What has changed in Ctrip's hybrid office experiment?

Among the reasons Ctrip employees support hybrid work, reducing commuting time is the first. (Visual China/Photo)

"30 years from now, when technology is more advanced, people will look back and wonder how there could be such a thing as an office." Virgin Group founder Richard Branson once said so.

The global spread of COVID-19 has accelerated this process. Many large companies have started working from home. Microsoft allows employees to work remotely forever, and companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple have also begun to implement a hybrid office model in which offices and remote work coexist.

On February 14, 2022, Ctrip announced that it will officially implement the "3+2" remote work model on March 1, allowing employees to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays, covering 30,000 employees in the group, regardless of gender, non-duty, and no salary adjustment.

Ctrip CEO Liang Jianzhang responded to southern weekend reporters that Ctrip may be the first Chinese company to try (mixed office). This will help Ctrip use global talent to improve its competitiveness. There are also many positive social effects of mixed office, including alleviating commuting pressure, alleviating the pressure of buying a house brought about by high housing prices, benefiting the development of suburbs and small cities in large cities, balancing work and family life, increasing fertility rates, and so on.

He hopes that in the future, more Chinese companies can try the hybrid office model.

Mixed office trials for up to six months

In 2021, Ctrip launched a hybrid office experiment within the group.

In August of that year, Zhao Min received a notice from the team leader that he was selected to participate in Ctrip's hybrid office trial. Including her, two colleagues from her team became pilots of the trial. Min Zhao joined Ctrip in 2003 to provide business support to the technology department.

As early as 2010, Zhao Min had heard that the company had done a hybrid office experiment, but it was only carried out in the Ctrip call center. When he heard that the company was going to start the mixed office, Zhao Min took the initiative to sign up and fill out a questionnaire.

According to the data provided by Ctrip, 76% of the employees who participated in the employee survey at the beginning of the trial involved technical, product, business, marketing and functional positions, and 76% of the employees voluntarily signed up. The trial lasted from August 2021 to January 2022 and was divided into trial group and control group.

After consulting with the leaders, Zhao Min adopted a "1+4" hybrid office model, working from home on Wednesdays, "the company does not have mandatory regulations that it must be two days, which can be determined according to the actual situation of the team." Zhao Min will put the work that needs to be done independently on the day of working from home, and the work that needs to be communicated on the other four days.

Liang Jianzhang told Southern Weekend reporters that the start of the home office experiment, the epidemic is a fortuitous opportunity, although it brings trouble to work and life, but also leaves a "legacy" of the remote work system. While people are accustomed to telecommuting, the facilities for remote work have gradually improved, especially many years ago, they have prepared for information security and IT support.

Sun Ya, an employee of Ctrip's R&D department, also believes that during the epidemic, everyone has to work from home, and the safety of employees is more secure. Now instant messaging, remote transmission software is mature, as long as the office environment is good, the company's internal networking facilities can ensure the needs of remote office.

A number of employees involved in Ctrip's mixed office trial told Southern Weekend that Ctrip did not set attendance regulations for the home office system. "The first criterion is your output, which is the degree of project completion." Sun Ya said.

But Sun Ya also admitted that his job should ensure stable online operation, even if it is working from home, it is necessary to ensure real-time online. If there is an emergency, he will also cooperate with the arrangement to rush to the company.

As the initiator of the mixed office system, Liang Jianzhang believes that in addition to the service industry or factory, almost all the work that can be done in the office can be done remotely, and the proportion of this part in large cities is quite high. The mixed office model is a balance in which employees have time to work independently, and the remaining three days are not only solved for work problems, but also emotional communication between colleagues.

Spending energy on this half-year-long experiment, Liang Jianzhang's intention is more to use data to demonstrate, so that employees, management and all sectors of society can see the good effects of mixed office.

Reduces commuting stress and increases happiness

According to trial data released by Ctrip, after the end of the half-year trial period, employee support for mixed office increased from 52.9% to 59.2%. Of the employees who support mixed-work, the proportion of very supportive is 60%, and among the reasons for employee support, reducing commuting time is the first, followed by work-life balance, and the third is happier and more creative.

Sun Ya, who has been employed at Ctrip for two years, lives in Shanghai's Putuo District, and it takes about an hour to drive from the company, and the traffic jam is longer, "after arriving at the company, it takes time to calm down the emotions to enter the working state."

Sometimes, Sun Ya also tried to take the subway to work, using the commute fragment time to read books, and the result was that "I can't see at all, at most listen to the radio."

Sun Ya admitted that working from home does not rule out extending working hours, but this is not the norm. Even in the office, there are situations where overtime is required. The difference is that the working hours from home can be flexibly adjusted, the working hours become longer, and it does not make people feel tired.

Compared with Sun Ya, Xu Jing lives in the farther Jiading District, nearly thirty kilometers from the work site, and it takes more than three hours to drive back and forth. In order to avoid the rush hour, Xu Jing can only choose to arrive at the company earlier.

In this mixed office experiment, reducing commuting time was the most impressive point for Xu Jing.

Li Dan, who just joined Ctrip in 2021, was not selected for Ctrip's hybrid office pilot group, but she is looking forward to the full implementation of this system throughout the company. She had heard that the heads of the department were generally in favor of the new rules, and that there were no special conditions to be met to apply for mixed office.

Southern Weekend reporters randomly contacted employees of Internet companies such as ByteDance and Tencent, and most employees recognized the mixed office system, especially reducing commuting time can increase personal time for employees.

Zhao Min, who has worked at Ctrip for more than ten years, has long been accustomed to the work rhythm of daily commuting, and the reason why she actively signed up to work from home is that she can better balance life and work.

Zhao Min's children will attend the third grade of a primary school in Shanghai in 2022. Going to work with your husband, going to school with your children, and picking up and dropping off are the problems of this family. After the implementation of the home office, she will send her children to school every Wednesday, and she will be able to appear at the school gate on time when school is over. The child even looks forward to every Wednesday.

In maintaining the parent-child relationship, Xu Jing feels the same as Zhao Min. Her children are still in kindergarten, and when Xu Jing returns home, the children are often already asleep under the care of the elderly. Early the next morning, Xu Jing rushed to work again in the morning rush hour. The time to meet is only on weekends.

"The happiest thing about a child is that I can accompany her to dinner." She said.

When analyzing the trial data, Liang Jianzhang introduced that the benefits of mixed office are to improve the happiness of employees, and Ctrip's overall turnover rate and the turnover rate of outstanding employees have dropped by more than 30%.

Managers' perceptions remain difficult to change

In the exploration of the feasibility of the home work model, more professionals are concerned about whether it will affect work efficiency and whether managers will lose the ability to supervise employees because of remote work.

According to Ctrip's mixed office trial data, the top three reasons for employees' concerns about "mixed work" in the early stage of the trial were the impact on communication between colleagues (51%), the instability or complexity of the intranet (42.4%), and the lack of efficiency and focus (38.2%).

In the later stages of the trial, the top three reasons for concern were affecting colleague communication (49.3%), longer working hours (42.3%), unstable intranet or complex use (28.8%), and the lack of efficiency and focus environment (28.5%) of the top three concerns before the trial ranked fourth.

But Li Dan feels that after working from home, he gets along more well with his colleagues. "People have social needs, and if you can work from home 1-2 days a week, the remaining 3 days of office life will make people feel happy."

In fact, in the 2010 Ctrip experiment, the loneliness of employees was also mentioned. In the discussion section of his published paper, Liang Jianzhang wrote that half of the experimental team employees changed their minds and returned to the office, especially those who performed relatively poorly at home. Two-thirds of the control group employees who had previously been willing to work from home decided to stay in the office, worried that they would feel lonely working from home.

The 2010 trial at Ctrip's call center was a study by Liang Jianzhang during his Ph.D. at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2013, Liang Jianzhang collaborated with three scholars from Stanford University Business School in the United States to publish the research results, "The Feasibility of Working from Home: Experimental Evidence Based on China".

In the later stages of the trial, in order to improve work efficiency, Xu Jing returned to the office for more time. Xu Jing's family does not have a special workshop, and the child is at home during the winter vacation, which will disturb her work from time to time. "Sometimes I'm asked to read stories, sometimes I'm asked what I'm doing."

Zhao Min has also "hidden" to work in the café because of the decoration of the upstairs neighbors, but she believes that as long as there is no external factor, those work that need to be completed independently is more efficient than the office, and it is easier to "work" without being disturbed by colleagues. When she's productive, she makes three or four business contracts in a day, which can take up to three days.

Although the hybrid office experiment has been affirmed by most employees, it may be difficult to change the perception of managers in the short term.

A netizen left a message on Weibo discussing Ctrip's mixed office, and the department has refused to work from home. Some netizens also left messages saying that some department owners did not agree to mixed office and still maintained the company's office for five days.

However, some netizens replied that the R & D department has applied for a mixed office.

(At the request of the interviewee, Zhao Min, Sun Ya, Xu Jing, and Li Dan are pseudonyms.) ）

Southern Weekend reporter Zhou Xiaoling Southern Weekend intern Lin Qianbing