At Wells Fargo, managers have dreamt up a new ratio to track alongside such banking¹ stalwarts as provision coverage² and capital adequacy. It is called the happy:grumpy ratio, and measures how many cheery staff the bank employs for every curmudgeon³.

富国银行(Wells Fargo)的管理者想出了一个新的比率，用来与拨备覆盖率和资本充足率等银行业使用的可靠比率一起追踪银行的状况。它被称作快乐暴躁率，衡量的是银行中快乐员工与暴躁员工人数之比。

The point of this exercise, executives told the Wall Street Journal last week, was that happy employees are more likely to do the right thing than unhappy ones. Financial regulators, who have recently been exercising themselves about the nasty culture of banks, will no doubt be impressed. And they will be even more so when they see how this ratio is moving at the San Francisco bank. Only five years ago happy bankers (measured by their own assessment) outnumbered the grumpy ones by 3.8 to 1; by last year there were eight times as many Pollyannas at Wells Fargo as there were miserable⁴ sods.

富国银行的高管近日告诉《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)说，这项实践的出发点是，快乐的员工比不快乐的员工更有可能做正确的事。这无疑会给近期一直对银行的恶劣文化感到头疼的金融监管者留下深刻印象。而且，当看到该比率在这家总部位于旧金山的银行的走势变化时，他们的印象会更加深刻。五年前，快乐银行家（快乐与否是基于他们的自我评估）与暴躁银行家的人数之比还是3.8:1；而到了去年，富国银行内快乐员工的人数已是不快乐员工的8倍。

When I first read about the happy: grumpy ratio, I thought it sounded so good it should become compulsory⁵ in the industry. Making banks produce such a number would force them to become less cut-throat places to work. And compared to most banking statistics, which are so complicated that even clever people can’t fathom⁸ them, this one is simple enough that any idiot can grasp it in a second.

当我最初听说这一快乐暴躁率时，我觉得它听起来妙极了，完全应该成为银行业的必备比率。让银行统计这一比率将推动它们成为不那么剑拔弩张的工作场所。而且，与大多数银行业统计数据（这些数据太过复杂，就连比较聪明的人都无法搞懂）相比，这一比率简单到连傻瓜都能马上搞懂。

Yet the longer I think about the ratio, the less I find I understand it — and the less I like it.

然而，我对这一比率琢磨的时间越长，就越发现它难以理解，同时也越不喜欢它。

Even its premise⁹ is dubious¹⁰. Are workers who claim to be happy really less likely to do bad things? There are no numbers to prove it; neither is there any obvious reason it should be so. If what makes bankers happy is taking risks and making money, they will be even happier when they are up to no good — provided it results in lots of money falling into their laps. Furthermore, if you are the sort of person who thinks it fine to diddle your bank out of billions of dollars, you are not going to worry about giving misleading answers on a staff satisfaction survey.

就连它的前提假定都是有问题的。那些声称自己快乐的员工做坏事的可能性真的更小吗？没有数据证明这一点；也没有任何显而易见的理由支持应该如此。如果让银行家快乐的是冒险和赚钱，那当他们做坏事时甚至会更快乐——假设做坏事可以让他们赚得盆满钵满。此外，如果你是那种不在意从你所在的银行骗走数十亿美元的人，你就不会担心在员工满意度调查中给出有误导性的答案。

As for the numbers themselves, they look too good to be true. I don’t believe for a moment that the happy outnumber the grumpy by eight to one among Wells Fargo’s 260,000 people, nor is it likely that a ratio could double in such a short time.

至于数字本身，它们看起来完美得令人难以置信。我一点也不相信富国银行的26万员工中，快乐员工与暴躁员工人数之比可以达到8:1，而且一个比率也不太可能在那么短的时间内翻一番。

According to a Gallup survey of 25m workers there are twice as many unhappy as happy ones in the world. I am lucky to work in one of the happiest places in Britain: FT journalists are generally treated well, management is light and (reasonably) benign¹¹ and people are mostly doing something that they love. But the ratio of happy to grumpy? Looking around at my colleagues I’d put it at 4:1 at best.

盖洛普(Gallup)针对2500万名员工的调查显示，全世界不快乐员工的人数是快乐员工的两倍。我很幸运能在英国最快乐的地方之一工作：在英国《金融时报》，记者普遍待遇不错，管理宽松且（相当）温和，员工大都做着自己喜欢做的事。但这里的快乐暴躁率是多少呢？环顾我的同事们，我最多给出4:1的比率。

More fundamentally, there is little point in asking employees whether they are happy or not. The answer surely depends on who is asking, on what mood the subject is in, on their temperament¹² and on what they consider “happy” to mean. To aggregate¹³ 260,000 unreliable answers and then treat the result as data on a par⁶ with tier one capital, is really quite frightening.

更为根本的是，询问员工是否快乐几乎毫无意义。答案当然取决于谁在问，取决于受访者的心情，取决于他们的脾气秉性以及他们认为“快乐”是什么。汇集26万份不可靠的答案，并认为其结果可与一级资本充足率相提并论，真是相当的可怕。

Underlying¹⁴ it all is something even more basic. Should employers even aim to make their staff happy? I’m with Freud on this one. He said it wasn’t possible to make people happy; the best that could be hoped for was normal unhappiness.

在这一切之下还有更为根本的东西。雇主的目标应该设定在使他们的员工快乐吗？在这一点上，我赞同弗洛伊德(Freud)的意见。弗洛伊德说，让人快乐是不可能的；人们所能期待的最好结果是正常的不快乐。

This should be the goal at work too. Banks, and all other employers, should try to become places where employees are not abnormally unhappy.

这也应当成为职场的目标。银行及其他所有雇主都应尽力不要变成让员工异常不快乐的地方。

To see how well they are doing in this task, there are two statistics they should monitor, both of which are objective and impossible to game.

要了解它们在这项任务中做得如何，应该追踪两项统计数据，这两项数据都是客观的、而且不可能作假。

The first is staff turnover¹⁵. If people are more than normally unhappy, they tend to leave. So if your staff turnover is greater than that of your competitors, you know at once you have a problem.

首先是员工流失率。如果员工感到异常不快乐，他们往往会离开。所以，如果你的员工流失率高于你的竞争对手，你立刻就知道出问题了。

The second measure is the ratio of what the bank’s hotshots get paid to what the security guard gets. We know that perceived unfairness and inequality both make people unhappy; so when this gap gets wider the culture worsens.

第二个的指标是，银行内明星员工与保安的报酬之比。我们知道，人们感受到的不公平和不平等都会让人不快乐；所以，当这个差距扩大时，公司文化在恶化。

There is a third measure that is less objective and harder to measure, but may be even more important than the other two. It is to monitor how many friends people have at work. All the general happiness data show a powerful correlation¹⁶ between the number of close friends and happiness; the same surely holds in the office — at least, it holds in mine. The main reason I am never abnormally unhappy at work is because I have three true friends among my colleagues.

还有第三个指标，虽然它不那么客观、也更难以衡量，但可能比前两个还要重要。那就是追踪员工在工作中有多少朋友。所有关于总体快乐的数据都显示出，好友的数量与快乐之间有着很强的相关性；在办公室内无疑也是如此——至少对于我是成立的。我在工作中从未有过异常不快乐，主要原因就是我在同事中交了三个真正的朋友。

If Wells Fargo produced such a statistic⁷, I doubt if it would tell the regulator whether a scandal was round the corner. But it would tell us something profound about its bankers’ happiness or lack of it, and it would give prospective¹⁷ employees an excellent idea as to whether they would like to work there, or not.

如果富国银行进行这样的统计，我不确定它是否能告诉监管者很快就要发生丑闻。但它能让我们深刻了解该行员工快乐与否，而且它能给拿不准是否想在该行工作的潜在员工一个极好的建议。