人力资源管理专业外文译文

1、knowledge workers need better managementknowledge workers could perform much better if we only knew how to manage them, says thomas davenport. his suggestion: don't treat them the all same, and measure them tactfully.they don't like to be told what to do. they enjoy more autonomy than other

2、workers- much of their work is invisible and hard to measure, because it goes on inside their heads or outside the office. they are a growing part of the u.s. workforce, and their skills are hard to replace.they're knowledge workers, and they are performing well below their potential because com

3、panies still don't know how to manage them, says thomas davenport, professor of information technology and management at babson college, in wellesley, mass.，and director of research for babson's executive education program."knowledge workers are going to be the primary force determining

4、 which economies are successful and which aren't/ he says. ”they are the key source of growth in most organizations. new products and services, new approaches to marketing, new business models一all these come from knowledge workers. so if you want your economy to grow, your knowledge workers had

5、better be doing a good job.nyet after studying more than 100 companies and 600 individual knowledge workers, davenport has come to the conclusion that the old dictum of hiring smart people and leaving them alone isn't the best way to get the most out of knowledge workers. as he writes in his lat

6、est book, "thinking for a living: how to get better performance and results from knowledge workersh (harvard business school press, july 2005)，although knowledge workers "can't be managed in the traditional sense of the word, you can intervene, but you can't do it in a heavy-handed

7、, hierarchical way/executive editor allan alter has followed davenport's career from his days as a pioneering thinker on business process reengineering and knowledge management. he met with davenport in his office at babson college's school of executive education in order to learn how manage

8、rs, and cios in particular, can improve the performance of this critical segment of the workforce. an edited version of their discussion follows.cio insight: how do you define knowledge workers?davenport: people whose primary job is to do something with knowledge: to create it, distribute it, apply

9、让.most of the time they also have a high degree of education or expertise. they include anywhere from a quarter to a third of the workforce, but not everyone who uses knowledge. if you are digging ditches, you may have some knowledge on the job, but ifs not the primary purpose of what you do.are com

10、panies doing a good job of managing and improving the performance of knowledge workers?they're not. what most organizations do is hspalta: hire smart people and leave them alone. we've spent a lot of effort recruiting knowledge workers and assessing how capable they might be before we hire t

11、hem. but once theyye hired we don't do a lot to improve their performance process improvement has mostly been for other workers: transactional workers, manufacturing workers, people in call centers. all the serious approaches to improving work have largely escaped knowledge work.we let knowledge

12、 workers get away with saying there's no process to their work, that every day is different. we don't measure much of anything about knowledge work.if we donft measure knowledge work, why do you think there's room to improve knowledge worker productivity and performance?it's a pretty

13、 well-informed hunch. people improve processes all the time; they just haven't done it with knowledge-work processes as much. its an extrapolation of the same logic in other work, that processes can be improvedhere is one number that indicates performance and productivity can be improved: idc fo

14、und that 1,000 knowledge workers can lose as much as $6 million a year just searching for nonexistent data, or repeating work that has already been done. is it possible every knowledge worker is working to his or her potential? its possible, but unlikely. we can get a lot better at improving their p

15、erformance.why hasn't knowledge management helped more in the effort to improve knowledge-worker performance and productivity?knowledge management was an early attempt to intervene in knowledge work. for the most part, it wasn't particularly successful, because we didnft look closely at how

16、knowledge workers did their work. we tried to be too broad in our focus.most organizations simply created one big repository for all knowledge and all workers.the only way we can get people to use knowledge on the job is to understand how they do their jobs, and then figure out some way to inject kn

17、owledge into the course of their day-to-day work, not make it a separate thing you have to consult when you need knowledge.we have to be much more targeted in approaching knowledge management. we have to target a specific job. and the best way is to use technology to bake the knowledge into the job.

18、how do we improve knowledge worker performance?there ought to be a lot more experiments. we have experiments now, but we don't measure anything, so we don't learn anything.if we say wete going to put people in cubicles to improve communication, then we ought to at least measure some subjecti

19、ve aspects of communication before and after. we ought to see if cubicles work well with a small group before we put a whole company into them.what is the most radical change that's needed in the management of knowledge workers?we need to start focusing much more on job-specific knowledge and in

20、formation environments, at least from an it perspective.capital one applies some of the same experimental approaches to technology. do their knowledge systems really work? does it improve productivity? does it improve communication? all the things that people talk about but never really measure.desi

21、gning these knowledge environments for knowledge workers is expensive and hard to do. but if wete serious about making knowledge workers more productive, wete going to have to focus on particular jobs and sometimes even particular individuals-there are a whole range of possibilities for differentiat

22、ing knowledge workers so that we don't treat them all the same. i don't think you should use any one segmentation approach, but the one i like best is a 2-by-2 matrix that's based on how much collaboration is involved in the job, and how much expertise is involved in the job.intel has fi

23、ve or six categories that differentiate knowledge workers on the basis of mobility and how aggressively they adopt technology. there are ucube captains11 who don't move around much, and hnomadsh who move around a lot and need portable technology. some involve factory workers and others who don&#

24、39;t have a lot of personal technology available.this sounds as if it's the company's job to tell knowledge workers what works- don't knowledge workers prefer to learn from one another?maybe. i think a good learning program for knowledge workers would combine classroom learning and learn

25、ing at their workstations. what we all want is just-in-time learning, where when we have a problem we'll click on a learning program and it'll tell us how to address that problem. but it's hard to do and wete a long way from it.knowledge workers have a lot of power, and you don't wan

26、t to impose things on them they don't want to do, because they don't like to be told what to do. they may put up with it for a while, but eventually they'll look for a job that gives them the autonomy they think they deserve.besides, managers cant easily enforce an order when work takes

27、place in people's heads. you have to make it easy for knowledge workers to do what you want them to do.but some organizations are starting to mandate the use of productivity tools. historically, pharmaceutical companies have asked scientists to use electronic lab notebooks, but never made it a r

28、equirement. hence, they had no way to ensure that lab results were collected in a similarway across the organization. infinity pharmaceuticals, a company in cambridge, mass., has made using an electronic lab notebook a condition of employment.you'd stand out if you didnft answer your electronic

29、mail or voice mail messages today一its semi-mandatory. we might as well make it a little more mandatory and help people use the stuff more effectively.knowledge workers take pride in what they do, and they want to be productive.and no one likes drudgery. most of the interventions involve getting rid

30、of work no one likes to do anyway. ask people, hwhat do you think can be done to the job?n when you redesign knowledge work processes, itfs got to be much more participative than it was in these top-down reengineering efforts. people have to see what the benefit is to them.更好地管理知识型员工“假如我们只知道如何管理他们，知

31、识工作者可以发挥得更好。”托马斯达文波 特说。他的建议：不耍用相同的方法对待他们，耍有巧妙的措施。他们不喜欢被告知该怎么做。他们喜欢比其他工人享有更多的自主权。他们的大部分 工作是无形和难以衡量的，因为它也许在他们的头脑内部或办公室以外的地方进行。他们 所占美国劳动人口的比重在不断上升而且他们的技能是难以替代的。“他们是知识型工人，他们的表现远远低于他们的潜力，因为公司仍然不知道如何管 理他们。”信息技术教授兼芭布斯学院的管理者，在韦尔斯利，马萨诸塞州作为巴布森的 行政教育课程研究部主管的托马斯达文波特说。“知识工人将成为决定哪些经济体制成功与否的主耍力量。”他说，“他们的主耍 增长源在大多数

32、组织。新的产品和服务，市场营销的新办法，新的商业模式，所有这些来 自于知识型工人。所以，如果你想你的经济有所增长，您的知识工作者最好还是在好好干 事。”然而，在研究100多个公司和600名个人的知识型工人之后，达文波特已经得出的结 论是，旧的格言雇用聪明的人，其本身并不是发挥知识型工人功效的的最佳途径。止如他 写在他的最新著作“思考的生活：如何从知识工人那里获取更好的性能”（哈佛商学院 出版社，2005年7月），但知识型工人不能被“传统”意义上的管理所指使。总之， 你可以进行干预，但是你不能用强制手段，分层的方式。执行编辑阿兰在达文波特的研究之后改变了职业生涯，因为一项开创性的思想家的业 务流

33、程重组和知识管理。在巴布森学院的学校执行教育办公室他会见了达文波特，以了解 如何管理人员，尤其是信息主管们，可以提高部分劳动力关键性能。经过编辑的讨论如下。cio的洞察：你如何定义知识型员工？达文波特：人，其主要工作是用知识做一些事情：创建，传播，应用它。大多数时候，他们也有高学历和高度的专业知识技能。它们包括从地方四分之一到三 分之一的劳动力，但不是使用知识的每个人。如果您是挖沟渠，你可能有一些工作的知识, 但不是你要做什么的主要目的。企业是否有很好地管理和改善知识工作者的性能？他们没有。大多数组织做的是分离的：租用聪明的人并让他们独立。我们己经花了很 多努力招募知识型工人和评估在我们聘请他

34、们之前可能具备多少能力。但是，一旦他们被 雇用我们不会做许多事情来提高它们的性能。工艺改进主要是对其他工人：交易工人，生 产工人，人民的呼叫中心。所有这些非同小可的办法，改进工作基本上逃脱知识工作。我们让知识工作者逃脱，说他们的工作没有进程，每天是不同的。我们没有衡量的事 情很多是知识的工作。如果我们不这样做衡量知识的工作，你为什么认为有改善知识工作者的生产力和业绩 的空间？这是非常明智的预感。人民改善流程的吋候，他们只是还没有做到与知识的工作流程 一样多。这是一个在其他的工作中相同的逻辑推断，这过程可以得到改善。这是有一个数字显示业绩和生产力是可以提高的：tdc公司发现，1000个知识工作

35、者一年会失去多达600万美元用于寻找不存在的数据，或重复已经做了的大量工作。是否 有可能每一个知识工作者正在努力用他或她的潜力工作？这是有可能的，但可能性不大。 在改善他们的业绩方面，我们能够做得更好。为什么知识管理没有在改善知识工作者的性能和生产力方面带来更多的效果？ 知识管理是早期一个干预知识工作的企图。在大多数情况下，它不是特别成功，因为我们 并不能近距离仔细观察知识型工人如何做的工作。我们设法重点过于宽泛。大多数组织仅仅创建一个所有知识和所有工人的大仓库。只有这样，我们可以让人们利用知识去工作是了解他们如何做他们的工作，然后找出 某种方式把知识注入到他们的日常工作的过程中，而不是使它成为一个当你需要的时候不 得不单独磋商的知识。我们在处理知识管理的吋候必须更加有针对性。我们需要瞄准具体的目标。而最好的 办法是使用技术来烘烤知