Merge pull request #437 from GregCTWang/patch-9

#217 Update 06-01-workplace.md

contents/english/06-01-workplace.md

@@ -10,9 +10,9 @@ The advances we discuss, which are just a sampling of potential implications of
 
 ### Strong remote teams
 
-The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected for decades to fruition in a year. A leading study by Barreto et al., for example, found that work from home rose from 5% of the American workforce to a high above 60%.[^Barreto]  Perhaps the most extreme manifestation has been the rise of so-called "digital nomads", who have harnessed the increasing opportunity for remote work to travel continuously and work a variety of remote jobs as encouraged by programs like Sardinia regional program for digital nomads and Estonia and Taiwan's e-citizenship and gold cards respectively, one author of this book holds.  While there has been substantial return to physical work since the end of the pandemic, at least a part of the change appears here to stay; Barreto et al. find that after the pandemic, workers on average want to work about half the week from home and believe their productivity is similar or better in that setting.  While some studies have found some evidence of mildly reduced productivity, these effects do not seem large enough to overcome the persistent demands for hybrid work styles.
+The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected for decades to fruition in a year. A leading study by Barreto et al., for example, found that work from home rose from 5% of the American workforce to a high above 60%.[^Barreto]  Perhaps the most extreme manifestation has been the rise of so-called "digital nomads", who have harnessed the increasing opportunity for remote work to travel continuously and work a variety of remote jobs as encouraged by programs like Sardinia regional program for digital nomads and Estonia and Taiwan's e-citizenship and gold cards respectively, one author of this book holds.  While there has been substantial return to physical work since the end of the pandemic, at least a part of the change appears here to stay; Barreto et al. find that after the pandemic, workers on average want to work about half the week from home and believe their productivity is similar or better in that setting.  While some studies have found some evidence of mildly reduced productivity, these effects do not seem large enough to overcome the persistent demands for hybrid work styles.[^reduce-productivity]
 
-Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides.  Some of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through remote collaboration tools.  But many others are: lack of organic interactions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or to form deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc.   While ⿻ can be used to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building of strong and deeply trusting teams.
+Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides.  Some of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through remote collaboration tools.  But many others are: lack of organic interactions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or to form deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc. [^remote-shift-impact] While ⿻ can be used to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building of strong and deeply trusting teams.
 
 In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit.  These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as "trust falls", simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.  What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service developing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the "Post-Symbolic Communication" chapter.  
 
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ A natural way to make such experiments dramatically easier is to create immersiv
 
 ### Difficult conversations
 
-Meetings are a central part of white collar work, consuming on average approximately a quarter of working time.  Yet for all the time they take up, perhaps the greater cost is the meetings that do not happen because of how burdensome they are.  Business leaders frequently misunderstand the needs of their customers, the challenges within their teams and the duplication of work because meeting with the relevant stakeholders would take too long. To make matters worse, many meetings are quite ineffective, as dominant personalities carry on and the wisdom of those who are less empowered or assertive is lost.  Anything that could significantly speed meetings and increase their quality could transform organizational productivity.
+Meetings are a central part of white collar work, consuming on average approximately a quarter of working time.  Yet for all the time they take up, perhaps the greater cost is the meetings that do not happen because of how burdensome they are.  Business leaders frequently misunderstand the needs of their customers, the challenges within their teams and the duplication of work because meeting with the relevant stakeholders would take too long. To make matters worse, many meetings are quite ineffective, as dominant personalities carry on and the wisdom of those who are less empowered or assertive is lost.  Anything that could significantly speed meetings and increase their quality could transform organizational productivity.[^Meetings]
 
 
 While meetings have variety of goals and structures, perhaps the most common type is an attempt to share a variety of perspectives on a common project to achieve alignment and assignment of responsibilities.  Such meetings are closely connected to the deliberative conversations we highlighted in our chapter on "Deliberation".  An important reason why, despite the rise of asynchronous communication via services like Slack, Teams and Trello synchronous meetings remain so prevalent is that asychronous dialogs often suffer from the same lack of thoughtful time and attention management that are necessary to make synchronous meetings successful.  Approaches like pol.is, Remesh, All Our Ideas and their increasingly sophisticated LLM-based extensions promise to significantly improve this, making it increasingly possible to have respectful, inclusive and informative asynchronous conversations that include many more stakeholders.
@@ -79,3 +79,6 @@ Putting these together, we can imagine a future where remote teams can form the
 [^agglomeration]:Greenstone, Michael, Richard Hornbeck, and Enrico Moretti. “Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings.” Journal of Political Economy 118, no. 3 (June 2010): 536–98.
 [^Coinbase]: Coinbase reference.
 [^Barreto]: Barreto Bloom and Davis paper
+[^reduce-productivity]: Emanuel, Natalia, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais. “The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?,” November 2023. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31880.
+[^Meetings]: Gibbs, Michael, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth. “Work from Home and Productivity: Evidence from Personnel and Analytics Data on Information Technology Professionals.” Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics 1, no. 1 (February 1, 2023): 7–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/721803.
+[^remote-shift-impact]: Yang, Longqi, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, et al. “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among Information Workers.” Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.