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Is employee loyalty silly?
员工忠诚度是一种有些傻的说法吗？
Job interviews are an opportunity to see allegiances shift in real time.
在求职面试中可以看到忠诚的实时变化。
A candidate will usually refer to a prospective employer as “you” at the start of an interview (“What do you want to see from someone in this position?”).
在面试开始时，应聘者通常会把有望成为雇主的一方称为“您”(“您想从担任这个职位的人身上看到什么？”)。
But occasionally the pronoun changes (“We should be thinking more about our approach to below-the-line marketing. Sorry, I mean ‘you’ should be”).
但代词也会偶尔发生变化(“我们应该更多地考虑我们的线下营销方式。不好意思，我是说‘您’应该”)。
That “we” is a tiny, time-travelling glimpse of someone imagining themselves as the employee of a new company, of a fresh identity being forged and of loyalties being transferred.
这个“我们”是一个细微的、穿越时空的一瞥，人们把自己想象成一家新公司的员工，正在构建新的身份，正在转移自己的忠心。
Loyalty is seen as a virtue in most situations: among friends, family and football fans.
忠诚在大多数情况下都被视为一种美德：在朋友、家人和球迷中都是如此。
Employee loyalty, however, is more complex. It is more transactional.
然而，员工忠诚度要复杂得多。它更具交易性质。
Friends don’t give each other performance reviews or fire each other for cost reasons.
朋友不会互相进行绩效评估，也不会因为成本而解雇对方。
It is less reciprocal.
员工忠诚度的互惠程度也比较低。
A worker can feel attachment to a company and a company can feel precisely nothing.
员工可以感觉到对公司的依恋，而公司可以无动于衷。
(Which is why people often feel more loyal to team members and individual bosses than to their organisations.)
(这就是为什么人们往往对团队成员和某个老板比对他们的组织更忠诚。)
And too much of it can impose high costs.
员工忠诚度太高还可能会带来高昂的成本。
Wage bumps and careers are built on people changing jobs.
加薪和建立事业是在换工作的基础上实现的。
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which tracks wage growth in America, in April job switchers were being paid 7.6% more than a year earlier; job stickers were being paid only 5.6% more.
根据追踪美国工资增长的亚特兰大联邦储备银行的数据，4月份，跳槽者的薪酬比去年高出7.6%，而未换工作者的薪酬仅高出5.6%。
A little promiscuity on the part of other people can help those who choose to stay where they are.
其他人在工作上稍微“寻花问柳”一下，这对那些选择保持现状的人可能有益。
A paper by Nathan Deutscher, a Treasury official in Australia, found that higher rates of job-hopping in local Australian labour markets were associated with faster wage growth both for workers who switched jobs and for those who did not.
澳大利亚财政部官员内森·多伊切尔的一篇论文发现，澳大利亚当地劳动力市场的跳槽率升高，无论是对换工作的人还是没有换工作的人来说，都与更快的工资增长有关。
Loyalty is nice; so is bargaining power.
忠诚是美好的，讨价还价的能力也是美好的。
Too much loyalty can harm workers in other ways.
过于忠诚可能会在其他方面损害员工的利益。
A piece of research published earlier this year by Matthew Stanley of Duke University and his co-authors tested how bosses felt about loyal workers.
杜克大学的马修·斯坦利和他的合著者今年早些时候发表了一项研究，测试了老板们对忠诚员工的看法。
The researchers asked managers how willing they were to ask a fictional employee named John to work overtime for no pay.
研究人员询问经理们，他们在多大程度上愿意让一位名叫约翰的虚构员工无偿加班。
If John was described as loyal, then bosses were happier to dump more work on him.
如果约翰被描述为很忠诚，那么老板们会更乐意把更多的工作扔给他。
The reverse also applied: workers who did more work for no reward were more likely to be described by managers as loyal.
相反的情况也适用：做更多工作却没有得到回报的员工更有可能被经理描述为忠诚。
Dogs are known for their loyalty, remember, but not for their brains.
请记住，狗是以忠诚，而不是以有头脑著称的。
Employers tend to be clear-eyed about what generates loyalty.
雇主往往很清楚是什么产生了忠诚。
Retention bonuses are an admission that the best employees might need a little nudge to stay.
留任奖金就是在承认，最优秀的员工可能需要一点动力才能留下来。
Actual loyalty tends to get nugatory rewards: a week’s extra holiday for 25 years of service?
真正的忠诚往往会得到没什么价值的奖励：任职25年就能增加一周的假期？
Netflix encourages its employees to speak to recruiters so that they know their worth in the open market and so that it can respond with counter-offers (an approach that makes more sense when you are prepared to pay top dollar and less so if you are in the non-profit sector).
网飞鼓励员工与招聘人员交谈，这样他们就知道自己在公开市场上有多少价值，这样网飞就可以用条件更好的offer回复员工(如果你准备支付顶级薪资，这种方法才更说得通，如果你在非营利性行业，这个办法就不那么有道理了)。
Companies can nonetheless be wedded to the idea of loyalty.
尽管如此，公司仍然可以坚守忠诚的理念。
The group of employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Lab in the 1950s to found Fairchild Semiconductor was famously dubbed the “traitorous eight”.
20世纪50年代离开肖克利半导体实验室，然后创立了飞兆半导体的一群员工被戏称为“八大叛徒”。
Some of that attitude still prevails.
这种态度在一定程度上仍然盛行。
But unless you are a member of the mafia or a cleric, joining a competitor is neither treachery nor heresy.
但除非你是黑手党成员或神职人员，否则加入竞争对手既不是背叛，也不是异端。
Indeed, boomerang hires—people who leave an employer and then come back—can offer a valuable blend of known quantity and new skills.
事实上，回旋镖招聘--离职的人又回到老东家--可以让已知数和新技能结合起来，这是非常有价值的结果。
Society can suffer if there is a surfeit of employee loyalty.
如果员工的忠诚度过高，社会可能会受到不利影响。
A paper on whistle-blowing, published in 2019 by James Dungan of the University of Chicago and his co-authors, found that employees were more likely to report wrongdoing if their concern was fair treatment of people outside the organisation and less likely to do so if they were more motivated by loyalty.
芝加哥大学的詹姆斯·邓根及其合著者在2019年发表的一篇关于检举揭发的论文发现，如果员工关心的是公平对待组织外的人，那么他们更有可能举报不当行为，如果他们更多的是出于忠诚的动机，那么他们不太可能这样做。
Other research suggests that competitive situations can encourage loyal members of one group to cheat in order to best another.
其他研究表明，竞争环境会鼓励一个群体中的忠诚成员为了打败另一个群体而作弊。
Employee loyalty can be great.
员工忠诚可以是伟大的。
Companies want workers who feel committed to them, who are prepared to go the extra mile and not join a rival at a moment’s notice.
公司希望员工忠心耿耿，愿意付出额外努力，不会事先不打招呼就加入竞争对手的阵营。
Workers want to believe in and belong at a firm, confident that it warrants chunks of their finite time on Earth.
员工们希望能信赖公司并有归属感，相信自己将活在世上的有限生命中的大部分时间投入这份工作是正确的。
It is better all around, for job satisfaction and for performance, if employees stay put because they feel invested in their organisation than because they haven’t got a better offer.
如果员工留在原公司是因为他们觉得想要致力于组织的事业，而不是因为没有更好的下家，那么这种情况对各方都更好：包括工作满意度和工作绩效。
But loyalty in the workplace is a self-interested decision, not a moral one.
但职场中的忠诚是利己的决定，而不是道德上的决定。
It should be contingent on being treated well, not a habit that becomes harder to break.
是否忠诚应该取决于是否被善待，忠诚不是一个越来越难改掉的习惯。
Stay where you are because you like it, not because to leave would be immoral.
留在原公司应该是因为你喜欢这里，而不是因为离开是不道德的。
