(1) Businesses are still struggling to understand which of the pandemic’s effects will be temporary and which will turn out to b

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问题     (1) Businesses are still struggling to understand which of the pandemic’s effects will be temporary and which will turn out to be permanent. Three new reports attempt to analyze these longer-term trends. One is from Glassdoor, a website that allows workers to rank their employers. Another is from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consultancy. The third is from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), a British professional body. Read together, they imply that firms stand to benefit—but that managers’ lives are about to get more difficult.
    (2) One change that is all but certain to last is employees spending more of their time working at home. The Glassdoor report finds that less commuting has improved employee health and morale. Splitting the week between the home and the office is also overwhelmingly popular with workers: 70% of those surveyed wanted such a combination, 26% wanted to stay at home and just 4% desired a full-time return to the office. Perhaps as a consequence, remote work has not dented productivity—and indeed improved it in some areas. Flexible work schedules can be a cheap way to retain employees who have child-care and other home responsibilities.
    (3) Telecommuting offers other potential cost savings, and not just the reduced need for office space. Remote workers do not need to live in big cities where property is expensive. If they live in cheaper towns and suburbs, companies need not pay them as much. Glassdoor estimates that software engineers and developers who leave San Francisco could eventually face salary cuts of 21 -25%; those quitting New York could expect reductions of 10 ~ 12%. As the report points out, remote employees are, in essence, competing with a global workforce and are thus in a much weaker bargaining position.
    (4) This point is reinforced by the BCG report, which finds that the pandemic has increased the willingness of companies to work with freelancers. Previously, many managers worried that legal and compliance issues prevented them from using outside staff. The pandemic forced firms to adjust their business models rapidly, and simultaneously led to growth in the pool of talented freelancers, as full-time employees had to be laid off. BCG says that " by embracing flexibility in whom they hire, internally or externally. companies can finally speed up operations and deliver faster on strategy. "
    (5) Despite its advantages, a remote workforce, or one consisting of more outsiders, brings challenges for managers, as the third report demonstrates. The CMI surveyed 2,300 managers and employees. The results highlight just how important effective communication, and concern for workers’ well-being, is to good management. They also unearthed an interesting difference of perspective: Nearly half of senior executives thought they were engaging employees more in decision-making since the pandemic, but only 27% of employees agreed.
    (6) The survey also shows that the experience of remote working has not been uniform. Of those working online, 69% of women with children want to work at least one day from home when the pandemic ends, compared with 56% of men with kids. These women have had less contact with managers during the lockdown than their male peers have had, suggesting they have been neglected.
    (7) So managers have a lot more work to do in responding to the pandemic. Executives need to tailor their behavior to individual employees’ needs. Ironically, though managers may have feared that remote working would allow employees to slack, it may be that managers have not been up to the challenge. Bosses may have spent too much time videoconferencing and not enough speaking directly with subordinates.
    (8) Ask someone what it is like to work at a firm and they may respond by saying what the offices are like—whether they are cramped, in a nice location and so on. In a world of remote working, employees may stress instead how the employer communicates with them. Not so much " management by walking around" as management by phoning—or Zooming—around. Time to get dialing.
In order to respond to the pandemic managers should________.

选项 A、videoconference more often
B、increase direct communication
C、treat all the employees similarly
D、get employees more involved

答案B

解析 细节题。文章第七段最后一句提到,老板们可能在视频会议上花了太多时间,而没有足够的时间直接与下属交谈。由此可以看出,老板们应该减少开视频会议的时间,多与下属直接沟通,故答案为B“增加直接沟通”,同时排除A“多进行视频会议”。该段第二句提到,高管们需要根据员工的个人需要调整自己的行为,故排除C“以类似的方式对待所有员工”;D“让员工更多地参与其中”在原文并未提及,故排除。
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