#182 Is working from home feasible in China? 线上办公可行吗？

Hello everyone! Welcome back to MaoMi Chinese!

It’s been quite a while since the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, many people were working from home, doing online work. “Online” means on the internet, and “work” refers to tasks done on the computer. Some people enjoy working online, while others feel it’s not ideal. Recently, a company’s boss asked all of his employees to work online. Do his employees like it? Will online work improve the company? Today, let’s discuss this together!

The boss of this company is named Gal Yosef. He’s Israeli, speaks excellent Chinese, and even started a company in Beijing. This year, he made a major decision: he asked all his employees to leave the office and work from home online. At first, his family and friends thought he was mad. People asked him, “Won’t this lower your employees’ productivity?” Lower productivity means working slowly and not producing good results. You can also say someone has high productivity, meaning they work quickly and well. Let’s listen to how Gal Yosef responded:

“At first, I was indeed worried that productivity would drop. I was concerned that people would become disconnected and not take their work seriously. But what happened? Over the past six months, it’s been the exact opposite. These six months have been the most productive ever.”

He said that at first, he was worried about low productivity and people becoming disconnected. Here, “disconnected” means that since everyone is apart, they might not want to work together, and teamwork would suffer. However, after six months, he found that wasn’t the case at all. During this period, their productivity was extremely high, the highest it’s ever been. So why is that? Gal Yosef gave these reasons:

First, his company is in Beijing. After switching to online work, his employees no longer had to commute. His company is in the city centre, and to save money, his employees lived far from the centre, where rent is cheaper. But commuting to and from work took a long time, and Beijing’s traffic is often congested during rush hours. Gal Yosef said, “One of my employees used to spend three hours on the road every day. I completely understand why he had no energy when he got to work. If he worked overtime until nine and didn’t get home until eleven at night, you can imagine how exhausted he was. But now? He just wakes up in the morning, washes his face, grabs a coffee, and opens his laptop to start working. Isn’t that great?” He said his employees no longer have to spend three hours commuting, and now they can work from home, which is really “爽”—a Chinese word meaning comfortable and enjoyable in this context.

Second, Gal Yosef said he really trusts his employees. Some bosses require their employees to clock in and out every day because they don’t trust them to finish their work on time, so they feel the need to pressure them. He thinks this is wrong. He believes that only by trusting employees can they do their best work. Third, his employees often have to travel for work. Travelling for work means going to other places for business purposes. He believes that online work has made travelling for business easier. Fourth, online work has saved him a lot of money—he no longer has to pay for office rent, water, or electricity. Each year, he saves 500,000 RMB.

Many people online have said they would love to work for Gal Yosef’s company because they’re tired of commuting every day. Others have said that in China, many companies can’t switch to online work because they’re too big and have too many employees. If everyone worked from home, there would likely be people who would slack off. Some believe that only small companies can work online. What do you think? Feel free to leave us a comment and share your thoughts!