In today’s world, most workers are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost — especially for those on the wrong team. New research by Harvard’s Growth Lab uncovers the importance of teams and coworkers when it comes to one’s productivity, earning potential, and stays of employment. The research analyzed administrative data on the 9 million inhabitants of Sweden. It found that to earn high wages and returns on education, workers must find coworkers who complement(互补), but not substitute, them.
The research offers a tool to assess the right and wrong coworkers in fields of expertise. The right coworkers are those with skills you lack, yet needed to complete a team. The wrong coworkers are those who replicate(重叠) your skillset and eventually lower your value to the employer. For example, those with a degree in Architecture are best assisted by workers with engineering, construction, or surveying degrees, and negatively impacted by those with landscape or interior(室内) design degrees.
“We tend to think of skills as something personal that individuals can market to a company,” said Frank Neffke, Growth Lab Research Director. “However, this vision of skills is too simplistic. One person’s skills connect to another person’s skills, etc., and the better these connections, the more productive workers will be, and the more they will earn.” Neffke adds that the benefits of working with complementary coworkers are not the same for all workers. Those with higher levels of education seem to benefit much more from working in complementary teams than workers with lower levels. Over the past 20 years, workers with college degrees or higher have been increasingly able to find better matching coworkers.
Complementarity also drives careers. The research shows that people tend to stay longer in organizations with many complementary workers and tend to leave those with many workers who substitute them. These results hold true for up to 20 years of one’s career.
The research also supports several well-known facts, such as cities and large firms pay higher wages. Workers are more likely to find better fitting teams in cities, and large firms often allow workers to specialize.
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请你根据以上内容，撰写调查报告，并简要表达你的看法。
注意：
1. 词数80左右；
2. 可适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
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Much time and effort has been devoted to researching the mental health benefits of flexible work environments, but can the ability to leave work early to watch your son’s soccer game, or arrive at the office a bit later in the morning in order to see to some personal matters, have physical health benefits besides making you feel a bit relaxed?
According to new research published in the Cochrane Library Database of Systematic Reviews, it seems so. In a review of 10 previous studies examining the health effects of unfixed work conditions for more than 16,000 people, researchers from the U.K.. Durham University and University of Newcastle, as well as the University of Montreal, found that flexible work schedules, for instance, when employees can shift their starting times, were associated with improvements in a person’s overall health. In addition, perhaps, unsurprisingly, in all of the studies included in the review, researchers found no evidence for negative effects of more flexible work schedules.
This initial analysis was intended to throw light on the potential health benefits of flexible work options, which are increasingly popular throughout Scandinavia, and have recently gained some ground in the U.K. For example, last April, the British government implemented a policy that allowed parents of children aged six and under to request flexible work arrangements to include parents of children aged 16 and younger. In the U.S., the phenomenon is a bit slower to catch on. Yet, the economic slowdown of recent years may have contributed to growth in workplace flexibility—as companies unable to reward employees with bonuses or raises may turn to other forms of compensation, Reuters reported early last year.
Original analysis too, of course, indicated the benefits of flexible work environments toward positive mental health outcomes. And while these latest findings are promising, the researchers stress that more study is vital to understanding the detailed relationship between flexible work and improved health outcomes. To truly grasp the benefits of flexible working conditions, the researchers say, additional study analyzing health outcomes among a wide range of workers—from high-ranking executives to hourly employees – is critical, which helps to gain a deeper understanding of the issue, and to shape future workplace policy.
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People choose to become entrepreneurs( 创 业 者 ） for a wide variety of reasons. One important reason is, of course, financial reward. If you own your own business and it becomes successful, you can reap huge financial rewards. And as an entrepreneur, dependent on how much your boss decides to give you; ifs limited only by the success of your business. And speaking of bosses, not having a supervisor is another major advantage of becoming an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs are often independent thinkers who want to be in charge of projects, rather than having others tell them what to do. They often have big dreams that that they want to pursue rather than making someone else’s dream come true. For many entrepreneurs, starting a business is a way of solving a problem or helping people receive something they need. It’s a way to change the world for the better.
Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy, however, nor is it always fun. Entrepreneurs often have to work long hours, especially early on when they’re trying to get their businesses off the ground. that’s the reason entrepreneurs need to have a strong work ethic( 伦 理 ).Employees can work 40 hours a week and then stop, but for an entrepreneur, there’s no end in sight.
That’s why another feature of successful entrepreneurs is passion; they have to be excited about what they’re doing to be willing to work hard for it. Entrepreneurs also need good communication skills to pass on that passion to others. That’s important for finding investors, getting people to buy products and attracting employees.
Entrepreneurs also need to be creative people who are able to find solutions to problems they encounter. This is important from the very beginning, when the entrepreneur comes up with an initial concept of a business. But even after that initial step, creative thinking is continually necessary to adapt to changing situations and to solve problems that come up.
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To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. Decades after Mao Zedong declared that women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts (对应者)in the United States.
Rjpa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement”， and builds on a cultural and historical legacy (遗产)in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to.
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite ( 精 英 ). In the US, that shift followed decades of battles over equality and women’s rights. In China, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally.
That’s true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had women in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the US. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America.
Thirdly, child care is easily accessible in China, enabling them to pursue their careers after giving birth to their children. Fourthly, ambition has become a matter of necessity in fast-paced China, and both the husband and wife have to work in order to keep up with the skyrocketing housing prices.
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【写作内容】
1. 用约30个词概括上述利用排名（ratings）进行消费的现象；
2. 谈谈你如何看待消费排名，然后用2-3个理由或论据支撑你的看法。
【写作要求】
1. 写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2. 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3. 不必写标题。
【评分标准】
内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。
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Paperless office was first coined in 1975. Four decades later, we’re still chasing the paperless office dream. Take the financial industry for example—it is one of the slower industries to hug digital transformation. Many financial institutions today still send out trade conformations by mail. I can tell you from first-hand experience that going paperless is by no means impossible. The Centric Digital office is a paperless work environment where all the office operations go digital, which has amazed our business partners.
Actually companies need to stress the benefits of a digital culture for communications. Going paperless can save time and money. You could say goodbye to costly repairs, office supply orders, wasted employee time and so on. Besides, forbidding paper in the office forces information to be 100% digital, where you can make endless amounts of backups (备份), which easily increase transparency(透明). Not to mention, top talents want to work for digital companies.
You might think the secret to a paperless company is purely technology. Well, not really. Thanks to products like iPads, smart-phones and cloud services, the ability to go paperless is highly accessible. Yet, even with all this technology, companies continue to rely on paper. It's not because they don’t have access to the technology, but because they’re lacking the politics, organizational structure and strong desire to change. In order to go paperless, companies need to change the way they think and operate. The decision needs to be made and cried out and everyone needs to work together to make it.
Yes, the paperless office has been a very long time in the making but it no longer has to be. With numerous amounts of software, services, apps and technology available today, the only thing we need to do is to make the decision to go paperless and see it through.
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