Alibaba Group has announced that it is eliminating the weekly personal summary report expected of its employees, as well as pointless PowerPoint presentations, in a bid to discourage inefficiency and reduce overtime, media reported on Monday.
“We strive for efficiency, and unnecessary forms only add to the burden,” a representative from Alibaba said.
The majority of netizens voting on several social media platforms supported the cancellation of the weekly reports and praised Alibaba’s decision after the announcement was made.
According to employees, a handful of managers said privately that a number of additional nonessential meetings will also be phased out, including some daily online morning meetings.
Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of Alibaba, has also announced that weekly reports are no longer a necessity, according to media reports.
Chinese internet companies have long favored a culture of submitting weekly reports, considering it an important method of performance appraisal and a helpful way to strengthen their teams’ synchronicity. Through the weekly reports, supervisors are able to keep abreast of employees’ progress, and it helps employees monitor their own productivity more effectively.
However, on a practical level, weekly reports have become a formality for frontline employees, with many saying that no matter what they write in their weekly reports, few of their managers actually read them. Instead, supervisors were evaluating the quality of employees’ work based on the length of the report, which not only wasted time, but piled unnecessary pressure onto employees.
The weekly report is one of the reasons so many tech companies’ employees work overtime, giving rise to the famed “996” working week: working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week, including at companies such as Huawei and Alibaba.
“I work for Alibaba. I finished working at six on Friday because now I don’t need to write the weekly report. It feels like heaven,” an employee wrote on the social media platform.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. makes a strong debut on the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange Tuesday with its share price rising 6.59 percent on the first trading day. Ten partners from around the world attend the listing ceremony. Photo: Xinhua
