Jumpstarting Remote Working in China
The Corona-lockdown has made companies realize that they need to be effectively set up for effective remote working, much like SARS made people realize the value of e-commerce.
China has gone back to work but will the nature of work be the same again? I’ve seen a lot of SARS comparisons but one of the most interesting is the growth of “new economy” companies during and after the SARS period. The creation and subsequent growth of Taobao (Alibaba’s e-commerce platform) ranks as one of the mega-growth stories of that period. Now, it is easy to say in hindsight that such a development would have happened anyway in China but that’s not necessarily the case. At the time, mobile and internet infrastructure was hardly developed. The SARS outbreak started in November 2002; it was only the year before in 2001 that China's 10 major backbone networks signed interconnection agreements to facilitate cross-regional traffic on the Internet. The iPhone wouldn’t be invented for years! Consumer and business behaviour had not adapted to e-commerce then but really got accelerated, just as communication behaviour in the enterprise hasn’t fully adapted to what is possible with mobile and the internet but is getting there very quickly.
Corona appears to be the catalyst for change in the workplace just like SARS was for e-commerce, and improvement of office productivity, especially around digital communication and work management, should be a major theme going forward.
What’s happening now?
The growth of China’s service sector means that for an increasing number of companies, remote working has finally become an option. Culturally, it hasn’t really been accepted practice in many companies to allow their employees to work remotely but this is definitely changing. Recently released government guidelines into the proposed treatment of employees during these times explicitly calls for offering remote working as an option.
Large scale experiments have shown that there is a meaningful increase in productivity and happiness if workers that carry out “routine” roles have an option to work from home (as long as their contribution is effectively measured). More complex roles that require a lot of communication between different parties, and a lot of face to face to communication naturally find it harder to work in a dispersed manner. However, firms like Elastic have shown that it is possible to build great products and build a viable business with distributed teams.
There are a number of software solutions that are currently available in China to facilitate remote working. I’ll try and dig into these in more details in another post but the main ones are:
Certain (non-Google, non-Facebook) collaboration/productivity tools such as Microsoft Office 365 (run by 21Vianet in China) and Skype (owned by Microsoft) do work in China to some extent, although most do not (including popular communication apps such as Slack).
WeChat Work - the Enterprise version of the well-known consumer mega-app owned by Tencent. Comes complete with the ability to integrate neatly into WeChat’s consumer-facing application which is definitely a killer feature given the popularity of WeChat as an overall communication framework. Has an ecosystem of 3rd party applications that are built on top of the platform to enable feature expansion. Apart from chat, core features include task management, video conferencing, calls and payments (such as salaries or 红包) together with all of the permissions and policies that an organisation needs to function effectively. It appears that the WeChat team has upped their release cadence of new features during the Coronavirus lockdown which seems to have led to a significant demand uplift.
Dingtalk - owned by Alibaba. Has a similar set of features to WeChat Work but without the integration with WeChat (naturally) and doesn’t seem to have the 3rd party app ecosystem that WeChat Work has either. On a side note, both Dingtalk and WeChat Work seem to also be used in the schools to allow teachers to connect with students during the lockdown so even the next generation is being trained to use these!
XYLink (小鱼易连) - which is a video conferencing platform similar to Zoom (which, funnily enough, was founded by a Chinese engineer working in the US) and in which Tencent is a strategic investor (Series C).
Lark/Feishu (飞书) - The parent company of TikTok, BtyeDance, released a Slack-like enterprise communication offering named Lark in April 2019 which targeted markets outside of China. Lark was later modified for the domestic Chinese market under the name "Fei Shu" (飞书), with lessons taken from the international deployment experience.
There are a number of Dropbox style storage tools available that facilitate cloud file management.
So what’s next?
Businesses in China have only just started getting equipped for the realities of remote working. Productivity when working remotely is not just a function of using the types of tools mentioned above (although that is a necessary condition), it also requires having the right types of policies in place to govern the way that people communicate with each other, and the type of mindset that can deal with being in a different kind of workplace. Knowing when to speak in a private chat, or create a specific channel for a particular purpose, or to initiate a video call are all things that can be very distracting and offputting if not handled in the right way. Businesses will need to spend more time thinking carefully about the nature of the people that they have, as well as the way they choose to work before they can put these into place effectively. There probably needs to be a change in management thinking so that this can happen properly. Many managers will not have been trained to think about how to structure this aspect of their employee’s workflow.
Given that we are in the early stages of this trend, expect more apps to keep coming out, each with their take on a particular facet of the overall remote working problem. We can expect more fragmentation before eventual consolidation of interest takes place. To cope with all of these different apps, I would imagine we will get something similar to what Dropbox is trying to build with their Smart Workplace that aims to consolidate all of these different ways of interacting or Tandem which can signal which tool a team member is using at any given time. Ultimately though, more so than anywhere else, it is possible (and probably likely) that one of the existing, ubiquitous platform players like Tencent or Alibaba will end up dominating quickly. Regardless of what the industry structure looks ultimately looks like, expect new features to come through at a really fast pace, and a lot of trial and error in product design.
We’re still too far away from having a credible AR or VR solution to more “realistic” face to face communication so a lot of the progress in terms of product design will be more incremental rather than revolutionary. However, that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that the benefits to working people, and the way that they can live their lives, should be meaningful!