Reading Tips

　　Many workers are trapped by work clusters and the "invisible overtime" they bring. People have gotten off work, but the WeChat work group keeps ringing. Professionals point out that this is not only not conducive to improving work efficiency, but also affects employees' emotions.

　　Company groups, area groups, department groups, store groups, project groups, rectification feedback groups... On the eve of the Spring Festival, Yu Xin, who worked as a store supervisor in a chain restaurant in Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, wanted to send a photo with her baby to a group in Jiangxi Province. Parents in her hometown, but when she kept scrolling down the WeChat page and flipped through countless groups, it took a while to find the family WeChat group.

　　“My life is flooded by work groups.” There are as many as 56 WeChat work groups pinned to the top of Yu Xin’s list. For her, who is engaged in store supervision and walks "ten thousand steps" every day, the road that is longer than patrolling the store is "climbing stairs" in various group chats.

　　Yu Xin is not the only person in the workplace who is trapped by the crowd. After get off work and during holidays, those WeChat work group message reminders pop up at any time, making the work and life of more and more employees blurred.

Being "swallowed" by the crowd and dividing the boundaries between life and work

　　Although Zheng Qi's work group on WeChat is far less numerous than Yu Xin's, as a new media editor on the day shift, her work group is "busy" for much longer than Yu Xin's.

　　"Push this morning, please reply when you receive it." This was the first @ group reminder Zheng Qi received on the day she was interviewed by a reporter. The reception time was 3:18 in the morning. At 3:15, the same message was sent to the work group, but without @Zhengqi. At 3:19, after Zheng Qi replied "received", there were no more new messages in this work group.

　　The smart bracelet Zheng Qi wears records her average sleep duration every day: less than 5 hours and 2 hours of deep sleep. From 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., it is the short "sleep time" of her work group.

　　Replying "received", returning phone calls, checking data, revising manuscripts... In Zheng Qi's view, the workload caused by the instructions in the work group is not heavy, but the endless group messages are always "reminding" her , work never goes “offline.”

　　Watching work information "pop up" day and night, Zheng Qi lamented that offline work is limited by time and space, but in WeChat groups, a simple "@" can easily break the boundaries of work. What was originally an 8-hour job has become 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Zheng Qi laughed and said that she has become an "invisible overtime worker".

　　An organization released a survey report on the current situation of overtime work in the workplace. It shows that nearly 60% of the workplace workers surveyed said that they are in a "flexible overtime" mechanism. 84.7% of workplace workers still pay attention to work-related information after get off work. "Invisible overtime" has become a problem. Troubled.

“24-hour standby” brings fragmented consumption

　　“When I first started working as a store supervisor in 2018, I managed 5 chain stores every month. I sent the problems discovered during the store inspections to the store management team through the WeChat group. After the rectification, the store then sent the rectification pictures to the group, one after another. The efficiency has improved a lot." But now, the company has become larger, and Yu Xin has to inspect 13 stores every day. At the end of the day, dozens of work groups "bomb" her in turn, and she receives more than 1,200 group messages every day .

　　After working for more than 5 years, the number of WeChat groups on Yu Xin’s mobile phone has increased to 326, and the information is “piling up like a mountain”. In order to find the person in charge of promoting the rectification of store inspection issues in this massive amount of information, "group chat and climbing stairs" has become a required course for Yu Xin.

　　In the past two years, Yu Xin has become more and more sensitive to WeChat notification sounds. Her heartbeat speeds up and her nerves become tense... She is afraid of accidentally missing important information. "My whole person has become a lot more anxious."

　　"For a new project in the company, a group is established first; the team performs a task, and then a small group is established... Every work must establish a group, and the 'group' becomes the manager who drives the workers of the enterprise. Once you leave the group, you seem to lose everything. Management ability." According to Yuan Ling, a national-level entrepreneurship mentor, more and more people in the workplace are being sucked into the whirlpool of "artificial group service." Various work groups not only occupy workers' rest time, but also bring a heavy emotional burden to many people. Work groups are "on call 24 hours a day", forcing workers to bear the psychological pressure of timely response and consuming workers' energy in fragments. This is not only unhelpful to the improvement of work efficiency, but also affects the mood of employees.

　　"'Man-made group service' should be solved by people." Yuan Ling suggested that companies should build information aggregation platforms to liberate workers like Yu Xin from massive work groups and disorderly information flows, and eliminate the original chaos. Information is presented to employees in a clearer and orderly manner, allowing employees to process work information efficiently, reducing the burden caused by inefficient communication, and returning life to those who work hard in the workplace.

　　The catering company where Yu Xin works is about to undergo digital transformation. The digital catering management applet developed by the company will be launched soon, giving her the opportunity to experience "one-click shop inspection and one-click generation of rectification reports" and get rid of the anxiety of "being driven by a group".

Work group chats should also strictly adhere to the 8-hour working day

　　Not long ago, Zheng Qi posted a WeChat tweet asking, "If I reply to my work WeChat message after get off work, does it count as overtime?" In the article, an employee who works as a product operator at a technology company in Beijing submitted the "Holiday Community Official Account Duty Schedule" to the court, as well as her chat records with customers and colleagues, and asked the company to pay her for using her off-duty time and legal holidays to work with customers. More than 500 hours of overtime paid for answering questions in the group. The court ultimately recognized using WeChat to perform substantial labor after get off work as overtime according to law.

　　Zheng Qi carefully looked through the chat records in the work group. She found that she and her colleagues had unknowingly fallen into a similar "overtime trap". She didn't know how long she had worked overtime in the WeChat group. .

　　Recently, the Supreme People's Court, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions jointly released typical cases involving wage arrears disputes, clearly proposing to actively respond to new working methods in the digital economy, standardize new remuneration payment methods, and establish online overtime pay determination rules.

　　Ma Liang, a researcher at the National Institute of Development and Strategy at Renmin University of China and a professor at the School of Public Administration, believes that "invisible overtime" is often informal, discontinuous and fragmented, making it difficult for employers to assess and evaluate, and is unwilling to include it in overtime subsidies. category. How to measure labor time and intensity, and how to convert overtime pay for compensation, all require clearer and operable standards of action. Only by strengthening the supervision and law enforcement of labor rights and promoting employers to proactively account for and compensate employees for their "invisible overtime" can workers' rights and interests be effectively protected.

　　"There is no 'cost-effectiveness' in working overtime. It not only dampens labor enthusiasm, but also eliminates the positive value of work-earning." Huang Jiayan, a lawyer at Fujian Jinlei Law Firm, believes that workers who have paid substantial labor content or use social media to work are cyclical. If the work has fixed characteristics and obviously takes up rest time, it should be regarded as overtime work. Overtime pay shall be determined based on the labor provided by the employee occupying his rest time, and shall be determined as appropriate by comprehensively considering the employee's overtime frequency, duration, wage standards, work content and other factors. He called on work group chats to strictly abide by the 8-hour work system and allow workers to enjoy the "right to offline rest." (Some interviewees have pseudonyms)

　　Li Runzhao

　　(Worker Daily)