Imagine an elite¹ professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime² to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting³, law, investment banking⁴ and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

想象有那么一家奉行高效工作狂文化的顶尖专业服务公司，里面的每个人都被要求立即为客户提供服务、随时准备出差，并且几乎每天晚上和周末都要待命。这会是一份折磨人的工作，但是在最顶尖的会计事务所、律所、投资银行和咨询公司，生活就是这样的。

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

不过，有那么一个见不得光的小秘密：其中一些人，尤其是男人，表面上交出了每周八九十个小时的工作时间，但可能只是在假装。

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

波士顿大学奎斯特罗姆商学院(Boston University’s Questrom School of Business)的教授埃琳·里德(Erin Reid)进行的研究显示，至少在一家顶尖的咨询公司，不少人采取了这样的办法。我们无从知道她在这家不具名的咨询公司所得出的结论是否适用于更广泛的职场。但她在学术期刊《组织科学》(Organization Science)上发表的这一研究成果，提供了一种思路，让人了解职场对男女员工有何不同，以及一味强调长时间工作的进取文化或许会让一些企业变得更糟。

Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly⁵.

在这家全球性咨询公司的美国办公室，里德采访了逾百名员工，并且可以查阅他们的绩效评估资料和公司内部的人力资源档案。这家企业有着很强的长时间工作和快速回应客户需求的文化。

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants⁶ Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub⁷ Scout⁸ meeting.”

“客户需要我去哪，我就得去哪，”里德采访的一名咨询师说。“如果你没法到场，那很可能是因为已经有了另一名客户要在同一时间见面。你知道很难把到不了是因为儿子要参加幼童军活动这样的话说出口。”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter⁹ and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

有些人全身心投入到这种文化中，花大量时间来工作，他们往往也是表现最好的人。另有些人则公开抵触这种文化，坚持要求削减工作量、增加工作时间的弹性，或者减少出差；他们在绩效评估上受到了惩罚。

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly¹⁰ asking for it.

第三组人最有趣。里德查阅的记录里，有31%的男员工和11%的女员工设法享受到了中等工作强度的好处，而他们并没有直截了当地提出这种要求。

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse¹¹, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

他们尽量安排自己接待本地的客户，从而减少出差的必要。当放下工作和孩子或配偶在一起时，他们会保持低调。有一个团队，其中好几名成员有年幼的孩子。他们一致决定互相照应，让大家都能在时间上拥有更大的灵活性。

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching¹² up on email.

一名较低级别的男性经理讲述了他如何努力让自己同一个离家不远的公司反复打交道，于是就能当天来回，搞定客户的咨询工作。“我尽量5点下班，5点半到家，吃晚饭，陪女儿玩，”他说。此外，他表示自己通常把周末的工作量减少到两个小时的邮件查阅。

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion¹³.

尽管没有长时间工作，但他说：“我知道客户们想要什么，于是我给他们提供超出预期的服务。”他在绩效评估中得到了不错的反馈，并得以晋升。

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology¹⁴ were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads¹⁶.

里德研究的这一类人，按照她的术语来说，是“佯装”成了工作狂。有趣的是，他们的绩效评估和那些极为上进的同事一样出色。对那些善于伪装的人来说，较少的工作量并不会带来实质性的损害。

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry¹⁷ for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring¹⁸ partners in a consulting firm.)

这让人想起了《宋飞正传》(Seinfeld)里的角色乔治·克斯坦萨(George Costanza)。他把车留在了洋基体育场的停车场，也就是他工作的地方。老板看见了他的车，以为他比别人早到晚退，所以就升了他的职。（这个方法对乔治来说后来出了岔子，也不推荐任何在咨询公司工作的进取人士这么做。）

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility¹⁹ through more formal means, such as returning from maternity²⁰ leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

研究还发现，女性——特别是孩子尚还年幼的女员工——有大得多的可能性会通过较为正式的渠道要求在工作上获得更大的灵活性，比如说休完产假后明确减少工作量。而提出休陪产假要求的男性，他们的绩效评估则似乎会受到影响，所以也许更加感觉到，需要通过那些非正式的办法来抽时间陪伴家人。

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload¹⁵, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly²¹ didn’t suffer. The maxim²² of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

结果是显而易见的：那些明确要求削减工作量的人，其中大部分是女性，他们的绩效评估会受到影响；而那些悄悄减轻工作量的人则不会。“请求原谅，而非许可”的准则看来在这里是适用的。

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

仅仅对一家公司进行一项研究就做出过多的推断是有风险的，不过里德在采访中表示，自从在《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)上发表了自己的研究摘要后，就收到了各行各业人士的反馈，表示情况确实如此。

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge²³ of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger²⁴.

无限进取的专业服务公司是有存在的理由的。如果你是一个马上要庭审的大案的律师，一个即将迎来纳税日的会计，或是一个为大型并购提供咨询的投资银行家，那么没人会质疑疯狂加班加点和成日出差奔波的必要性。

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

然而，悄悄减轻工作量的咨询师和真正每周工作至少80小时的人，两者的绩效评估同样出色。这样的事实就表明，沉重的工作量可能更多是在显示员工对公司的投入程度，而并不代表他们真的更有成效。就服务顾客而言，每周工作80个小时的人的表现并不一定比50个小时的人更优秀。

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

也就是说，真正的问题可能并不是男性佯装自己对工作有更大的投入，而可能是太多公司奖励了错误的东西，过于青睐极为努力的表象，而非实际的工作成效。