Tencent vows to improve work-life balance after fresh 996 criticism of worker’s 20-hour shift

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On Wednesday, WeCom chief Ted Huang Tieming, one of the managers targeted by Zhang, said in the company’s internal forum that long working hours are “unsustainable”. He also thanked Zhang, who joined the team two months ago, for raising the issue, according to two company sources.

“I’m very grateful to everyone who worked hard for the project and the product, and I’m ashamed that everyone had to work so hard for this,” Huang said. “This incident also reminds us once again that high intensity work … will inevitably affect everyone’s work-life balance and health.”

Huang also said that management is already trying to improve the situation with better work planning and scheduling and that he will later discuss reasonable working hours with team members. The evaluation of workers’ job performance would not be based on working hours, he added.

Tencent confirmed Huang’s comments but declined to comment further.

WeCom is Tencent’s workplace collaboration tool that competes with similar software like Lark and DingTalk from ByteDance, from Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post. WeCom is used by 130 million people in 5.5 million organizations, according to data released by Tencent this month.

Zhang’s rebellion has again sparked discussions on social media about 996, a shorthand for the notoriously long working hours of China’s tech sector that refers to an unofficial but widely adopted schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

The incident was one of the most searched topics on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo on Wednesday, with more than 250 million views and 320,000 discussions surrounding the topic. Many netizens expressed admiration for Zhang’s stance against the tech giant, calling him a “hero.”

“I am grateful for young people like him, who help me believe that our society will change for the better,” read one of the most popular comments.

Complaints about excessive working hours at tech companies have been commonplace on the internet in China in recent years. A now-deleted collaborative spreadsheet that encouraged people to share information about their company’s working hours was widely circulated last year, attracting contributions from employees of Chinese internet giants including Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan and Tencent.

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