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Bartleby
巴托比专栏
Up close and personnel
近距离和人员互动（注：标题化用电影名Up Close and Personal）
The role of physical proximity in the workplace.
工作场所中物理近距离的作用。
Seeing people in person matters.
与人面对面交流很重要。
Information pours off them: not just what they say but how they say it and whether they listen.
信息从他们身上倾泻而出：不仅是他们说的话，还有他们说话的方式以及他们是否在倾听。
Relationships form more naturally.
这时关系形成得更自然。
It’s much harder to look a person straight in the pixels.
要直视一个像素人脸则困难得多。
An array of studies have demonstrated how much proximity matters in the workplace.
一系列研究已经表明，在工作场所中彼此接近有多么重要。
One paper published in 2020 by Diego Battiston of Stockholm University and his co-authors looked at how the police force in Manchester fields emergency calls.
2020年，斯德哥尔摩大学的迪亚戈·巴蒂斯顿及其合著者发表了一篇论文，研究了曼彻斯特警察如何处理紧急呼叫电话。
Their process involves two people.
处理过程涉及两个人。
A handler takes the call and writes up the incident.
一名接线员接听电话并记录下事件。
An operator then allocates police officers.
然后一名操作员分配警察。
Some operators happened to be in the same room as the handler who had taken down the call details.
一些操作员碰巧与记录下通话细节的接线员在同一个房间。
Because they could talk face-to-face, these operators were able to extract salient details and allocate police officers to cases more quickly than those who were left to scan descriptions for themselves.
因为他们可以面对面交谈，所以相比那些只能自己查看书面记录的操作员，这些操作员能够更快地提取重要细节并将警察分配到案件中。
Proximity within rooms also mattered.
房间内的接近程度也很重要。
Operators were more productive when their desks were closer to the relevant handlers.
当操作员的办公桌离相关接线员更近时，他们的工作效率会更高。
A subsequent reorganisation, permanently separating the two types of workers, resulted in an 8% increase in average response times to violent crimes.
后来进行了一次重组，将这两类人员永久地分开，这导致警察对暴力犯罪的平均响应时间增加了8%。
In a working paper published in November Natalia Emanuel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and her co-authors demonstrated that proximity can be good for mentoring, too.
在去年11月发表的一篇工作论文中，纽约联邦储备银行的娜塔莉亚·伊曼纽尔及其合著者证明，彼此接近也有利于指导。
They studied software programmers at an online retailer, and found that sitting closer to co-workers increased the amount of online feedback junior engineers received on their code from more senior colleagues.
他们研究了一家在线零售商的软件程序员，发现与同事坐得更近会让初级工程师从更高级同事那里收到更多关于他们代码的在线反馈。
Teams who were all based in one building before the covid-19 pandemic and started the day with an in-person meeting received 22% more comments than teams spread across two buildings whose daily meetings were online.
在新冠疫情之前，那些位于同一栋大楼、以面对面会议开启每一天的团队，他们收到的队员意见比分散在两栋大楼里、每天在线开会的团队多22%。
That gap disappeared when covid struck and both offices were closed.
当新冠疫情来袭，两栋办公楼都关闭时，这种差距消失了。
This is not an argument for mandating that everyone comes into the office five days a week and sits in a single, jam-packed room.
这并不是说要强制所有人每周五天都到办公室，都坐在一个拥挤的房间里。
Proximity can exact costs as well as produce benefits, as both of these papers demonstrate.
彼此接近既会产生好处，也会产生成本，这两篇论文都证明了这一点。
One trade-off relates to output.
其中一个利弊权衡涉及到产出。
In the Manchester police force, handlers who spent more time talking to operators had less time free to take new incoming calls.
在曼彻斯特警察局，与操作员交谈时间更长的接线员，他们用于接听新来电的空闲时间会更少。
In the case of the software engineers, too, online comments take time to give and to receive.
对于软件工程师来说，给出和接收在线评论也需要花时间。
Senior employees in particular wrote more code when they were not sitting near to junior colleagues, their beaks open for feedback.
特别是高级员工，当他们没有坐在初级同事附近，没有像小鸟一样张着嘴要反馈的同事时，他们会写更多代码。
Employees should be capable of negotiating such trade-offs for themselves.
员工应该有能力自己商量这些利弊权衡。
But managers can help or hinder.
但管理者可能起到帮助或阻碍作用。
If handlers are being evaluated on how many calls they field, they have less reason to help operators; Mr Battiston and his colleagues duly found evidence suggesting that handlers helped less when they were coming up for their annual performance reviews.
如果根据接听电话的数量来评估接线员，那么他们就没有太多理由去帮助操作员；巴蒂斯顿及其同事也相应地发现了证据，表明接线员在即将进行年度绩效评估时提供的帮助更少。
Similarly, Ms Emanuel and her co-authors found that junior workers in teams that shared a building were less likely to receive pay rises because their output was lower.
同样地，伊曼纽尔及其合著者发现，在位于同一栋大楼的团队中，初级员工获得加薪的可能性更小，因为他们的产出更低。
Although proximity can bring members of teams together, it can also come at the expense of interactions with outsiders.
虽然近距离可以使团队成员聚集在一起，但也可能以牺牲与外界的互动为代价。
A study published by Maria Roche of Harvard Business School and her co-authors in 2022 looked at startups that were randomly assigned space in a co-working hub in America.
2022年，哈佛商学院的玛丽亚·罗奇及其合著者发表了一项研究，研究了在美国某个共享办公中心被随机分配了办公空间的一些初创公司。
The researchers examined how knowledge passes from one startup to another by looking at the likelihood that firms adopt a technology used by their peers in the building.
研究人员通过观察公司采用同栋大楼的其他公司所使用的技术的可能性，研究了知识如何从一个初创公司传递到另一个初创公司。
Even small distances exerted enormous power.
即使是很小的距离也能产生巨大的力量。
A startup located more than 20 metres apart from a peer might as well have been seated on a different floor.
如果一家初创公司与同行相距超过20米，那么这两家公司就好像位于不同的楼层一样。
Office designers thus try to engineer proximity of a more fleeting kind—creating communal areas and enabling joint social events, for example, in an effort to bring together people who might not otherwise interact.
因此，办公室设计师试图设计出一种更有暂时性的接近方式，例如，创建公共区域并举办联合社交活动，从而将那些原本可能不会互动的人聚集在一起。
But few people really want to mingle at drinks parties, and co-workers will often use these events to spend even more time with the people they already know.
但是很少有人真的想在酒会上交际，而且同事们经常会利用这些活动，花更多时间与他们已经认识的人待在一起。
One more paper, by Sharique Hasan of Duke University and Rembrand Koning of Harvard Business School, looked at a bootcamp for entrepreneurs in India, in which participants were randomly assigned to teams.
杜克大学的沙里克·哈桑和哈佛商学院的雷姆布兰德·科宁发表的另一篇论文研究了印度的一个创业者训练营，在这个训练营中，参与者被随机分配到不同的团队。
They found that teams with members who already knew each other were much less likely to interact with neighbouring teams, compared with those whose members had few prior connections.
他们发现，相比于成员之前不太相互认识的团队，成员已经相互认识的团队与邻近团队互动的可能性要小得多。
Proximity is more useful as a glue than a solvent.
看来近距离的黏合剂作用比溶剂作用更大。（注：即近距离让认识的人聚在一起的作用比让人员分散开、互相交流的作用更显著。）
