2024年4月27日发(作者：)

人力资源管理专业外文翻译----更好地管理知识型员工

一、外文原文

原文一：

Knowledge Workers Need Better Management

Knowledge 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 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 companies 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 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—all these come from knowledge workers. So if

you want your economy to grow, your knowledge workers had

better be doing a good job."

Yet 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 latest book, "Thinking for a Living:

How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge

Workers" (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, 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 managers, 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 it.

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

it's not the primary purpose of what you do.

Are companies 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 them. But once they're hired we don't

do a lot to improve their performance. Process improvement has