Opinion The 'L' word By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
Lで始まるキーワード 成果主義のアメリカでは、業績いかんでは社員は簡単に解雇される。 社員は社員で、後の混乱を考えずいきなり転職してしまう。 だが最近、会社に「忠誠心」が戻ってきたようだ—。

I'm constantly surprised at how long some of my colleagues have been working at this company. Many of them have been working here for more than 20 years. This goes against the strategy of many of my peers, which is to work at a given company for a few years before moving on. Indeed, many younger colleagues joined the company after I joined and have already left. They have pursued better positions, usually to be replaced by less experienced researchers.

I mentioned this age distribution to one of the veteran researchers on my project and asked him whether he thought this was due to a generation gap. His children are about the same age as me, so I figured he knows a thing or two about the thought processes of my generation. He suggested that it was partly a generation gap but that companies are also responsible for the way their employees behave.

For a while, many corporations took a performance-based approach where they didn't hesitate to fire people when times were (temporarily) bad or employee performance was (temporarily) low. Sometimes employees would be forced to leave the premises within a day of receiving notice, without even the opportunity to save computer records or say formal goodbyes.

Employees would reciprocate by switching jobs with minimal advance warning and with little concern for the amount of disruption it would cause. Both companies and employees seemed to work under the assumption that any person was dispensable and could be easily replaced.

This researcher told me that the "L" word was verboten for a while but it's recently come back: loyalty.

Companies are taking a kinder and gentler approach to letting people go and are valuing the depth of experience and knowledge a veteran employee brings. In return, employees are staying in one place to see ideas bear fruit. I agree that unless succession plans are thorough, rapid switching of personnel on a project leads to a painful loss of expertise and a decrease in morale. My assumption is that an employee cannot be easily replaced and I prefer to see companies — and individuals — look beyond the immediate bottom line.

One "L" word that will probably not be entering our corporate lexicon any time soon is "love." It is a bit too much to ask of Americans to anthropomorphize a company, and to love a job as if it were a breathing personality.

I am well aware that at various times in my career, I've put in more than my reasonable share of working hours. People would ask me why I'd invest so much of my time in work. It's true that many projects are not that interesting or important in the first place and a company will never love me back. My answer would be that, in the end, I work for people. I work for myself, because I like working and I like doing a good job. I work for my loved ones, who benefit from the money I earn. And I work for my teammates, most of whom are good people who have the same commitment to make a living that I do.

(523 words)