ou are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Corporate culture instilled online A. At its most basic, the Internet is a wonderful way to communicate. Hit that "send" button and off goes the email to everybody in the firm and beyond. No wonder companies find it a perfect way to talk to their staff. No wonder it is so useful—but also so dangerous—when staff want to talk to each other. B. Over and over again, the Internet's uses turn out to go beautifully with current trends. As companies become more fragmented and their workers more geographically dispersed, managers need a way to rally the troops. In particular, they need a way to build a corporate culture: that intangible something that binds employees together and teaches them to understand instinctively the defining qualities of the business and the appropriate way to respond to any issue that confronts them. The Internet provides the means to do this. C. In a stable, slow-growing, and well-established company, a common culture may be easy to maintain. But few companies today can afford to be stable or slow-growing. Instability and speed make culture-creation harder. In many companies, for instance, the sales or the maintenance people rarely come into the office. A quarter of IBM's workforce, for instance, is now mobile—they spend at least 80 percent of their time off-site, usually working from home or on the road. Key people may be based in key markets abroad, a day's air travel away from the main office. D. You need also consider mergers (公司合并), which create a need to persuade a new bunch of employees to abandon one corporate creed for another. As companies outsource (外包) more and more activities, too, they look for ways to teach their subcontractors to share their values. And the faster things change, the more important it becomes to explain to employees what is happening, and why. E. How to do it? "In a rapidly changing and geographically distributed organization," says Michael Morris, a social psychologist at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, "you don't have the option of the drink after work." But you do have the Internet. More than any previous technology, it allows companies to ensure that every employee has access to the corporate news, views, and vision. F. Some companies use it to teach their employees (as well as suppliers and customers) their ethical code. Boeing, for instance, offers an online "ethics challenge" where employees can test their moral instincts on such delicate issues as "acceptance of business courtesies" and "the minister drops a hint." Such applications are a way to spread a common approach throughout an organization. G. The Internet is also a way for bosses to tell staff where they want the business to go. For example, at Ford, which claims to have the world's largest intranet, 170,000 staff around the world are emailed a weekly "Let's chat" note from Jac Nasser, the chief executive. A purpose-built newsroom maintains a website upgraded several times a day, and available to Ford's employees around the world. H. Not only does the Internet allow managers to talk to their staff; it lets them track whether the staff are at least pretending to listen. William Nuti, president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for Cisco Systems, a high-tech giant, produces a monthly video to send to his staff explaining where the business is going. What happens if the staff don't choose to watch? Well, the Internet allows you to track who opens an email and when. "I know everyone who clicks on it, and those who throw it away, and I make phone calls to people, saying it's important you watch this." Unsurprisingly, Mr. Nuti's viewing figures are high. I. But all this communication from on high can sometimes cause problems. SAP, a German business-software giant, is another company with an elaborate communications system. It allows material to be broadcast on the car radios of workers on the road, for example. The company found that middle managers objected to the chairman emailing all employees. Their authority had rested partly on their role as a source of information, and without it they felt exposed. As so often with Internet-driven changes, the implications of what appeared to be a simple, time-saving innovation turned out to be more complex and politically sensitive. That sensitivity becomes more acute as communications become increasingly bottom-up as well as top-down. At Siemens, a large German company, Chittur Ramakrishnan, the chief information officer, has noticed a "very significant number of emails to top management. The idea of going through a secretary to get an appointment has changed. People can send emails to anyone and expect a response. It is very democratizing." J. Despite all these, companies find all sorts of routine tasks can be done online with greater efficiency and less expense. As a result, "B2E"—business-to-employee—applications are flourishing. They may be the biggest growth area for Internet applications over the next couple of years. They include many tasks involving staff matters, the creation of an internal job market, and training. One of the strengths of the Internet over previous systems is that it can be used to provide services to everyone in a company. K. A growing number of companies now have a "corporate portal": a centralized home page with links to various services and items of information to attract the staff to keep looking in. Click, and there is a map of each floor of the office; click again, and there are photographs and personal details about who sits where. Elsewhere on the page there may be links to the online services of the human resources department, or the day's news clippings (剪报), or a page allowing workers to order office supplies or find telephone numbers. L. The good thing about such pages is that they are accessible not only to employees in head office, but also to people in distant subsidiaries, on the road, or at home. Increasingly, employees can personalize their page, so that if they are working in the marketing department they do not receive a flood of news clippings on irrelevant subjects. Companies with lots of old computer systems can use the home page as the entrance to a network designed to pull all the old systems together. M. Next, there is the prospect of turning the corporate workforce into a marketplace. It is an advertiser's dream: a stable group of people with regular pay and a known employer. Why not, for instance, offer a link from the page that informs an employee of her holiday entitlements to a travel company with which the company already does corporate business, and which will offer discounts on leisure travel? Why not charge local restaurants for the occasional advertisement? N. Indeed, this is already starting to happen. For instance, Exult, a consultancy to which BP subcontracts much of its human resources work, is discussing just such a proposition with companies offering financial services. But how will businesses feel about encouraging their staff to hunt for a home loan when they should be finishing a presentation? Alan Little, Exult's head of global client relationships, replies robustly that, if employees can work from home at the weekend on their company laptop, then surely they should be allowed to book their holidays from the office on a weekday. They should be judged by results. 1. The Internet does a better job than any other technology in helping employees get the news and views of their organizations.
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