企业界趋势：顶尖企业着力促进员工沟通_职场英语

企业界趋势：顶尖企业着力促进员工沟通

But despite all the buzz around serendipity─several panels at the popular tech conference South by Southwest Interactive discussed the topic─it is hard to know for sure whether any of these efforts really work. The real challenge, companies and workplace scholars say, isn't merely connecting workers with their colleagues so much as it is connecting them with the right ones.

打破员工沟通壁垒的努力可谓盛极一时──South by Southwest Interactive时尚科技大会上就有好几个专家小组讨论这个话题──但很难确定这些方法到底有没有效果。研究公司与职场管理的学者们表示，真正的挑战并不在于仅仅让员工们互相碰面，而在于把那些能够相互契合的员工凝聚起来。

'The most productive relationships are difficult to engineer,' says Jason Owen-Smith, a University of Michigan sociologist who studies employee collaboration.

密歇根大学(University of Michigan)研究员工协作领域的社会学家詹森•欧文-史密斯(Jason Owen-Smith)说：“最富有成效的员工合作关系是难以设计并人为促成的。”

Designs for Google Inc.'s GOOG -0.50% new headquarters, expected to be completed in 2015, set out to maximize casual employee conversations, which the firm says were responsible for innovations such as Gmail and Street View. 'We want it to be easy [for] Googlers to collaborate and bump into each other,' says a Google spokeswoman.