Signs like “Please rate me five stars” point to a growing problem with businesses in the on-demand economy of app-based services like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. These companies rely on customer ratings systems that often require workers to maintain near-perfect reviews. If an Uber driver falls below a certain point, he’ll be deactivated.

【G1】_____________________

This work extends beyond good customer service: It involves actively reshaping a worker’s inner emotional life to conform to employers’ and customers’ expectations of emotional performance.

【G2】____________________

Learning to control their own emotions at the behest of the airline became such second nature to the flight attendants that they began to manage their feelings in their personal lives in a similar fashion.

Hochschild and other sociologists have noted that emotional labor in the service of work often pro-duces “emotional dissonance”—a conflict between how workers really feel and the surface feelings they’re expected to perform as part of a job.【G3】__________________

Companies in the service sector have long struggled to get the balance right when it comes to ask-ing for and acknowledging emotional labor. What’s revolutionary and troubling about the present moment is how much companies in the on-demand economy, including Uber, are taking emotional labor for granted, especially given its centrality to their ongoing success.

There are multiple examples of Uber drivers being required to perform emotional labor.【G4】______________For example, Uber suggests that drivers “stay calm, patient, and polite with riders” in order to receive the best ratings, and that drivers should “never ask” for a five-star review.

【G5】___________________

It’s clear that drivers are expected to do more than simply take a customer from point A to point B; what’s unclear is the kinds of extra personal emotional effort that are necessary, or what will result in a low rating and hence deactivation. This lack of clarity leads to poor morale and driver anxiety.

Appreciating the emotional labor of workers is a smart strategy for the on-demand economy. Not only will employees be happier and more productive, but they’ll also be better positioned to support a business over the long term. Specific changes to both app interface design and broader training practices will go a long way to ensuring the sustainability of these business models in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace.

[A] Many fretted about “professional” codes, describing times when they had to accept cancellations or low ratings from passengers who didn’t understand how the app worked; all the drivers could do was grit their teeth and internalize their negative feelings.

[B] Their work on flight attendants found that unless managers acknowledged and appreciated the emotional efforts of their workers, the pressures around emotional dissonance created by so-called “sur-face acting” caused flight attendants stress, anxiety, and resentment against their employers—and, ultimately, long-term burnout.

[C] Entrepreneurs should consider these changes to their user experience design, HR policies, and general corporate strategy to recognize, value, and support the emotional labor of on-demand workers.

[D] The problem is that Uber doesn’t acknowledge the personal and financial cost of this emotional labor to its drivers and doesn’t adequately explain how these forms of work factor into drivers’ performance ratings.

[E] In the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term emotional labor to refer to the ways flight attendants were trained to present a calm, friendly, and professional demeanor to customers—even if the flyers they were attending to were frightened, angry, or abusive.

[F] As a result, on-demand workers end up performing outsize amounts of what sociologists call “emotional labor,” or expressive work to make the customer experience a positive one so that users come back to the platform.

[G] The design of the Uber app encourages drivers to perform this sort of “feeling” work by reminding them, both explicitly and implicitly, that such labor is central to maintaining a five-star rating.

As Nicholas Negroponte has done for the past three years, the founder and chairman of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child foundation has touched down in one world capital after another to pitch his innovative and audacious project to government leaders, curious teenies, education advocates, NGOs and anyone else who will listen. But even as he was crisscrossing Rome in a hectic 14 hours earlier this week, Negroponte’s attention was fixed on a factory near Shanghai.【G1】______________The Big Idea of Professor Negroponte—co-founder in 1985 of MIT’s influential Media Lab—is the development and distribution of a high-quality, low-cost laptop to potentially hundreds of millions of children throughout the developing world.

The first task was to design a machine that would allow kids to connect wirelessly to the Internet without an outside source of electricity, and that would be rugged enough to function in often harsh conditions. Prototypes of the laptop (dubbed XO)—with built-in video and audio, a hand-crank and low wattage requirements—are getting high marks from technology reviewers.【G2】______________Negroponte confesses to “bluffing” on the original numbers to create momentum for the project. “You need scale to change people’s minds,” he said. “We must create an avalanche.”

【G3】________________

Such was the case Monday in Rome, where he was utilizing the most important new tool in one of his three speeches: the lime green laptop with a toy-like design that Negroponte carries with him everywhere. Throughout the day, he spoke to three packed auditoriums, and met with officials at the U.N.’s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization and Telecom Italia. In between, he taped an interview at Vatican Radio, lunched with two top advisers to former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, reviewed strategy with his own staff and fielded a proposal to distribute the computers in Florence and some of its 20 sister cities around the world.

Still, the skeptics remain, noting for example that the price tag of what was once billed as a $100 laptop is now closer to $200.【G4】______________The governments in China and India have also been resistant, convinced that they can do something similar on their own.

【G5】___________________

For example, he launched in mid-November in the United States a “Give One, Get One” program that will ask people to pay $400 for two XO’s, one of which they will receive and the other to be sent to a poor child.

Taiwan-based laptop manufacturer Quanta will begin by turning out 44,000 units a week at a recently expanded factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai. Negroponte said some 300,000 orders have been booked so far. That avalanche, the critics will say, better start rolling soon. But Negroponte doesn’t seem to mind the doubters. He said: “When you tell me something’s impossible, that’s going to make me want to try.”

[A] Though Negroponte and his project are not quite there yet, the 63-year-old professor is as busy as ever piling up the snow.

[B] But perhaps an even more difficult task was to generate enough mass interest in the project to allow the computer to be produced on such a vast scale that costs could be kept down.

[C] That’s where within a week—after all the development and design and gigabytes of both hype and skepticism—mass production will begin on the state-of-the-art, low-price computer.

[D] Negroponte has committed Italy to donating 50,000 of the laptops to Ethiopia, while the Vatican potential is particularly enticing, with some 50 million schoolchildren in Catholic schools around the world.

[E] Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s all the time that Nicholas Negroponte has for the Eternal City right now.

[F] Negroponte’s response has been to open up the program to individuals and companies.

[G] Moreover, the original strategy of getting six of the largest developing countries—Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya—to commit to buying one million units stalled in August.

[A] Shift work

[B] Communication

[C] Forward-looking recruitment

[D] Team motivation

[E] Flexible scheduling

[F] Team building

[G] Positive reinforcement

5 Ways to Cure Absenteeism

High absenteeism not only affects company morale, but also affects the bottom line for any business. There are ways you can lower the rate of employee absences, and cut down on the high costs associated with them, without having to resort to termination. Here we offer some insight on changing employees’ behavior in this article.

【G1】____________________________________________________

When hiring workers, pay special attention to verifying their previous employment histories and attendance. During the interview phase, ask guided questions which will gauge the potential hire’s attitude towards missing work. Draw up employment contracts that specify the job description being hired for and clearly outline your absenteeism policy. Having the prospective worker sign the contract after reading and understanding the policy will ensure you have something to work from if absenteeism becomes an issue.

【G2】______________________________________________

Many managers are finding this drastically cuts down on absenteeism in the workplace, if it’s implemented properly. Custom-designed working hours and the allowance to work from home if possible may form predictable work habits that can be relied upon. If proper accountability systems are in place, a more flexible work environment has the potential to be more beneficial, not just for the overall profitability of the company, but for the customer base as well.

【G3】______________________________________________

Every company has some sort of attendance policy in place, whether it’s strictly enforced or only loosely followed. Emphasize the importance of proper attendance, and focus on the importance of everyone’s attendance as much as possible. If you apply tangible actions to the attendance policy, people are more likely to respect it. Some ways might be to offer small benefits and bonuses for steady attendance after a week, month, year etc.

【G4】______________________________________________

This is an important key to lowering absenteeism rates in the workplace. Is there a particular manager or managers for whom attendance is a bigger problem than others? Investigating their higher numbers may turn up answers that are surprising. If certain employees are showing higher absentee rates than others, take them aside and ask them how you might help; there may be childcare or transportation issues that are easily rectified, or other issues the employee may feel helpless about but a good manager can easily overcome.

【G5】___________________________________________________

Disputes among employees and managers can severely impact the absenteeism rate of a company and negatively affect business practices. Stress, negativity and rumors can all be factors which can be virtually eliminated by effective team development. Develop teams who are responsible for planning and problem-solving. When employees feel they have a hand in the decision-making processes for the company they work for, they tend to have a vested interest and higher morale. In a team environment, everyone’s strengths are emphasized and utilized for a common goal, which can reduce negativity and harsh competition. People working in an effective team environment also have an increased sense of responsibility, since their contributions are required and tend to have lower absenteeism rates.

[A] “I just don’t know how to motivate them to do a better job. We’re in a budget crunch and I have absolutely no financial rewards at my disposal. In fact, we’ll probably have to lay some people off in the near future. It’s hard for me to make the job interesting and challenging because it isn’t—it’s boring, routine paperwork, and there isn’t much you can do about it.

[B] “Finally, I can’t say to them that their promotions will hinge on the excellence of their paperwork. First of all, they know it’s not true. If their performance is adequate, most are more likely to get promoted just by staying on the force a certain number of years than for some specific outstanding act Second, they were trained to do the job they do out in the streets, not to fill out forms. All through their career it is the arrests and interventions that get noticed.

[C] “I’ve got a real problem with my officers. They come on the force as young, inexperienced men, and we send them out on the street, either in cars or on a beat. They seem to like the contact they have with the public, the action involved in crime prevention, and the apprehension of criminals. They also like helping people out at fires, accidents, and other emergencies.

[D] “Some people have suggested a number of things like using conviction records as a performance criterion. However, we know that’s not fair—too many other things are involved. Bad paperwork increases the chance that you lose in court, but good paperwork doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win. We tried setting up team competitions based on the excellence of the reports, but the guys caught on to that pretty quickly. No one was getting any type of reward for winning the competition, and they figured why should they labor when there was no payoff.

[E] “The problem occurs when they get back to the station. They hate to do the paperwork, and because they dislike it, the job is frequently put off or done inadequately. This lack of attention hurts us later on when we get to court. We need clear, factual reports. They must be highly detailed and unambiguous. As soon as one part of a report is shown to be inadequate or incorrect, the rest of the report is suspect. Poor reporting probably causes us to lose more cases than any other factor.

[F] “So I just don’t know what to do. I’ve been groping in the dark in a number of years. And I hope that this seminar will shed some light on this problem of mine and help me out in my future work.”

[G] A large metropolitan city government was putting on a number of seminars for administrators, managers and/or executives of various departments throughout the city. At one of these sessions the topic to be discussed was motivation—how we can get public servants motivated to do a good job. The difficulty of a police captain became the central focus of the discussion.

Order:

G→【G1】→【G2】→【G3】→【G4】→【G5】→F

[A] So next time your child counts using her fingers, or you see your employees spreading out information over their desks and walls, be reassured: they are not limited in their capacity to think well, nor are they handicapping their ability to do so. In fact, they are enhancing their ability to think. Your mind does not think like a computer, but it thinks with the objects (including computers) and people around you. And our capacity to think and reason well, at any given moment, depends as much on our cognitive abilities as it does on the richness—or paucity—of material things which sup-port our thinking and decision-making.

[B] Our ability to think and reason has been trained and tested in real world situations that restrict our ability to use our hands. For example, at school, children quickly learn to count “in their heads’ without using their fingers as props. The implicit assumption that underpins the practice is that truly intelligent behavior originates from the inner parts of the brain, and the brain alone. Recent research strongly challenges this assumption, showing instead that people’s thoughts, choices and insights can be transformed by physical interaction with things. In other words, thinking with your brain alone— like a computer does—is not equivalent to thinking with your brain, your eyes, and your hands—as humans frequently do. Consider a game of Scrabble: players naturally touch, move and re-arrange the tiles they receive. If thinking were simply done “in the head”, what’s the purpose of these moves?

[C] To put this to the test, researchers design thinking tasks under laboratory conditions during which people can physically interact with the properties of the problem. Interactivity inevitably benefits performance. In part this is because changes in the physical environment make it easier for people to remember what information they are considering. But also dynamically changing the problem’s configuration prompts new possibilities for action, or unveils new ways of solving problems. People are more creative and more efficient when solving problems with their hands: thinking is an embodied activity embedded in a physical environment.

[D] They also applied this approach to the study of complex statistical reasoning. Previous research had found that, depending on the ease of mentally representing the statistical information presented, between 11 percent and 40 percent of people succeeded in solving these reasoning problems using just pen and paper.

[E] In fact, these moves are integral to the process of generating words. As players reconfigure the physical properties of their environment, they are not simply making it easier for them to think; they are thinking. Moves can be deliberate or serendipitous. This suggests that thinking is fundamentally relational: it unfolds along a series of physical changes in the environment that at times affects, and at times is affected by, a series of biological changes in the brain.

[F] Researchers recently applied this approach to a study of creativity and insight. While posing a problem presented with a classic pencil and paper fonnat never led to a breakthrough, those who could use physical artefacts to build a model of the problem were much more likely to reach some insight, no matter the difference between the participants’ cognitive abilities.

[G] They presented the same information on a pack of cards that reasoners were free to spread out and rearrange in any way they preferred. Not all participants fully engaged with the cards—perhaps unwilling to be judged as poor thinkers for doing so. Yet, the success rate for those who made the most of this opportunity to use the material world to boost their thinking leapt to 75 percent.

【G1】→【G2】→【G3】→【G4】→D→【G5】→A

[A] This re-grown “secondary” forest is crucial to the pair’s analysis. Within a few decades of land being abandoned, half of the original biomass has returned. Depending on what else is nearby, these new forests may then be colonized by animals and additional plants, and thus support many of the species found in the original forest.

[B] Elizabeth Bennett, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, an American conservation group, agreed and mentioned that for large birds and mammals, uncontrolled hunting for food and for trade is causing a phenomenon known as “empty-forest syndrome”. She said that although many forests look healthy when viewed from a satellite, they are actually falling silent because many of their large animals have been removed for subsistence or profit.

[C] What everyone agreed, though, was that climate change is a threat. Even the optimistic Dr. Wright is worried because many tropical species evolved in an environment that has very little temperature variation, they are not equipped to cope with an increase of as little as 3°C, which is the sort of change that many climate scientists predict. He said that by the end of the century, 75% of tropical forests will be warmer than today, and what will remain in these hot, wet places is unknown.

[D] A rare piece of good news from the world of conservation: the global extinction crisis may have been overstated. The world is unlikely to lose 100 species a day, or half of all species in the lifetime of people now alive, as some have claimed. The bad news, though, is that the lucky survivors are tiny tropical insects that few people care about. The species that are being lost rapidly are the large vertebrates that conservationists were worried about in the first place.

[E] Dr. Wright and Dr. Muller-Landau therefore reckon that in 2030 reasonably unbroken tropical forest will still cover more than a third of its natural range, and after that date its area—at least in Latin America and Asia—could increase. Much of this woodland will be secondary forest, but even so they suggest that in Africa only 16-35% of tropical-forest species will become extinct by 2030, in Asia, 21-24% and, in Latin America, fewer still. Once forest cover does start increasing, the rate of extinction should diminish gradually.

[F] This new view of the prospects for biodiversity emerged from a symposium held this week at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, but the controversy over how bad things really are has been brewing since 2006. That was when Joseph Wright of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Helene Muller-Landau of the University of Minnesota first suggested that the damage might not be as grim as some feared. They reasoned that because population growth is slowing in many tropical countries, and people are moving to cities, the pressure to cut down primary rainforest is falling and agriculturally marginal land is being abandoned, allowing trees to grow.

[G] There are, however, two criticisms of this analysis. The first questions whether the raw data about forest cover are a good indicator of biodiversity, at least for big animals. William Laurance, a colleague of Dr. Wright’s, pointed out to the symposium that birds and mammals are more vulnerable to alterations in their habitat than are insects and other small animals. His data suggest that even in some of the world’s best-protected primary forests, these species face severe pressures.

【G1】→【G2】→【G3】→【G4】→G→【G5】