salaries, four weeks of training that costs the company $5,000, stable schedules … and the opportunity to thrive in front of their customers every day,” Ton said in a speech she forwarded to me. The grocery business is low margin, where every penny counts. If Mercadona couldn’t keep prices low with this strategy, it would have abandoned it long ago.
最先讓她注意到Mercadona的一點是，它每年的人員流動率只有4%，這樣的低比例幾乎前所未聞。爲什麼它的員工會如此穩定？“他們薪水不錯，有爲期四周的培訓機會，由公司支付每人5000美元的費用，有穩定的工作時間表……他們有機會每天在顧客面前一點點成長。”湯恩在她發送給我的一個演講視頻中這樣講道。食品雜貨生意是利潤率很低的行業，價格差一分錢都會有影響。如果Mercadona採用這一管理模式的同時不能保證商品低價，它早就放棄了。QuikTrip, an $11 billion company with 722 stores, is a prime example of what Ton means by “human-centered operations strategies.” Paying employees middle-class wages allows the company to get the most out of them. Employees are cross-trained so they can do different jobs. They can solve problems by themselves. They make merchandising decisions for their own stores. The ultimate result of the higher wages QuikTrip pays is that costs everywhere else in the operation go down. At QuikTrip, says Ton, products don’t remain in the back room, and in-store promotions always take place, as they’re supposed to.
在全國有722家店、年營收110億美金(約合680億人民幣)的QuikTrip，是湯恩所說的“以人爲本的運營策略”的最佳範例。他們給員工支付中產階級水準的薪資，換回來的是，員工爲企業付出了自己所能發揮的最大價值。該公司員工會進行交叉培訓，因此可以做多種不同的工作。他們可以自行解決問題。也會爲自己所在的店做營銷決策。QuikTrip爲員工支付更高薪資帶來的最終結果是，其他各方面的運營支出都大大降低。湯恩講到，在QuikTrip，商品不會待在庫房裏，店內促銷時時都有，就像便利店本來該有的樣子。Ton’s interest in the good jobs strategy is more than academic now; she has become a proselytizer, trying to spread the word that every company would be better served by this approach. “The assumed trade-off between low prices and good jobs is a fallacy,” she says. As we worry about where middle-class jobs are going to come from, Ton’s is a message that needs to be heard not just in Aspen but all across America.
如今，湯恩對理想用人策略的興趣遠遠超出學術範疇，她已經變成一名說客，盡力將這種觀念廣泛傳播，以使每個企業都能因此受益。“商品低價和提供好工作不可兼得，這是一種謬論，”她說道。就在我們擔心中產階級職位將來無處可尋的時候，湯恩的觀點不僅應該被阿斯彭思想節的聽衆聽到，更值得全美國人瞭解。
