It's past midnight, but many staffers at Enplug, an advertising-technology company, are milling about the office in their T-shirts and boxers, writing code and talking strategy. Others are already in bed, sound asleep.
午夜已过，但在广告科技公司Enplug里，许多身穿T恤和短裤的员工还在办公室转来转去，忙着写代码和讨论策划。其他人都已经在床上酣然入睡。
Enplug's office is a six-bedroom, three-bathroom Ranch-style home in the ritzy Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Twelve of the company's 37 employees, including the chief executive, live and work there.
Enplug的办公室是位于洛杉矶豪华社区Bel Air的一套六卧三卫的牧场风格住宅。公司的37名员工中，包括首席执行长在内的12名员工都住在这里工作。
The idea is to live and breathe work -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- without the commute and few outside distractions.
理念就是全身心投入工作──一天24小时，一周七天──省去通勤之累和避免受到外部干扰。
Employees and managers meet, work, eat, clean, exercise and sleep in the same space. And while there are occasional uncomfortable moments, such as nudging your boss to do the dishes, companies like Enplug say it is good for professional relationships, saves on rent and travel costs and is often just plain fun. Employees who choose to live in such arrangements are generally single 20-somethings who have recently left dorm life.
员工和管理者在同一个地方见面、工作、吃饭、打扫、锻炼和睡觉。尽管偶尔会有尴尬的时候，比如提示老板去洗碗，但Enplug这样的公司表示，这样做有助于培养员工之间的关系、节省房租和通勤成本，有时候就是纯粹的好玩。选择这样做的员工一般都是刚离开宿舍生活不久的20多岁的单身年轻人。
'We don't try to separate work life from our personal life, ' says Nanxi Liu, the 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Enplug, which creates digital billboards, incorporating tweets and other social-media streams. 'It's a little bit cultish, ' she says. 'It is also extremely efficient.'
Enplug专做数字广告牌，并将推特消息和其他社交媒体内容融入其中。其创始人兼首席执行长、23岁的Nanxi Liu说：“我们并不会刻意把工作和个人生活分开。”她说：“这种方式有点另类，但同时也极其有效率。”
At the Enplug house, work literally gets done around the clock. Engineers often pull all-night coding sessions and roll out of bed around midday, while account managers wake up hours earlier to attend client meetings that are typically held offsite in cafes or clients' offices.
在Enplug，员工们工作起来是名副其实的连轴转。工程师常常是通宵写代码，到中午才睡觉，而客户经理会早起几个小时参加通常在公司外咖啡厅或客户办公室举行的客户会议。
'We work 24/7. We code. We go to bed. We wake up. We code, ' says Alex Ross, 23, the firm's chief technology officer and one of Ms. Liu's roommates.
23岁的首席技术官亚历克斯•罗斯(Alex Ross)说：“我们7x24小时都在工作，写代码，睡觉，起床，写代码。” 亚历克斯也是Liu的一个室友。
Enplug's five co-founders, most of them recently out of college, started rooming together last year to save money, working out of their apartment -- a familiar scenario for many startups.
Enplug的五位创始人多数都刚大学毕业。从去年开始，他们为了省钱住在一起，在公寓里办公──很多初创公司都有类似状况。
But as the company grew, they maintained their live-work arrangement. Instead of renting a separate office space, the Enplug staff simply moved into a bigger house.
但随着公司发展壮大，他们依然保持着居住办公在一起的状态。Enplug员工并没有租住单独的办公空间，而是搬进了一套更大的房子。
Most of the staffers living in the house get paid a modest stipend in lieu of salary, while the founders forgo salaries altogether, funneling company earnings back into rent, utilities and large boxes of Cheerios. Chores such as housecleaning and dishes are shared among the roommates and a maid comes in once a month to clean, but there are basically no formal house rules.
住在这里的大多数员工都拿的是微薄的津贴而不是薪水，而创始人们都放弃了薪水，将公司的收入用来付房租和水电费以及购买大盒Cheerios上。打扫房间和洗碗等杂务由室友分摊，每个月会有一个阿姨来打扫。但基本上没有正式的住宿规定。
Two Enplug employees got married to each other just weeks before moving into the house in November.
两名Enplug员工在去年11月搬进公司的几周前结婚了。
'We were a little skeptical living together with lots of people in the house, ' says Bruno Denuit-Wojcik, who moved in with his wife Justyna. The couple, both Enplug software developers in their 30s, say the practical perks, such as free food and rent, make up for the lack of privacy.
Bruno Denuit-Wojcik和妻子Justyna都是30多岁，均在Enplug担任软件开发工程师。Bruno说：“当时我们对和那么多人住在一起有点顾虑。”但他俩说，免费食物和房租等实际的福利抵消了缺乏隐私的不足。
There are no data available on the number of companies where employees live together on-site, but Nancy Rothbard, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has studied boundaries among employees, says that these closely tied firms face many of the same challenges as family businesses. 'The boundaries become very blurred, ' says Dr. Rothbard. 'If you have a bad day at work, the good news is you can talk about it with someone who can understand. The bad news is you can't just detach.'
目前没有数据统计有多少公司采用这种居住工作一体化的方式，但研究过企业与员工之间界限的宾夕法尼亚大学(University of Pennsylvania)沃顿商学院(Wharton School)管理学教授南希•罗斯巴德(Nancy Rothbard)说，这些员工关系紧密的公司也面临许多和家族企业同样的挑战。他说：“员工之间的界限变得很模糊，如果你某天工作不顺，好处是你可以和了解的人说说，但坏处是你没办法摆脱 。”
Meanwhile, commercial ventures are cropping up to provide co-housing spaces for startup employees.
与此同时，风投公司们也开始为初创公司的员工提供合住住房。
CrashPad, which launched this spring and now has three houses in the Boston area, offers tech workers communal living spaces where they can sleep, share a kitchen, get some work done during the day and schmooze about startup life.
CrashPad是一家今年春天上线的网站，目前在波士顿地区有三套房子。公司为技术工作人员提供集体住宿空间，他们可以睡觉、共享厨房，白天做一部分工作，还可以聊聊创业生活。
Would-be residents must apply -- there is a waitlist, says co-founder Jennifer Fremont-Smith -- and are selected with skills diversity in mind, mixing coders with marketing experts and designers. CrashPad's co-founders recently received venture-capital funding to expand the co-housing concept into other cities.
想住的员工必须提出申请──创始人珍妮弗•弗里蒙特-史密斯(Jennifer Fremont-Smith)说有一个等候名单──公司会按照技能多元化的原则来选，把程序员、营销人员和设计师组合在一起。CrashPad创始人最近拿到了风投资金，用以将合住的概念扩大到其他城市。
The houses are furnished and include private 'cloffices' -- small closet-size offices -- allowing residents to brainstorm. The rent typically is about $1, 200 a month per person and residents are only expected to stay for three or four months, until their startups get off the ground.
房子都有家具，而且有包括衣橱大小的私密小隔间，员工可以在这里进行头脑风暴。房租一般是每月每人1,200美元（约合人民币7,300元）左右，员工的居住时间一般是三或四个月，等到他们的创业公司顺利起步。
Steve McGarry lived in the CrashPad for three months starting in March after moving to the Boston area from North Carolina. Within three weeks of moving in, Mr. McGarry started a company with his new roommate and met a key business adviser at one of the house events.
史蒂夫•麦加里(Steve McGarry)在CrashPad住了三个月，他是3月份从北卡罗来纳州搬到波士顿地区的。在搬进去的三个月里，麦加里和新室友创立了一家公司，并在一次公司活动中遇到了一位重要的商业顾问。
It isn't just startups that are co-housing employees. At Whirlpool Corp., sales trainees live together for about 10 weeks in the 'Real Whirled House, ' inspired by MTV's 'The Real World' reality show.
为员工提供住宿的不仅仅是创业公司。在惠而浦公司(Whirlpool Corp.)，销售培训生会在“Real Whirled House”集体住大约10周，其房子灵感来自MTV真人秀节目《真实世界》(The Real World)。
Sales recruits share an eight-bedroom, eight-bathroom condo complex in St. Joseph, Mich., that is filled with Whirlpool brand appliances as well as products from competitors. Residents cook, clean and entertain clients and colleagues together. The idea behind the program is to immerse recruits in an appliance-rich environment so they become experts on the products they'll be selling, and to bond with their colleagues.
销售新人们住在密歇根州St. Joseph一套八卧八卫的共管公寓里，房子里都是惠而浦的品牌家电，还有竞争对手的产品。员工们一起做饭、打扫和招待客户及同事。这个项目背后的理念是让新人们处在一个有大量家电的环境里，这样他们就会成为自己将要销售的产品的专家，而且还可以与同事培养感情。
Allison Gillespie, who completed the program in 2004 and now helps run its alumni group says that the company wants recruits to have hands-on experience.
艾莉森•吉莱斯皮(Allison Gillespie)于2004年完成了这个项目，现在在帮忙管理已完成项目者团体。她说，公司想让新人拥有实践经验。
There can be awkward moments when staffers live together.
员工住在一起会有尴尬的时刻。
FiveStars Inc., a San Francisco customer-loyalty service that employs about 100 people nationwide, rents houses in cities across the country, including Denver and Los Angeles, in which staffers can work and sleep.
旧金山从事客户忠实服务的公司FiveStars Inc.在全国有大约100名员工，它在包括丹佛和洛杉矶在内的各大城市都租了供员工工作和休息的房子 。
Last year, FiveStars CEO and co-founder Victor Ho, 27, and his roommate Eric Burdullis, 25, the company's head of operations, were giving each other performance reviews on the living room couch in full view of their colleagues, some of whom are also roommates.
去年，在同事们的注视下，FiveStars 27岁的首席执行长兼创始人 Victor Ho和他25岁的室友及公司运营总监埃里克•布尔杜里斯( Eric Burdullis)在客厅沙发上为对方做业绩评估，其中有些同事也是室友。
At the end of an intense two-hour conversation, there was no place to retreat, so the two 'ended up back on the couch with a beer, ' says Mr. Burdullis. After that, they decided to take future feedback sessions to a nearby bar.
布尔杜里斯说，两小时的紧张对话结束时，由于没有其他地方休息，两人“最后又回到沙发那里喝啤酒”。后来，他们决定把以后反馈会议的地点改到附近的一个酒吧。
|
