“蘋果公園”真能提高工作效率嗎？

The iPhone X was the focus of Apple’s launch event on Tuesday, but the venue was equally alluring. Tim Cook, chief executive, unveiled the device in the Steve Jobs theatre, a sleek auditorium at Apple Park, its new head office in Cupertino.

上周二蘋果(Apple)發(fā)布會的焦點是iPhone X，但舉辦發(fā)布會的場所同樣吸引人。首席執(zhí)行官蒂姆•庫克(Tim Cook)在史蒂夫•喬布斯劇院(Steve Jobs Theater)發(fā)布了這款設備，這座新潮的禮堂位于該公司在庫比蒂諾的新總部，蘋果公園(Apple Park)。

Apple Park, a $5bn campus for 12,000 staff with a vast circular building surrounding a park planted with oaks and fruit trees, is an emblem of the US technology industry’s latest craze. An industry of start-ups founded in garages wants to redesign employee activity, prodding engineers to get up from their desks and exchange ideas.

蘋果公園工作園區(qū)造價50億美元，可容納1.2萬名員工，擁有一座巨大的環(huán)形建筑，中間是一座公園，里面種滿了橡樹和各種果樹，它標志著美國科技行業(yè)的最新潮流。充斥著從車庫里走出來的初創(chuàng)企業(yè)的該行業(yè)，想要重新設計員工活動，鼓勵工程師們從辦公桌前站起來，與同事交流想法。

Apple Park is “a building which is pushing social behaviour in the way people work to new limits”, says Stefan Behling of Foster + Partners, its architects, in an official video. Apple is not alone: Amazon plans a $5bn second head office and Nvidia, a chipmaker, has built a two-storey office with spaces at its heart to “spark collisions”.

蘋果公園是由福斯特建筑事務所(Foster + Partners)設計的，該事務所的斯蒂芬•貝林(Stefan Behling)在一個官方視頻中表示，“這座建筑正在推動社會行為，讓人們在工作中達到新極限。”蘋果并不是唯一這么折騰的企業(yè)，亞馬遜(Amazon)計劃斥資50億美元建立第二個總部，芯片制造商英偉達(Nvidia)建了一座兩層樓的辦公大樓，其中心位置設有“激發(fā)碰撞”的空間。

The vision is as ambitious as that of Louis Sullivan, the architect of early US skyscrapers, whose 1896 essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” declared loftiness to be “on a high road to a natural and satisfying art”. The contrast is that, instead of skyscrapers that split staff across floors, they are building utopias in wide, flat campuses.

它們的愿景與美國早期摩天大樓建筑師路易斯•沙利文(Louis Sullivan)同樣雄心勃勃。沙利文在1896年發(fā)表文章《從藝術角度思考高層辦公大樓》(The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered)，斷言高層建筑將“迅速成為一種自然的、令人滿意的藝術。”二者的不同之處在于，摩天大樓將員工隔離到不同樓層，而科技巨頭們在廣闊、平坦的園區(qū)里建起了烏托邦。

But utopias are tricky: people do not always enjoy collisions, nor having their social behaviour pushed. As John O’Brien, senior director of real estate at Nvidia, says: “Human beings do not like change, and engineers like it the least.” There is reason to be reluctant about being made to mingle: people often get most done when left in peace.

但這些烏托邦問題很多，人們并不總是喜歡碰撞，也不喜歡自己的社會行為受到“推動”。正如英偉達房地產(chǎn)高級總監(jiān)約翰•奧布萊恩(John O'Brien)所說：“人類不喜歡變化，工程師們尤其不喜歡。”人們不愿被迫交流是有原因的：人往往在不受干擾時最有成效。

The guilty secret of many corporate transitions to open plan offices and “hot desking” is the desire to save money. As work patterns become more flexible and technology makes remote working easier, one study found that the average desk is only occupied about half the time. Allocating everyone a locker and telling them to find a free desk when they arrive costs less.

許多企業(yè)之所以轉向開放式辦公室和“輪用辦公桌”是因為一個難言之隱：想省錢。隨著工作模式變得更加靈活，隨著技術進步方便了遠程辦公，一項研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，辦公桌平均只有大約一半時間被占用。給每個人分配一個儲物柜，告訴他們來公司時找一張空辦公桌，就可以降低成本。

The tech industry is innocent of that. Its main motivation for reconfiguring these campuses is not cost but revenue, the belief that innovation springs out of collaboration and that is inhibited by walls and floors. Everyone has his or her own workstation at both Apple and Nvidia and these buildings also allow them to gather and huddle when working together on projects.

但科技行業(yè)沒有這個問題，其重新布置園區(qū)的主要動機并不是成本，而是收入，它們認為創(chuàng)新源于協(xié)同合作，而樓層和墻壁阻礙了人們協(xié)同合作。蘋果和英偉達的每個員工都有自己的工作站，兩家公司的辦公大樓也讓他們在合作推進項目時可以聚在一起集思廣益。

The apotheosis is “activity based working”, an approach to office design pioneered in the mid-1990s in the Netherlands by the consulting firm Veldhoen at companies including the insurer Interpolis. Rather than staying in one place, staff should move among zones during the working day, depending on whether they are working normally, focusing quietly, or collaborating.

其所信奉的是典范是“基于活動的工作”(ABW)，這是20世紀90年代中期荷蘭首創(chuàng)的辦公室設計理念，由咨詢公司Veldhoen為保險公司Interpolis等企業(yè)設計。員工們在上班時不應原地不動，而是要在不同區(qū)域間移動——取決于他們是在正常工作、安靜沉思，還是協(xié)同合作。

This can create uncertainty for employees, who have a human tendency to gravitate to one spot. (When told that the Financial Times is considering activity based working on its return to its former London head office, I was among them.) Some Apple engineers were reported to be dismayed at having to work in newly designed open plan “pods” at Apple Park.

這可能給員工帶來不確定性，因為他們有一個人類天性：待在一個地方。(在被告知英國《金融時報》在重返原來的倫敦總部大樓之后將考慮采用“基于活動的工作”時，我也是這樣的一個員工。)據(jù)說蘋果的一些工程師對于不得不在蘋果公園新設計的開放式“艙”工作感到沮喪。

As a result, activity based working often does not operate as planned. A study by Leesman, a workplace research group, found that while it often boosts productivity, many employees stuck to familiar habits. About 70 per cent of those in activity based workplaces still anchored themselves to a single desk, which the study concluded “seems a catastrophic failure”.

其結果是，“基于活動的工作”往往無法按計劃實現(xiàn)。專門研究工作場所的機構Leesman的一項研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，雖然靈活辦公往往能提高生產(chǎn)率，但許多員工堅持熟悉的習慣。大約70%靈活辦公的員工依舊守著一張辦公桌，該研究將這種局面總結為“看來是一場災難性的失敗”。

It is also a waste, given the amount of ambition and money that goes into configuring these offices. There must be something in it for employees or they will not change their ways, no matter how much companies abolish walls to create space or alter furniture.

考慮到布置這些辦公大樓所投入的雄心和金錢，這也是種浪費。靈活辦公必須對員工有些好處，否則他們不會改變自己的習慣，無論企業(yè)怎樣大規(guī)模拆除墻壁來創(chuàng)造空間或改變家具。

Companies should start by recognising what their employees fear losing. Gensler, the architecture firm that designed Nvidia’s new building, pointed out in one study that workers face “less space, less privacy . . . more distractions” in offices, as well as spending more hours working. Collaboration had to be balanced with “extended periods of uninterrupted focus”.

公司應該先認識到他們的員工在擔心失去什么。負責設計英偉達新大樓的建筑事務所Gensler在一項研究中指出，員工在這樣的辦公室面對“更少個人空間，更少隱私……更多干擾”，而且在工作上要花費更多時間。協(xié)同合作必須用“長時間不受打斷的專注”來加以平衡。

They also need to accept that not every kind of professional works in a similar way. Some jobs require the kind of constant moving from communal discussions to individual focus that activity based working is designed to facilitate. In other cases, employees work most efficiently in one place every day and prodding them to migrate around the office is a pointless distraction.

企業(yè)還需要接受一個事實：不是所有職業(yè)的工作方式都是相似的。有些工作需要在集體討論和個人思考之間不停切換，基于活動的工作就是為了方便這種工作而設計的。在其他情況下，員工們每天在一個地方辦公才最有效率，鼓勵他們在辦公室里搬來搬去是沒有意義的干擾。

Sullivan wrote influentially that “form ever follows function” and concluded that in skyscrapers, “tiers of typical offices, having the same unchanging function, shall continue in the same unchanging form”. This was the early 20th century template: floor upon floor of small offices, “similar to a cell in honeycomb, merely a compartment”.

沙利文寫下了那句頗有影響力的“形式永遠服從功能”，并得出結論稱，在摩天大樓里，“不同樓層的典型辦公室擁有相同的不變功能，應繼續(xù)保持相同的不變形式。”20世紀初的模板就是這樣的：一層層的小辦公室，“類似于蜂巢中的巢室，只是一個隔間。”

A century later, the need for uniformity has been eroded by changes in technology and working patterns. The 21st-century office performs a variety of functions and has to take on various forms. Silicon Valley’s campuses will work if they are flexible enough to allow diversity, not if they are technology utopias that try to re-engineer the behaviour of the people inside.

一個世紀后的今天，由于科技和工作模式的變化，對統(tǒng)一性的需要已被削弱。 21世紀的辦公室執(zhí)行多種功能，必須具有多種形式。如果硅谷的園區(qū)足夠靈活，容得下多樣性，而不是成為試圖重新設計人們在園區(qū)內(nèi)行為的科技烏托邦，它們將會取得成功。