【英语生活】卧底老板的发现

Employee attitude surveys, brown bag lunches, focus groups, informal chats: managers try quite hard to find out what their staff are thinking. But the results are mixed at best. What are your staff thinking? Admit it – you don't really know.

Is there any way of finding out? Electronic surveillance would be a bad idea. Cloaks of invisibility work for Harry Potter, but are not available to the rest of us. One chief executive has done the next best thing. He went undercover in his own business for two weeks, disguised as an office worker, completing shifts on 10 different sites. He has heard for himself what his people really think. It has been a revelatory experience.

Stephen Martin is the 43-year-old CEO of the Clugston Group, a medium-sized civil engineering and logistics company based in the north of England. But for two weeks earlier this year, as far as his colleagues were concerned he was “Martin Walker”, an ordinary co-worker trying to earn a living like everybody else.

Ordinary, that is, except for the film crew that was following him around. The cover story was that this documentary team wanted to record how a clerical worker would cope with the demands of a physical labouring job. In truth they were making a programme, called Undercover Boss, which will air on British television (Channel 4) in two weeks' time and then in a US version (CBS) this year.

How did Mr Martin avoid being found out? He is still a relatively new CEO, having started in December 2006. He grew a beard and turned up to work in protective clothing rather than a suit. His down-to-earth, approachable style does not mark him out immediately as “boss class”.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear unfiltered what my employees were really thinking,” Mr Martin told me when he came in to the Financial Times office – clean-shaven and in a suit and tie – last week. “They said things to me that they would never have told their managers.”

What lessons has he learnt? “Our key messages were just not getting through to people,” Mr Martin says. “People working a shift on a large site do not have time to read newsletters or log on to websites. You have to communicate with people on their terms, and it is different for every location. One size does not fit all.”

For example, Mr Martin found that an apparently sensible idea – encouraging his workers to take a tea-break where they were working rather than coming back to a canteen – was taken to mean that the break had been cut.

What is more, having worked these physically demanding shifts, which involved pouring concrete, laying kerbs and clearing drains, the boss now has a better informed view of the job. His conclusion: “We were asking the impossible of some of them.”

This TV-inspired experiment has highlighted a classic management problem. Leaders may know exactly what they want to see happening. They send out messages down the management line. Employees ought to understand. But between the top table and the shop-floor something goes wrong. Leadership teams can be scarily ignorant of how badly their wishes have been distorted, and how much unhappiness there is among those on the receiving end.

And right now there is a bigger, more urgent point. In a recession it is even harder to have an effective, open dialogue with an anxious workforce. Mr Martin shared what he had learnt with his team of managers after filming was over. It provoked a (frequently repeated) response: “They've never told us that!” But “Martin Walker” had seemed like someone it was safe to talk to, a regular guy, working night-shifts and staying at a £27-a-night bed and breakfast hotel called the Cocked Hat. “Even we wouldn't stay there,” his co-workers had told him.

Mr Martin feels he needs to “over-communicate” to reassure staff who have seen big redundancies in recent months. “If you don't pass on enough information, even if it is bad news, they will fill the gap with something else, probably worse than the truth.”

That view is supported by Robert Sutton, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University in California, and author of the cover story in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review: “How to be a good boss in a bad economy”.

Prof Sutton says there are four things in particular that managers need to provide if they want to avoid this false anxiety syndrome: predictability (over-communicate); understanding (keep it “Sesame Street simple”, advises Procter & Gamble's AG Lafley); control (break down big challenges into manageable ones); and compassion (show that you care).

Having had a chance to eavesdrop on his employees' hitherto private conversations, Clugston's Mr Martin has been forced to rethink much of what he thought he knew about management.

Convincing employees that the company has their best interests at heart is hard work. Key messages to staff should never go undercover, even if one boss had to don a disguise to find this out.

员工态度调查、自带午餐讨论会、焦点小组、非正式谈话……经理们费尽心思想了解员工的想法，但最多只能得到模棱两可的结果。你的员工在想些什么？承认吧——你并不真正了解！

有没有办法一探究竟？安装电子监视器是个坏主意，哈里•波特(Harry Potter)的隐形衣挺好用, 但我们这些人又没有。一位首席执行官采取的做法仅次于此。他在自己公司卧底两周，伪装成一名办公室职员，在10个不同地点轮班工作。他亲耳听到了员工们的真实想法。这是一次具有启发性的体验。

史蒂芬•马丁(Stephen Martin)现年43岁，是英格兰北部一家中等规模的市政工程与物流公司Clugston Group的首席执行官。但在今年早些时候，有两周时间，对他的同事们而言，他叫做“马丁•沃克”(Martin Walker)，是一名普遍同事，与大家一样努力谋生。

除了有个摄制组跟在他身后转之外，他就是普通员工。表面说法是，这个纪录片小组想要拍摄一名文员如何应付体力工作。事实上，他们在制作一个节目，叫做“卧底老板”(Undercover Boss)，两周后将在英国电视台（第四频道）播放，年内美国版也将由哥伦比亚广播公司(CBS)播出。

马丁是如何做到没有被看出真面目呢？他担任首席执行官的时间相对较短，2006年12月才上任。他蓄了胡须，在工作中只穿防护服，不穿西装。他务实，有亲和力，不会让人一下子归入“老板阶层”。

“这是一辈子一次的机会，能够听到我的员工们的真实想法，没有过滤，”上周马丁来英国《金融时报》社时对我说道。他胡子刮得干干净净，穿着西服，打着领带。“他们对我说的事情，他们永远不会告诉他们的经理。”

马丁从中得到什么教训？他表示：“我们的重要信息完全没有传递给人们。在一个大工地上轮班工作的人，是没有时间看简讯或登录网站的。你必须根据他们的情况与他们沟通，而每个地方情况都各不相同。一种情况不适用于所有地方。”

例如，马丁发现，一种看上去合理的做法，即鼓励工人们就地吃茶点休息，无需回到餐厅，却被理解为茶歇被取消了。

此外，从事这些繁重的体力工作，包括灌注混凝土、铺设马路崖子和清理排水沟等，让这位老板对员工的工作有了更清晰的认识。他总结道：“过去，我们是在要求他们中的一些人完成不可能完成的工作。”

这段缘起电视节目的体验，突显了一个典型的管理问题。领导者或许确切知道自己想要的结果，于是自上而下地传递信息，员工应该能够理解。但在从最高层向基层的传递过程中，有些事情变了味。领导团队可能完全不了解，他们的意图遭到了多么严重的扭曲，而处于接收端的员工又会产生多少不满。

而眼下还有个更大、更迫切的问题。在经济衰退中，要与焦虑不安的员工们进行公开有效的对话变得更加困难。拍摄结束后，马丁与管理团队分享了他的心得。有很多次，经理们往往会做出这样的反应：“他们从未告诉我们这些！”但“马丁•沃克”看上去就像个能让人放心与之交谈的对象，一个普通员工，上夜班，住在一家叫做Cocked Hat的旅馆，一个床位加早餐每天27英镑。“就连我们也不会住在那里，”一起共事的工人们这么对他说。

马丁觉得，近几个月员工们看到了太多大幅裁员的情景，他有必要通过“密集沟通”进行安抚。“如果你没有传达出足够的信息，哪怕是坏消息，他们就会产生别的想法来填补空白，这些想法甚至可能比真相还糟糕。”

美国加州斯坦福大学(Stanford University)管理学及工程学教授罗伯特•萨顿(Robert Sutton)赞同这种观点。他为6月份的《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)撰写了封面故事，题目是：《在恶劣经济环境下如何当个好老板》。

萨顿表示，若要避免出现这种虚假的焦虑综合征，经理们尤其需要提供四样东西：可预测性（进行密集沟通）、可理解性（就像“芝麻街”一样简单易懂，宝洁的雷富礼(AG Lafley)建议）、控制力（将重大挑战分解成可处理的小问题）以及同情心（表现出你是在意的）。

有机会偷听到员工们迄今为止的私下谈话之后，Clugston的马丁被迫反思他原先对管理的理解。

让员工相信公司关心他们的利益是一项艰难的工作。向员工传递的重要信息绝对不能成为秘密，即使得有位老板披上伪装去发现这一点。

译者/岱嵩