I've spent the last couple of years traveling around the world giving talks to big corporations and little bitty start-ups and lots of leadership teams and women's groups, and what I've been talking to people about, I've been trying really hard to convince people that we can change the way we work.
过去几年我一直环游世界 为大公司、小初创公司、 很多领导团队和女性团体提供演讲, 我一直在和人们谈的是, 我非常努力的说服人们 我们可以改变我们工作的方式。
But every time I do a talk, somebody comes backstage or follows me offstage and says, "You know, I'm so inspired by what you say. It's so great, it makes so much sense. But we can't." "We can't because we're regulated." "We can't because our CFO says we can't do it." "We can't because we're in Europe." “We can’t because we’re a service industry.” "We can't because we're a nonprofit." And then last year came the pandemic. And the pandemic changed everything all over the world.
但是每次我谈论时, 总有人来到台下或跟我到后台 并且说,“你知道, 你的话让我很受启发。 这太好了,太有道理了。 但是我们不能这么做。” “我们不能因为我们受到监管。” “我们不能因为我们的首席财务官 说我们不能这么做。” “我们不能因为我们在欧洲。” “我们不能因为我们是服务业。” “我们不能 因为我们是非营利组织。” 然后去年疫情来了。 而且疫情改变了世界上所有的事情。
Service people started realizing that they had to suit up and wear masks and take temperatures and wash their hands. We had to start standing six feet apart in lines. We started working from home. We started working virtually. And we started learning all kinds of things because we had to. All that muscle around innovation and flexibility and creativity that we didn't think we had, we had all along. And we now have realized that we can.
服务人员开始意识到 他们必须穿好衣服并戴上口罩、 量体温、洗手。 我们不得不保持六英尺距离排队。 我们开始在家工作。 我们开始虚拟工作。 我们开始学习所有事情, 因为我们不得不这么做。 围绕创新、灵活性 和创造性的所有力量, 那些我们没想到我们已经拥有的, 我们一直都有。 而且我们现在意识到了我们可以。
So what have we learned? I mean, what did we learn right away? First of all, we learned we're not family. The family is the toddler walking around behind you in the Zoom call with the pet. The family is somebody needing their diaper changed. The family is making sure you're taking care of your mom. That's your family. This is your team. And we've also learned that that separation between family and work has become this balancing act. And that when we used to say, "Well, this is my work home and this is my family home, and those are two completely different things," for many of us, it's exactly the same thing. You're no longer at home and at work. For many of us, work is at home and the home is -- and it's confusing, and it's creating a whole different level of complexity and coordination so that we understand that it's easier actually to work when we can separate the work that we do as a team from the work that we do in our family.
所以我们学到了什么呢? 我的意思是,我们立即学到了什么? 首先,我们发现我们不是一家人。 家人是在Zoom 视频通话中和宠物一起 在你身后走来走去的小孩。 家人是需要你换尿布的人。 家人是你在照顾你的妈妈。 那才是你的家人。 这是你的团队。 而且我们还发现 分开家庭和工作 是个平衡的挑战。 我们过去说, “好吧,这是我的工作之家, 而这是我的家庭之家, 这是两个完全不同的东西,” 现在对于我们很多人来说, 这完全是一回事。 你不再是在家和在工作。 对于我们很多人, 在家工作,而且家是—— 这很令人迷惑, 这创造了一个完全 不同水平的复杂和协调, 以至于我们理解了工作其实更简单, 如果我们能分清楚 我们和团队一起做的工作 和我们在家里做的工作。
Furthermore, in order to be able to do all that, we have to recognize that we're all adults. And here's the deal about adults. Adults have responsibilities, adults have obligations. Adults have things that they have to commit to. And do you know that every single person that works for you, from the shop floor to the executive suite, is a grown-up? But we have been operating as if they aren't. We operate as if only the smart adults are the people who are at the C Suite. And as we move through the organization, everybody sort of gets a little dumbed down and the rules get a lot stricter and we have to have more control. And the truth is, everybody's a grown-up, we can see it now. Everybody has all of these things to figure out and coordinate. And so now we're expecting from people adult behavior. We're now focusing on the results that matter, not the work. And the way we track it now is we don't walk by and see who's working. We pay attention to what people are doing. And I think that that's always been the best metric.
更进一步说,为了能做成这一切, 我们必须意识到我们都是成年人。 以下成年人的共识。 成年人有责任,成年人有义务。 成年人有他们要投入去做的事情。 你知道每一个为你工作的人, 从车间到行政套房, 都是成年人吗? 但是我们一直就当他们 不是成年人那样在运行。 我们只把高管当成聪明的成年人, 当我们往下看组织, 每个人的工作都变得更简单一点, 规则变得更加严格 我们不得不有更多控制。 而真相是,每个人都是成年人, 我们现在可以看明白了。 每个人都要解决和协调这些事情。 所以我们现在期待 人们有成年人的表现。 我们现在在关注那些 重要的结果,而不是工作。 我们现在持续关注的方式 不再是走过去看看谁在工作。 我们把注意力放在人们正在做什么。 而我认为这一直是最好的衡量标准。
And you know what? For the first time in my life, the concept of best practices is out the window. And you know what? We don't care what Google's doing because we're not Google. We don't care what some other company is doing. Nobody's doing it best. We're all figuring it out as we go along and we're figuring it out for our organizations in our teams at this time. So in order for people to deliver the right results, in order for people's hard work to matter, it has to be in the context of what success looks like for your organization.
你知道吗? 这是我人生中第一次, 最佳实践的概念已经过时了。 你知道吗? 我们不在乎谷歌在做什么, 因为我们不是谷歌。 我们不在乎其他公司在做什么。 没有人做得最好。 我们一直在边走边想办法, 我们一直在团队中 为组织想办法。 所以为了让人们交付正确的结果, 为了让人们的努力工作有意义, 必须要向大家展示你的组织 “达到成功”是什么定义。
So if we start to think about context, it's really important that we think about how we teach that. If we can teach everybody in the company how to read a profit and loss statement, if we can teach them what the different teams do, and what they're setting out to accomplish, then people within their own small teams, and within themselves, can figure out what excellence looks like for them. And so then we can start operating relatively independently as a whole organization because we're all moving in the same direction, trying to do the same thing.
所以如果我们要定义这样的目标, 就非常需要考虑传达的方式。 如果我们能教公司里的每一个人 如何读损益表, 如果能教他们 不同的团队是做什么的, 他们要着手完成的是什么, 那么人们在他们自己的小团队里, 在他们中间, 就可以搞清楚“成功”是什么样的。 这样我们就可以开始在整个组织中 相对独立地开始运作了, 因为我们都正在向同一个方向行进, 试着做同样的事情。
And there's a really critically important part of making that work, and that's communication. And everything about communication has changed. We tend to think that communication is this waterfall from the top to the bottom. The executives would tell somebody and the next level would tell somebody and we'd go all the way down to the shop floor and everybody would understand what's going on. Well, it may not have worked that well then, but it certainly doesn't work that well now. So now we have to recognize it's a different heartbeat. What has it been before and what should it be now? How do we make sure that the messages are clear and consistent? Because that's how people operate. That's how those adults who get the freedom and the responsibility to produce great results operate best is when they understand what they need to know in order to make the best decisions. So that communication, that skill around being a great communicator is something that each of us needs to get better at.
要让这运作起来, 有一个必须的点, 那就是沟通。 关于沟通的一切都变了。 我们倾向于认为 沟通是自上而下的瀑布。 高管会告诉一些人, 然后下一级会告诉一些人, 我们就这样传达至车间, 每个人都会明白正在做什么。 那时候可能效果不佳, 但是这在现在绝对更行不通了。 所以现在我们必须认识到 现在需要一种不同的方式。 之前是什么样的? 现在应该是什么样的? 我们如何确保信息保持清晰一致? 因为这就是人们运作的方式。 那些获得自由和承担责任的成年人 产出巨大成果的最佳运作方式 就是他们可以理解 为了做出最佳决定需要知道的事情。 所以沟通, 成为优秀沟通者的技能 是我们每个人都 需要做得更好的事情。
One of the things we have to do is think about what the right discipline is for that. If you used to communicate to your team by walking by and asking how they're doing or if they had heard something, you're going to have to schedule that now, it's going to have to have discipline. We've got to check in with the people on the shop floor to make sure they're hearing what they need to hear because it's not going to automatically happen.
我们必须做的一件事 是思考什么是正确的规范。 如果你之前会和你的团队随意搭话, 询问他们过得如何, 或者他们有没有听说过什么, 你现在必须去把它安排上日程, 它必须要有规范。 我们得和车间里的人 确认他们听到了必须听到的内容, 因为这是不会自动发生的。
One of the ideas I have is just jot down at the end of every day a sentence of what worked and what didn't work. And you don't have to look at it for a month. But when you look back, over a month, you want to look for, "Wow, that was surprising. I didn’t really think that would be as effective as it is.” Or maybe it would be, like, "We keep trying to have this in-person meeting in Zoom, and it turns out that there's 14 people on the call and only two of them are talking. Maybe it's an email." So we have to rethink all of the ways, not just the work we're doing, but the ways we're doing it.
我有一个主意, 只需在每天结束时记下 一句话说明什么有效,什么无效。 你这一个月都不需要去看它。 但是当你超过一个月之后 去回顾时,你期待着 “哇,真惊喜。 我真没想到会这么有效。” 或者它可能像, “我们一直尝试进行 这种面对面的Zoom视频会议, 结果 会议中有 14 个人, 却只有 2 个人在说话。 或许还是电子邮件好一点。” 所以我们必须重新思考所有的方法, 不只是我们正在做的工作, 还有我们做事的方法。
So now I'm starting to hear a lot of nostalgia around the way it used to be. There are things we aren't doing now that don't matter. Maybe we don't need to go back for five levels of approval. Maybe we don't need to go back and do that annual performance review. Maybe we don't need to do a whole bunch of things that were part of the way we do business that just aren't making a difference. You know what? The way we used to do it not only is not the way of the future, but we're discovering so many wonderful things right now. Let's not lose it. We want to create a new organization, new workforce, that's excited about taking all of the things that we've learned using that muscle, going forward.
现在我开始听到很多 关于过去的怀旧情绪。 有些我们现在没有做的 事情并不重要。 或许我们不需要 回到过去进行五级审批。 或许我们不需要回到过去 做那种年度绩效考核。 或许我们不需要做 那些没什么用,但又是 工作中的一部分的事情。 你知道吗? 我们过去做事的方法 不仅不会是未来的方法, 而且我们还正在探索 这么多丰富多彩的事情。 让我们不要失去它。 我们想要创造新组织、新劳动力, 对我们学到的所有东西感到兴奋, 使用这股力量前行。
One of the most important things that we can do is realize the things that we aren't doing now. The stuff that we've stopped doing and not go back and do it again. What if we don't go back? What if we go forward and rethink the way we work?
我们能做的最重要的一件事是 意识到我们现在没有做的事情。 我们已经停止做的事情, 不要回去再做。 如果我们不再回到过去呢? 如果我们向前走, 并重新思考我们工作的方式呢?
Thank you.
谢谢。