毕业季忠告:这5个迹象说明这家公司不能呆,要小心了!

The hardest part of any toxic relationship is that it ruins your conception of what is and isn't normal. This is especially true of the long-term toxic relationship known as "employment." 

当你处理任何一段“有毒”的关系时，最困难的部分就是，它已经破坏了你对“正常与非正常”概念的是非观。这种情况在那种长期有毒的“雇佣关系”中尤为明显。

Most of us have only had a handful of jobs, and most of them were probably terrible, so when the boss screams, or lies, or asks you to work off the clock, it's easy to assume that's just the way it is. It doesn't have to be! Here are some red flags to look out for.

我们大多数人的工作经验并不多，而且在这些工作中的大部分也都很糟糕，所以当大Boss朝你大喊大叫、满口谎言、或者要求你加班的时候，你肯可能觉得这是理所应当的事情。但实际上，你不必这样！这里有一些你需要注意的危险信号。

Despite the fact that approximately every employee in a shop is there only because they need to put food on the table, bosses like to make it seem as if it's a dick move to acknowledge this. "How dare you make this treasured personal bond about money!"

虽然从实事求是的角度出发，在一个商店里面的几乎全部员工都是为了混口饭吃才来上班的，但老板们还是喜欢让员工觉得，只有蠢蛋才会承认这一点。“你怎么敢把这种珍贵的人与人之间的感情，与金钱联系在一起！”

Here's an example from my own life, and tell me if it sounds familiar. (To not name any names, let's just say I worked in, I don't know, a gluten-free bakery for gerbils.) Any talk about the business side — career development, salary negotiations — was often ignored or postponed indefinitely, like it was an awkward conversation they were putting off. 

接下来是我自己生活中的一个例子，如果听起来有点耳熟，就请把你的故事告诉我吧。（为了不透露任何名字，就简单地说吧，我当时在一家沙鼠专用的无麸质面包店工作。）当时如果有任何有关商业方面的谈话——包括职业发展、工资谈判——都常常被忽视或无限期推迟，就好像他们是在拖延一场尴尬的谈话。

Finally, right before I left, I asked for confirmation of vacation back pay and credit for a few assignments I'd completed. After ignoring the request for weeks, my boss finally took me aside and told me, practically in tears, that my request hurt her feelings.

最后我都快要离开了，便想要确认一下我假期拖欠的薪资，还有我完成一些文件应得的职业信用积分。过了好几个星期，我的老板根本就不搭理我的申请。直到最后，我的老板把我叫到一边，声泪俱下地控诉说，我的要求伤害了她的感情。

This kind of emotional manipulation happened all the time at the bakery. To management, it was OK that people were quietly denied proper pay and advancement, because as they often told us, we were "treated just like family." You wouldn't ask your mom for pay or professional credit in a timely fashion, would you? I mean, you would if you were the world's most ungrateful kid.

这种工作上的情绪控制，在面包店里时有发生。对管理层来说，员工提薪和晋升的要求被悄悄否决，这是无关紧要的事情，因为正如他们经常挂在嘴边的那句，我们“就像家人一样被对待”。你不会催着问你妈妈要工资或职业信用积分，是吗？换句话说，如果你这样做了，你就是世界上最忘恩负义的孩子。

This phrase — "like family" — turns up all the time in workplaces large and small, and it's always a red flag. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman called this the biggest lie employers tell employees, which is impressive in a system based almost entirely on lying to employees about what they're worth. Offshoots of this idea include asking workers to "volunteer" (that is, work unpaid) at some kind of feel-good events. You know, like families do!

这句话——“像家人一样”——在大大小小的工作场所都经常出现，而且总是一个危险信号。领英的创始人里德·霍夫曼说过，这是老板对员工撒过的最大的谎，在那种不会实事求是地考量员工自身价值的体系里，这一点尤其令人印象深刻。这种做法还有一些副作用，包括要求员工在一些看似挺好的活动中“自愿”工作（也就是无偿工作）。你知道的，就像是家人一样！

Around Christmas last year, the airline Qantas asked staff to volunteer over the winter holidays without pay. When criticized for this move, Qantas said they were only trying to "spread Christmas cheer." So if you tried to argue, you were now on the anti side of Christmas cheer. See how that works?

去年的圣诞节前后，澳航要求员工在寒假期间无偿做义工。而当这一举动被大众批评时，澳航表示，他们只是想“传递圣诞节的快乐”。所以，如果你反驳，那你就是在反对圣诞节。这回明白这种有毒行为是如何发生的了吗？

Management loved telling us how lucky we were to be at the gerbil bagelry. Whenever an employee quit, or became disillusioned and unhappy, management would complain about their lack of gratitude. "Can you believe him?" they'd say. "After all we did for him." By "all we did," they basically just meant that they hired him. The message was clear: Even though employees were treated with little dignity on a day-to-day basis, we were still expected to show gratitude at all times.

管理层喜欢告诉我们，我们能在沙鼠面包店工作，是一件多么幸运的事情。每当有一名员工辞职，或者是感到失望和不开心的时候，这些管理者就会抱怨他们缺乏感激之情。“你能相信他吗？”他们会这样说。“我们已经为他付出了这么多。”而他们所说的“我们付出了这么多”基本上就是指他们雇了他而已。这传达出来的信息非常明确：尽管员工在平时的日常工作中得不到什么有尊严的对待，但员工仍然要时时刻刻表达对公司的感激之情。

To reinforce this, our boss would do tiny things for us on occasion, like buy birthday cakes or chips for the office. (Like a loving mom would do!) But it was difficult to enjoy unhealthy deliciousness when they were used as a substitute for mentorship, flexibility, career development, and fair wages. When employees had to absorb the jobs of former full-time staff members but weren't given raises or changes in title, we were still expected to thank our boss profusely for those "perks," because wouldn't you rather have chips than no chips?

为了加强这一点，我们的老板有时候也会为我们做些小事情，比如请办公室的同事吃个生日蛋糕或者是薯条（就像是一位充满母爱的妈妈会做的那样！）但是员工们还是没有办法放下心来享受这些不健康的美味，因为这些蝇头小利就相当于替代了那些业务辅导、弹性工作制、职业发展以及公平薪资。我们这些员工不得不承担起全职员工的工作，却没有加薪和升职，却还得感谢老板给我们的那些“额外福利”，因为至少有那些薯条，总比没薯条要强吧？

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying gratitude is a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing in a work environment ... when it goes both ways. In fact, it is a lack of appreciation, and not low pay, that is cited as being the most common reason why people quit jobs. In one poll, 79 percent of people revealed they quit jobs because of a lack of appreciation from a bad boss. 65 percent of North Americans said they weren't recognized once in the past year. To this, you can imagine every boss in America saying, "'Recognized?' They'd starve without this paycheck! They should be thanking me!"

别误会我的意思，我并不是说感恩是件坏事。在工作环境中能够心存感恩，这是一件很棒的事情……但它也是双向的。事实上，人们辞职最常见的原因是缺乏被老板的赞赏，而不是工资太低。在一项民意调查中，79%的人表示，他们辞职是因为那些坏老板很少赞赏他们。65%的北美职员表示，他们在过去一年里，连一次也没有被认出来。针对这个研究报告的结果，你甚至可以想象美国的每个老板都会这样说：“认出员工？要不是我赏脸给他们这一口饭吃，他们早就饿死在街头了好吗！他们都应该感谢我！”

Have you ever felt the weight roll off your shoulders when you walked in to find out your boss was out of the office that day? It's the relief of knowing that you don't have to worry about this human landmine choosing to randomly explode at you, flying into a rage over some minor oversight or pending deadline.

你有没有过这种感受：当你走进办公室发现你的老板那天恰好不在时，突然感到肩膀上的重担减轻了？这其实是一种解脱，因为你知道终于不用担心会因为一些小疏忽或者是即将到来的deadline，就把这颗“人类炸弹”引爆了。 

Sometime in the parrot bagelry's development, management apparently sat down and watched The Devil Wears Prada together. But instead of learning "Oh, I guess sometimes successful people have to be tough to get where they are," they thought, "Oh, cool. I guess if I act like an a*****e, it will automatically mean I'm good at my job."

有一次，在鹦鹉面包店，管理层领导们围坐在一起，观看了电影《穿普拉达的女王》。但是，他们没有学会“哦，我觉得有时候成功人士要达到现在的位置必须很努力，”相反，他们想，“哦，太棒了，如果我表现得像个女魔头，就意味着我很擅长这份工作。”

So when a few employees once left a minute before 5 o'clock, one of the managers came out and had a temper tantrum. She berated us for being lazy and having a terrible work ethic, and told us that we ought to know that even if we had finished our work before 5, we had to keep sitting in our seats and "at least pretend to work." You know, the kind of things families say to each other.

所以，当有几个员工在5点前的一分钟离开时，其中一个经理便跳出来大发脾气。她怒斥我们懒惰，工作态度极为恶劣，并说我们应该晓得，即使我们在5点之前完成了工作，也必须坐在座位上，“至少要假装在工作”。你知道，就像是家庭成员之间苦口婆心的劝说那般。

We watched our fellow employees get yelled at, and we listened to contractors get bullied over the phone. We even went to work dinners and witnessed wait staff being condescended to and pushed around. Even then, we worried that maybe we were just too sensitive, that we were just millennial snowflakes with an unrealistic expectation that we'd be treated with some level of basic human dignity.

我们看到我们的同事被骂，我们听到乙方在电话里被甲方爸爸欺负。甚至我们去参加工作晚宴时，目睹服务员被那些人摆出一副屈尊俯就的样子，甚至被各种推搡。即使在这个时候，我们也还在担心是不是自己过于敏感了，我们只是芸芸众生中的一员，还抱着想要拥有人类最基本尊严的这种不切实际的愿望。

There has actually been a lot of debate about whether harassment and humiliation of employees is a valid management style (corporate legends like Steve Jobs were infamously abusive). Aside from the basic fact that it's morally wrong to treat humans that way, there's no evidence it actually works, and plenty that indicates it doesn't. It may even turn employees into terrible people themselves, passing on the lessons of their awful mentors.

实际上，关于骚扰和羞辱员工是否是一种有效的管理风格（比如史蒂夫·乔布斯这样的企业传奇人物，都是出了名的暴君），一直存在很多争论。除了这种行为违背了人类道德这一基本事实之外，并没有证据表明这种辱骂的管理方式真的有效，而且有很多证据表明它的效果适得其反。它甚至会把员工变成更糟糕的人，把他们坏导师的教训再接着传递给后辈。

Don't confuse these behaviors with merely being a "tough boss," having high expectations, and holding employees accountable for meeting them. What we often see is just plain bullying -- bosses who scream, get overemotional, and humiliate people when others disagree with them or when they don't get their way. They're not using some advanced motivation tactic; they're just losing control. Oh, and if a subordinate ever used the same tone back to them, they'd be gone in an instant. Because then it's unprofessional.

当然，也不要把这些行为与那种仅仅是很严厉、高期望、并且希望员工为这些期望负责的老板相混淆。我们经常看到的，是那些赤裸裸的恃强凌弱——当别人不同意他的观点或不按他的意愿行事时，你的老板就会大喊大叫、情绪激动、羞辱员工。这个时候，他们并不是在使用一些先进的激励策略；他们就是失去控制而已。哦，相反的，如果下属们用同样的方式对待他们，那么这些下属就会马上消失，只因为这样“很不专业”。

At the parrot spa, management was obsessed with their negative Glassdoor presence. This itself wasn't unusual. If you're not familiar, Glassdoor is a crowdsourced site for job seekers to research companies, and according to employer branding statistics, only 21 percent of candidates say they would apply to a company that has a one-star rating there.

在鹦鹉水疗中心，管理层正因为公司在“玻璃门”(Glassdoor)软件上的负面形象所困扰。这种现象并不少见。“玻璃门”软件是一个信息收集网站，供求职者看到各种公司的信息。根据雇主品牌的统计，只有21%的求职者表示会申请评分仅为一星级的公司。

The problem is that their reaction to the bad rating was exactly what some of you have seen where you work: Stop those mean people from making us look bad. Why do that when you can just spam fake positive reviews?

问题在于，这些公司的管理者对差评的反应，与你们中的一些人在工作中看到的完全一样：不要让那些刻薄的员工抹黑我们。那为什么你可以发布虚假的好评呢?

In order to protect anonymity, Glassdoor has no verification system for employees submitting those ratings. That means anyone, including management, can post a review, and while Glassdoor's website says that they take it "very seriously" if they find out that reviews are fake or that employees were offered incentives to write good reviews, you can imagine how hard that is to prove.

为了保证用户的匿名，“玻璃门”软件没有针对提交评级的员工的验证系统。这意味着任何人，包括管理层，都可以发表评论。虽然Glassdoor的网站上说，如果他们发现虚假评论，或者有人因为刷好评而得到奖励，他们就会严肃对待此事，但你可以想象这个取证过程有多难。

That's why staff had to stop everything we were doing to have meetings with our extremely emotional boss in which we were "strongly encouraged" to write positive reviews. On multiple occasions, we were told if we didn't want to write a good one, we should either not work there or at least keep our bad opinions to ourselves. Our boss claimed that if we did have negative feedback, we could tell her in person (you know, the way a family would). Whenever we tried to give honest feedback, of course, our words fell on deaf ears. ("Where's the gratitude?!")

这就是为什么员工们不得不停下手头的一切工作，与情绪极其激动的老板开会，在会议上老板会“强烈鼓励”我们写正面的评价。很多时候，我们被告知，如果我们不想写一篇好评论，我们要么不去那里工作，要么把那些负面评论憋心里。我们的老板说，如果我们确实有负面的反馈，我们可以当面告诉她（你知道，就像一个家庭一样，参见第一条）。当然，每当我们试图给出诚实的反馈时，我们的话都被置若罔闻。“你的感恩之情呢？！参见第二条。”

Rumors. Gossip. Informal back channels. Vague memos. Abrupt changes that seem to come out of the blue. That's life in an office where they've decided even innocuous information is only to be shared on a need-to-know basis. When employees try to report anything up the chain of command, it's treated like it's an act of rudeness. There's a pervasive feeling that all information can and will be weaponized, so it's best to keep everyone in a fog of ignorance.

谣言。绯闻。小道消息。模糊的备忘录。突如其来的变故。这就是在办公室里的生活，这些因素也决定了这个事实：即使是无害的信息，也只能是在必要的时候分享。而当员工试图向上级汇报任何事情时，他们会认为这是一种冒犯。人们普遍认为所有的信息都可以而且将会变成武器，所以最好让每个人都保持一种无知的状态。

At the ferret university, for example, there were people who were personally close to the boss on the payroll. This meant that not only were those people not held accountable for their work, but also that staff couldn't critique anything related to them without the boss taking it personally.

例如，在“雪貂大学”，有一些人跟老板关系密切。这意味着，这些人不仅不会对自己的工作负责，而且如果老板不点名批评他们，员工也不能对任何与他们有关的事情提出异议。

Oh sure, they liked to claim they had an "open-door policy" (probably every company says this), but it was a policy in name only. Employee reviews were postponed for months (meaning there was no opportunity to voice concerns), then management became upset or irritated when they finally occurred. They wouldn't implement changes anyway, so the general message was that honesty was pointless.

哦，当然，他们喜欢声称自家公司有一个“门户开放政策”（可能每家公司都会这么说），但这只是一个虚名罢了。员工评估被推迟了整整几个月（这意味着员工没有机会表达自己的忧虑），而当这些意见终于传达上去之后，管理层就会变得心烦意乱。反正他们无论如何也不会改变的，所以总的来说，提出中肯的意见是没有意义的。

According to a global survey, less than half of professionals actually trust their employer, and a lack of transparency was listed as a major factor when determining trust. A lack of open and honest communication means rumors fill in the blanks, and that means workplace drama.

根据一项全球调查，只有不到一半的专业人士真正信任他们的雇主，“缺乏透明度与否”被列为决定是否信任的一个主要因素。缺乏公开和诚实的沟通意味着谣言会填补空白，也意味着工作场所里，戏剧性事件会不断发生。

It's also just hard to do a good job when you have no context for what you're actually trying to accomplish. One survey found that 92 percent of workers would work harder if there was better transparency. What are my goals? What's my place in the organization? Am I in trouble? Is the company about to go under? Why did you take away the vending machine? Why were half of the employees called into a secret meeting yesterday? Of course, this is assuming that the bosses themselves know the answer to all of those questions, and let's be honest, there's a solid chance that they just don't.

当你连自己真正想要完成的事情都不太了解，你就很难把工作做好。一项调查发现，如果有更好的透明度，92%的员工会更加努力工作。我的目标是什么？我在公司里的地位如何？我目前面临麻烦吗？公司要破产了吗？为什么拿走自动售货机？昨天为什么有一半的员工被叫去开秘密会议？当然，这个说法的前提，是假设老板知道所有这些问题的答案，但老实说，他们很有可能并不知道。