Coronavirus Is Making Life Hell for China’s Tech Workers

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A relentless office schedule dubbed “996”—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, plus overtime—has long been a burdensome reality for China’s tech workers. With the new coronavirus outbreak forcing hundreds of thousands of the sector’s employees to log in remotely, they’re discovering that working from home can be even worse.

Instead of bringing employees greater freedom, telecommuting means professional life is encroaching even more on private life, as bosses subject workers to hourslong conference calls, regular check-ins to ensure they’re not slacking off, and expectations that they’ll be available 24/7. Compounding the problem are unstable virtual office tools that frustrate smooth communication, stymieing productivity and deepening the sense of seclusion.

China’s notorious tech culture—espoused by business leaders including Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma for driving productivity—was already starting to encounter resistance from workers, as the biggest slump in the sector since the 2008 financial crisis spurred mounting job losses. The worsening morale among the country’s tech foot soldiers, some in isolation weeks before the virus spread beyond China’s borders, might be a lesson for the world’s corporations contemplating similar contingency plans on how not to do work-from-home.

A recently hired employee at the Shenzhen branch of ByteDance Inc., which owns TikTok, has yet to meet her colleagues in person because the epidemic forced the company to temporarily shut down its offices. The product specialist, who asked to be identified only by her surname, Huang, says her days are so packed with teleconferencing—brainstorming sessions with her team can last four hours—that she can start to tackle her workload in earnest only at night. “I feel I’m enduring the pressure of work, but not enjoying the benefits,” Huang says. “I didn’t even get to know my new colleagues. I’m just a machine that works all the time.”

Mobile applications manager Stella Ma’s mornings start with a team conference call that she takes from bed. After briefing her manager, the 28-year-old hits mute, brushes her teeth, and downs a bowl of oatmeal before settling in at her dining room table for an additional 12 hours or more on her laptop. Ma says she’s putting in longer days than ever. “I was stupid to think working from home was easy,” says Ma, who asked that her company’s name not be disclosed. Sunny Chen, a 26-year-old Beijing-based product manager in NetEase Inc.’s online education unit, also says she’s facing a heavier workload than usual because of increased demand for remote learning during the public-health crisis. “Being on standby 24/7 is more of a norm under the work-from-home situation,” Chen says.

Managers at Huawei Technologies Co. are keeping tabs on attendance by requiring workers to complete a survey about their health condition every day before 9:30 a.m., according to Allen Chen, a 26-year-old engineer at Huawei’s research institute in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated. A Huawei spokesman said the checks were intended to monitor the health of workers, not their attendance.

Without regular check-ins, employees might not be working, says Gu Xi, chief marketing officer at online education startup Higgz Technology in Beijing. Gu, 25, had tightened supervision over her team of more than 10 during about three weeks of remote working. She demanded that staffers reply to all messages on WeChat Work, Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s virtual office app, within 20 minutes, and she monitored who was the quickest to read her recommended reading items sent via the app as early as 7 a.m. At the end of each day, staffers had to rank their performance on a scale from 2 to 10. “If I’m not harsh, the employees might be working out at home during the office hours,” Gu says. In the past few days, Higgz has let workers come back to the office to improve productivity. They sit at every other desk and wear masks.

Search firm Baidu Inc. estimated that more than 40% of the country’s businesses still had office shutdowns in place as of March 3, citing data collected via its map service. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the e-commerce giant that serves as a barometer for the world’s No. 2 economy, warned last month of a “significant” hit to revenue for the quarter ending in March because people such as merchants, couriers, and factory workers couldn’t get to their jobs. Thousands of its employees are still working from their homes in Hangzhou, where Alibaba has its headquarters. That city has imposed some of the harshest quarantine and virus-prevention measures outside of Wuhan.

The need for greater trust between employees and management, and for better tools to accommodate mass telecommuting, are among takeaways China’s tech companies should consider after their remote working experience during the outbreak, says Alvin Foo, managing director of Reprise Digital, a Shanghai digital ad agency. “It’s a wake-up call for companies to be really looking into building a more resilient organization,” Foo says. After all 400 of the company’s employees worked remotely for two weeks, Reprise Digital now allows half back to the office on a rotating basis. “Meeting people in person also allows you to build back the momentum that has been lost during the outbreak,” Foo says.

Eric Zhu, 35, a game developer in Beijing, got a glimpse of what the return to the office might look like when he had to go to his company’s headquarters to turn his desktop computer’s power on—so he could continue accessing files from home—after a security guard had shut it down. The place was empty and reeked of disinfectant. “I risked my life,” he says, half-jokingly. Before heading out, he left a post-it on his monitor reminding others not to switch the computer off. Zhu, who asked that his company’s name be withheld, is apprehensive about being in close contact again with colleagues and commuters. For him, telecommuting hasn’t been more arduous, he says. “We are result-oriented, as long as you finish your job before the deadline, no one cares what you do in the middle.”

A growing number of major companies are making work-from-home recommendations as the virus infects more people around the world, and as health authorities put in place containment measures in regions with the greatest number of cases. The tech sector, in particular, has been an early mover: Apple Inc. is encouraging employees in Silicon Valley to work from home as an additional precaution against the outbreak, joining Alphabet, Microsoft, and Twitter.

Global firms may not encounter the same lower employee morale tied to working from home as in China, where the broader corporate culture doesn’t put a high priority on the well-being of staff, says Marlon Mai, Shanghai-based managing director with recruitment consultancy Morgan McKinley. “China has yet to enter the stage where you can truly have work-life balance and where companies have people’s needs foremost in mind,” Mai says. “Internet firms have turned 996 into a default setting, and other companies are following suit. To put it bluntly, workers in this sector are just exchanging their time for money.”

--With assistance from Yuan Gao.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, Colum Murphy

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