Facebook消灭不了上班偷懒 How Zuckerberg can limit office skiving

With 1.5bn active members, Facebook is on the way to achieving its aim of connecting everyone in the world, all 7.3bn of us, from mewling babes to muddled centenarians. But the social networking giant faces obstacles. One is China, wooed by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg with a speech in Beijing last weekend, which he delivered in Mandarin in the hope of charming the country into lifting its ban on his .

拥有15亿活跃用户的Facebook正在朝实现这个目标目标迈进：把世界上73亿人中的每一个人，从啼哭的婴儿到糊涂的百岁老人，全都连接起来。但这家社交媒体巨头面临着一些障碍。一个是中国，Facebook首席执行官马克丠克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)正努力向中国示好，不久前他来到北京，用普通话发表讲话，希望借此取悦中国，让其解除对Facebook的禁令。

The other challenge to crack is the global workforce of 3bn people, many based in offices where employers have done a China and blocked the site. The tech firm’s response has been to launch Facebook at Work, a business-friendly twin to the personal service. It has received a boost with the news this week that Royal Bank of Scotland will adopt it for its 100,000 staff by the end of 2016.

另一个需要解决的挑战与全球30亿劳动者有关，其中许多人在办公室工作，他们的雇主效仿中国屏蔽了Facebook。这家科技公司的应对之道是推出了适用于企业、与个人版相对应的工作版Facebook——Facebook at Work。新闻报道称，苏格兰皇家银行(RBS)将在2016年底前为旗下10万名员工配备Facebook at Work，这个消息为Facebook带来提振。

The work version looks like the personal site; users can join groups, share files and swap messages. The difference is that no one outside their company can see any of it. The app has screenshots of idealised examples, like a young woman messaging her colleagues with the inspiring sentiment: “Can’t believe I’ve been at Acme for two years! I couldn’t ask for a better workplace.”

工作版看起来和个人版很像：用户可以加入小组、分享文件、交换消息。二者的区别在于，在工作版中，公司以外的人无法看到任何内容。这款应用提供了一些理想场景的截屏，比如一名年轻女性热情洋溢地给她的同事发消息：“不敢相信我已经在Acme工作了两年了！这真是一份再好不过的工作。”

It sounds Orwellian, a coercive scheme that China’s politburo would be happy to “like” were it on Facebook. But the truth is more nuanced. What we are actually witnessing is a pragmatic acceptance of skiving.

这听起来有点极权主义色彩，如果中国的中央政治局也用Facebook，他们一定很乐于给这样的高压制度点“赞”。但真相更加微妙。我们看到的实际上是抱着一种务实的态度接受上班摸鱼。

Every working day has moments when we are not technically working. One example is the famous water-cooler moment beloved of entertainment executives, when staff mill around filling flimsy paper cones while discussing the new Star Wars film. Smoking breaks are another. Cigarettes may take years off your life but they also steal about 20 minutes daily from your employer.

在工作的每一天，我们都有一些时间并没有真正在工作。一个例子是为娱乐业高管们所钟爱、著名的“饮水机时刻”：员工们一边讨论最新的《星球大战》(Star Wars)电影，一边走来走去用薄薄的纸杯接水。吸烟休息时间则是另一个例子。香烟可能会让你少活数年，但它们同样能让你每天上班偷懒大约20分钟。

The internet has transformed the many pauses that punctuate office work. With so much time spent at a computer, the screen has taken over as the place for truancy. In the old days, we might have gazed out the window or made a furtive phone call. Now we can send personal emails or check the weather forecast while pretending to work.

互联网改变了曾经许多上班偷懒的方式。人们在电脑上花如此多的时间，屏幕变成了我们翘班的地方。过去，我们可能会凝视着窗外，或者偷偷摸摸地打个电话。现在我们一边假装工作，一边发送个人邮件，或者查看天气预报。

Every working day has moments when we are not technically working. One example is the famous water-cooler moment The world wide web is capacious enough to be both an aid to productivity and the most powerful tool for skiving ever invented. Businesses can keep tabs on its misuse with monitoring programmes. But, like smoking or tea breaks, a small amount of personal time is usually tolerated — and many employees expect it. When a risqué link is sent with the message “not safe for work”, the warning implies there is some content that is safe for work, the sort of thing that should not lead to disciplinary action — clips of kittens being tickled, say, or toddlers singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

互联网无所不包，既能帮助人们提高工作效率，同时也是有史以来最适合工作摸鱼的发明。企业可以通过监控程序来对滥用互联网进行监视。但是，就像抽烟休息和茶歇一样，短时间的偷懒往往是可以通融的——而且很多员工也是这么认为的。人们发送含有下流内容的链接会附带一条讯息，“不适宜工作时间观看”，这样的警告暗示，有些内容是适宜工作时间观看的，也就是应该不会导致处罚的东西——比如胳肢小猫的视频、或者小宝宝唱美国国歌的视频。

Sharing banal YouTube videos is no different from idle chat, a lubricant in the social life of the workplace. A 2012 analysis of 600,000 internal emails between Enron staff — among the largest publicly available caches following the company’s bankruptcy — discovered that almost 15 per cent was devoted to gossip. The Georgia Tech researchers who conducted the survey judged the proportion to be typical.

在YouTube上分享一些无聊的视频和闲聊没什么区别，都是办公室社交生活的润滑剂。安然公司(Enron)倒闭后，其最大的公开存储数据包括60万封前安然员工的内部邮件，2012年有研究者对这些邮件进行了分析，发现其中近15%的邮件内容是八卦。进行这项研究的佐治亚理工学院研究所(Georgia Tech Research Institute)研究者认为这一比例很具有代表性。

Private life seeps into work life. Technology is criticised for colonising free time with an always-on-call culture, but the opposite also holds true. The internet has transformed our expectations of what we can get away with at work.

私生活渗入到了工作之中。人们批评科技用一种随时待命的状态控制了他们的空闲时间，但是反过来说也是正确的。互联网已经改变了我们心目中可以在上班摸鱼时做的事情。

If RBS’s 100,000 employees are not allowed to swap chatter and jokes on Facebook at Work — if they are expected only to ping each other messages like “OK, sent you the new revision!” — then they will spend as little time on it as possible. But their bosses surely know that. What we see here is not an attack on digital skiving but a test-case in setting its limits. Enlightened corporations of the 21st century, take note.

如果苏格兰皇家银行不允许其10万名员工在Facebook at Work上闲聊和互相发笑话，期望员工只发送诸如“好，发给你最新修改版”这样的信息——那么员工们会尽量少用这款软件。不过，他们的老板们肯定知道这一点。我们看到的不是要消灭上班摸鱼，而是一次对其设定限度的尝试。注意了，21世纪的开明公司们。