Any manager worth their salt knows the value of spending time “walking in their customers’ shoes”. There are many ways to do it. You can observe customers in their natural habitat. Pernod Ricard’s boss recently told Bloomberg, a news service, about his habit of bar-hopping in order to see what people want to drink. Such research is a lot less fun if your company makes soap dispensers for public toilets but the same principle applies.

任何稱職的經(jīng)理都知道花時間“站在客戶的角度思考”的價值。有很多方法可以做到這一點。你可以在顧客的生活地觀察他們。保樂力加(世界知名烈酒和葡萄酒集團)的老板最近告訴彭博社(一家新聞服務(wù)機構(gòu))，他經(jīng)常去酒吧看看人們想喝什么。如果你的公司生產(chǎn)公共廁所的皂液器，那么這樣的研究就不那么有趣了，但同樣的原則也適用。

You can be a customer yourself, buying your company’s products, ringing your own helplines and enduring the same teeth-grinding muzak. Or you can hear from your customers directly. Jeremy Hunt, who has just been appointed Britain’s finance minister but was once its longest-serving health secretary, started each day in that job by reading a letter of complaint from a patient or their family, and writing back to each correspondent personally. If you cancel one internal meeting a week and use that time to hear from customers instead, you will come out ahead on the trade.

你可以自己成為顧客，購買你公司的產(chǎn)品，撥打自己的熱線電話，忍受同樣的磨牙音樂?；蛘吣憧梢灾苯勇牽蛻舻姆答伮?。剛剛被任命為英國財政大臣的杰里米?亨特曾是任職時間最長的衛(wèi)生大臣，他上任后的每一天都是閱讀病人或其家屬的投訴信，并親自給每位回信。如果你每周取消一次內(nèi)部會議，用這段時間來聽取客戶的意見，你就會在交易中獲得優(yōu)勢。

This idea does not apply only to customers. It can also be useful inside the organisation. Walking in employees’ shoes is a way for bosses to understand what impedes productivity, what saps morale and what makes workers feel valued. A sense of affinity can come from living in the same community as other members of staff. Recent research found that ceos in Denmark who lived within 5km of their offices seemed to foster better work environments than those who lived farther away. But short of moving house, how else can managers get inside workers’ heads?

這個想法不僅適用于客戶。它在組織內(nèi)部也很有用。站在員工的角度思考，老板可以了解是什么阻礙了生產(chǎn)力，是什么削弱了士氣，是什么讓員工感到受到重視。這種親近感可以來自于與其他員工生活在同一個社區(qū)。最近的研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，在丹麥，住在離辦公室5公里以內(nèi)的 CEO 似乎比住得更遠的 CEO 能營造更好的工作環(huán)境。但除了搬家，管理者們還能怎樣了解員工的想法呢?

Even if a boss genuinely wants to hear the unvarnished truth, employees may not be comfortable delivering it. Anonymous surveys can help encourage honesty, as can exit interviews, but even in these settings, workers may temper their views. Reviews on sites like Glassdoor can be brutal, but the motives of the people posting them are not always transparent. Corporate-messaging apps like Slack can provide a partial window into how some teams are getting on, but surveillance is not a form of empathy. And none of this is the same as knowing what it is actually like to be an employee.

即使老板真的想聽赤裸裸的真相，員工也可能不愿意說出來。匿名調(diào)查和離職面談有助于鼓勵員工誠實，但即使在這些情況下，員工也可能會改變自己的觀點。Glassdoor(美國的一家做企業(yè)點評與職位搜索的職場社區(qū))等網(wǎng)站上的評論可能很殘酷，但發(fā)布評論的人的動機并不總是透明的。像Slack這樣的企業(yè)即時通訊應(yīng)用可以讓我們部分了解一些團隊的進展情況，但監(jiān)控并不是一種共情的方式。這些都和了解作為一名員工的真實感受是不一樣的。

It is very hard for managers to replicate the experiences of normal employees. Rooms will magically become available if the boss asks for one; everyone else has to roam around the building like wildebeest that have become separated from the herd. Managers do not have to remind people of their names. They are less likely to suffer some of the common feelings that undermine workers’ enthusiasm for their jobs: rare is the boss who feels overlooked or underappreciated. And they are also much less likely than employees to encounter incivility from colleagues.

管理者很難“復(fù)現(xiàn)”普通員工的經(jīng)歷。如果老板要房間，房間就會神奇地變空; 其他所有人都必須在大樓里四處游蕩，就像與獸群分離的牛羚一樣。管理者們不需要提醒人們他們的名字。他們不太可能經(jīng)歷一些損害員工工作熱情的常見感受: 很少有老板感到被忽視或不被賞識。此外，他們遇到同事不文明行為的可能性也比員工小得多。

One option is to appear on “Undercover Boss”, an entertaining reality-tv show in which executives put on preposterous disguises, work in their own organisations and discover what life is really like for their workers. If you go down this route you will learn a lot, but you will have to admit to an audience of millions that you have absolutely no idea what is going on in your own organisation. (A less involved option is not to bother with the cameras and to wear your own home-made disguise in the office, though there is a risk your moustache will fall off at a pivotal moment.)

一種選擇是參加“臥底老板”，這是一檔娛樂電視真人秀節(jié)目，在節(jié)目中，管理者們進行荒謬的偽裝，在自己的組織中工作，發(fā)現(xiàn)員工的真實生活是什么樣的。如果你沿著這條路走下去，你會學到很多東西，但你必須向數(shù)百萬聽眾承認，你完全不知道自己所在的組織正在發(fā)生什么。(一個不那么麻煩的選擇是，在辦公室里不用擔心攝像頭，穿你自制的偽裝，盡管你的胡子可能會在關(guān)鍵時刻掉下來。)

Even without disguises it is good for managers to spend time doing the same work as their underlings. (It is also good for them to stop referring to people as underlings.) Airlines and retailers have run schemes that involve executives working in front-line roles in airports and on shopfloors. DoorDash, a delivery app, has a programme called WeDash that requires salaried employees to make regular drop-offs. And bosses can do things for themselves that people without assistants must navigate alone. Filling out expense forms is a chore: everyone should have to do their own, at least occasionally. By default bosses should fly in the same airline class as their colleagues do. And so on.

即使沒有偽裝，管理者花時間和下屬做同樣的工作也是有好處的。(對他們來說，停止稱“下屬”也有好處。) 航空公司和零售商實施了讓高管在機場和商店一線工作的計劃。送貨應(yīng)用DoorDash有一個名為WeDash的項目，要求受薪員工定期送貨。老板可以自己做一些那些沒有助手的人必須獨自完成的事情。填寫費用表是一件苦差事: 每個人都應(yīng)該自己填寫，至少偶爾要填寫。默認情況下，老板應(yīng)該和同事乘坐同一艙位。等等。

If managers can learn a few things by walking in employees’ shoes, there is also value in workers thinking about what life is like as a boss. It is not all business-class travel and people agreeing with you. Imagine getting in a lift and conversation around you always dying. Imagine being grumbled about all the time, or knowing that your absence causes a general lightening of the mood. Imagine not being able to kick a difficult decision upstairs. The boss wears much nicer shoes but they can still pinch.

如果管理者能從員工的角度學到一些東西，那么讓員工思考作為老板的生活是什么樣子也是有價值的。并不是所有的旅行都是商務(wù)艙的，人們也并不是都同意你的觀點。想象一下，坐電梯時，周圍的人的對話戛然而止。想象一下，總是被人抱怨，或者知道你的缺席讓心情變得輕松。想象一下，不能把一個艱難的決定讓“上級”處理。老板穿的鞋好得多，但還是夾腳。