When Spotify workers need a new keyboard, they go to a shelf and take one. There are no forms to fill in and no one to ask. There is just a sign saying how much each keyboard costs.

当Spotify的员工需要一个新键盘时，他们就到架子上去取一个。不需要填什么表格，不需要问谁去要。只有一个标签显示每个键盘多少钱。

Kristian Lindwall, whose title at the music streaming company is “agile coaches team lead”, told us this at a human resources conference in Barcelona last week.

不久前在巴塞罗那举行的一次人力资源大会上，Spotify的“敏捷教练团队主管”克里斯蒂安•林德沃尔(Kristian Lindwall)告诉了我们这一点。

His talk was about Spotify giving teams autonomy. His job seemed to be to help the teams, but not to hover over them. “People are self-motivated and they want to do great work,” he said.

他演讲的主旨是Spotify给予团队自主权。他的工作似乎是帮助各个团队，但不凌驾于他们之上。“员工们自我激励，他们想做成大事，”他说。

Setting up elaborate approval processes for workplace equipment not only interfered with that aim; it ended up costing more. “It’s cheaper to give someone a keyboard than for people to go through two sets of approvals that take a week,” he said.

建立繁复的办公设备审批程序，不但干扰了上述目标的达成，而且最终会产生更大的成本。“跟让员工花两周时间走完两套审批程序相比，直接给他一个键盘更省钱，”他说。

Judging by reviews on the Glassdoor jobs website, some employees find these autonomous teams “chaotic”, with “duplicate and uncoordinated efforts”. But 87 per cent say they would recommend the company to a friend.

从员工点评网站Glassdoor上的评议看，有些员工觉得这些自治团队“杂乱无章”，“重复劳动，彼此间缺乏协调”。但87%的人表示，他们会把Spotify推荐给朋友。

As a consumer, I find Spotify’s service entirely satisfactory. But I feel the same about Amazon, which only 64 per cent of employees would recommend to a friend, according to Glassdoor. Employee reviews — “people making minor mistakes are punished; breaks are limited, exhausting the workforce and making people hate work” — reflect recent press coverage, which Amazon contests, stating that it used detailed data to monitor both managers and lower-level employees’ performance.

作为消费者，我认为Spotify的服务完全令人满意。但是，我对亚马逊(Amazon)有同样的感觉。根据Glassdoor的数据，愿意向朋友推荐亚马逊的员工比例仅为64%。员工评议——“犯小错就受到惩罚；工间休息时间有限，让大家感到精疲力尽，憎恨工作”——反映出了不久前媒体报道的内容，即亚马逊使用详尽的数据监控管理人员和更低层级员工的表现。亚马逊对这一报道提出了异议。

Spotify trusts you; Amazon monitors you. The companies are both stars of the digital age, while also illustrating the sharp divide in today’s world of work. Some companies give their workers freedom while others use modern technology to track their every move.

Spotify信任你；亚马逊监控你。这两家公司都是数字时代的明星企业，同时也呈现出如今职场世界的严重分化局面。有些公司给予员工自由，也有些公司使用现代技术跟踪员工们的一举一动。

Traditionally, this trust divide existed inside companies rather than between them, according to an excellent and prescient 2001 paper by Cambridge’s Judge Business School and the Stockholm School of Economics. Managers were trusted, but workers were not.

根据剑桥大学(University of Cambridge)贾奇商学院(Judge Business School)和斯德哥尔摩经济学院(Stockholm School of Economics)在2001年发表的一篇富有远见的高质量论文，传统上，信任度方面的鸿沟存在于公司内部，而不是公司之间。管理人员受到信任，下属员工不被信任。

Max Weber, the great German analyst of organisations, “identified the fact that senior figures in bureaucracy operate with discretion, since it is they who formulate, rather than follow, rules,” the paper said.

论文指出，德国组织管理分析大师马克斯•韦伯(Max Weber)“发现了一条事实，即官僚机构中的高层人物在工作中拥有自主权，因为他们是规则的制定者，而不是遵从者”。

Senior figures did not always deserve that trust, of course. In any event, the idea that some should be above the rules began to break down in the 1960s and especially in the 1980s, with the rise of the idea of corporate culture.

当然，高层人物并非总是配得上这份信任。无论如何，有些人应当凌驾于规则之上的观念从上世纪60年代开始瓦解，尤其是进入上世纪80年代之后，随着“公司文化”这种理念的崛起，这种观念的瓦解更是迅速。

Popularised by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, corporate culture “was understood as an anti-bureaucratic move” that aspired to substituting values for rules, the Cambridge/Stockholm paper said.

论文指出，汤姆•彼得斯(Tom Peters)和罗伯特•沃特曼(Robert Waterman)在《追求卓越》(In Search of Excellence)一书中普及了公司文化的理念，它“被理解为一种反官僚主义运动”，希望以价值观取代规定。

Those values bound everyone in the company together, both workers and managers. It meant employees could be empowered and “less directly managed”. Rather than establishing rafts of rules, employees were educated in the culture. They grasped the values and could then be left to get on with their work without excessive oversight.

那些价值观把公司里的每个人——普通员工和管理人员——都团结到一起。这意味着，员工可以获得自主权，“受到更少的直接管理”。公司不必建立重重规则，而是用文化来教育员工。员工理解了价值观之后，就可以自己去完成工作，无需太多监督。

It was not always this way. Many companies still had plenty of rules. But this was the ideal. Now the old corporate culture model is breaking down under the strain of global competition, an end to final salary pensions, insecure employment, agency working and outsourcing.

过去并非总是如此。现在许多公司仍然设有大量规则。但推行公司文化曾经是理想的管理方式。如今，在全球竞争压力、最终薪资养老金制度终结、以及灵活雇佣合同、劳务派遣和外包的影响下，旧有的公司文化模式正在坍塌。

If people are no longer secure in a company then everything changes. “Why should individuals be committed to the values of an organisation to which they have only a fleeting attachment?” the paper’s authors say.

如果人们在公司中的饭碗不再稳固，那么一切都会发生变化。“如果个人只是暂时在某一组织中工作，那么他们为何应当承诺忠于该组织的价值观呢？”论文作者们表示。

Amazon’s close monitoring is one response; Spotify’s autonomous teams are another. Why would its people in their autonomous teams behave in a trustworthy way? Because, in a world in which they will probably move around, their own reputations, their personal brands, are a vital asset.

亚马逊的严密监视是一种对策；Spotify的自治团队是另一种对策。自治团队的成员为何应当以一种值得信任的方式行事？这是因为，在一个他们很可能将到处流动的世界里，他们自己的名声和个人品牌是一种至关重要的资产。

When you move on, you want to be remembered as someone who was trusted. The more skilled and mobile you are, the more your employer will believe your reputation matters to you.

当你奔赴新前程时，你希望有人记住你是个值得信任的人。你的技能越高、流动性越大，你的雇主就越相信，你的名声对自己非常重要。

Everyone’s reputation matters to them, but not everyone is as mobile or has skills that are rare or transferable. The further down the work ladder you are, the more employers will believe you need to be controlled.

每个人的名声对自己都很重要，但并非每个人的流动性都那么大、或者拥有稀罕或可转移的技能。你在职场阶梯上的地位越低，雇主就越相信，有必要对你进行控制。

There is a class element to this. The new world of work is horribly divided. Egalitarian corporate culture was just a passing moment.

这其中存在一个“阶级”元素。新的职场世界分化非常严重。平等主义的公司文化只是一个转瞬即逝的阶段。