I co-wrote this essay titled “The Era of the Social Workplace: On-Demand Office Communication Solutions Becoming Mainstream in the Next Normal” with Sofia Costales. This article was submitted on August 14, 2020, for our Managing New Media for Organizations course in the Masters of Communication program at De La Salle University.
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“Email has never been huge in China, and it’s down to a combination of cultural factors and timing.” The era of social media in China has changed the way workers communicate within their organizations. In his BBC Worklife article, Why email loses out to popular apps in China, British-Chinese freelance journalist Lu-hai Liang explains that WeChat, “the super-app that is ubiquitous,” has made business transactions more efficient that using emails “now seems a quaint leftover from the past” (Liang). However, as Liang and his interviewees note, the flipside is that workers feel pressure to respond to messages on WeChat immediately.
App-Based Office Culture in China
WeChat has been branded a “super-app” by some Chinese technology analysts, scholars, and expatriates in China as it merges many functionalities into one single application (Sapra, Qiao). Aside from interpersonal messaging, WeChat allows users to form groups to create communities and share information that can be archived or passed onto other groups. While conversing with each other, these users can simultaneously post photos, short videos, or texts on their personal walls called Moments, on which their friends can like or leave a comment. Users can make financial transactions through their WeChat Pay, linked to their Chinese bank accounts. These WeChat functionalities are just some of the manifestations of Treem and Leonardi’s definition of affordances in social media: the app effortlessly combines visibility, editability, persistence, and association in that messaging function alone, making WeChat more conversational and superior than email. We say that these affordances—and there are many others related to different services such as mobile payments and lifestyle activities, but we will let other scholars comment on them—may explain why WeChat is the preferred platform for communication of many Chinese.
According to the WeChat Exclusive Report on the QR code economy during the first quarter of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the app saw more than 1.2 billion monthly active users. Its enterprise version, the separate mobile app WeChat Work with more business-level functionalities (such as clocking in/out, filing leaves, organizing meetings, and the like) but with the “same communication experience,” was used by more than 2.5 million companies and over 60 million people as of first quarter of 2020 (Ross, Tencent). WeChat’s huge user base and its user-friendly interface make it the “king of the (Chinese) internet” (de Jong, Lamb).
Other popular business and productivity apps are used in China, including Alibaba’s massive enterprise platform Dingding with 100 million users, the e-commerce site Pinduoduo, and Bytedance’s Lark. Some of these apps even have seen an increase in demand during the quarantine period (Celik, Lee, Koetse, and Grigorian). But WeChat is still more ubiquitous than any of these apps, and it allows easier access to many new systems such as the jiankang bao (“Health Kit”), a “powerful application” that assesses users’ fitness to go back to work or to enter public areas or private spaces, or any other situations related to the prevention and control of the pandemic (Herdyanto, Beijing International).
With the widespread use of WeChat and its integration into its users’ lives, the boundaries between the personal and the professional are blurred, at least for the tech-savvy millennials and all those who are caught up in the frantic lifestyle in modern Chinese cities. In the workplace, the lines become more indistinct, as Liang and his interviewees note, because of the expectations workers face regarding instantaneous communication even after office hours. This kind of pressure relates to what Mumby and Kuhn define as technological control and bureaucratic control combined: companies utilize apps such as WeChat to facilitate information transfer for productivity purposes, but the blurred personal and professional boundaries may mean that users are linked to their work all the time. So overworked that Chinese millennials feel burnout and many turn to luxury shopping as a form of self-care or reward and publish content about these on their Moments (Luo). These users can select their audiences through the use of tags, but posts can still make their way to other audiences through screenshots. There are commentaries on the oversaturation of similar content on social networking platforms, especially WeChat, and the glut of information exacerbates the feeling of work stress or fatigue in young people (Wang), significantly affecting their mental and physical well-being.
We look into Latour’s Actor-Network theory to describe WeChat and its users as co-constructed actants in multiple networks of relationships, one of which is an influential rise of its multidimensional aspect that can force such negative consequences on its role in the workplace. For instance, a smartphone is an actor-network made up of a number of relations between smaller actors (glass, plastic, circuit boards, inventors, users, bloggers, and so forth). Looking at WeChat as an actor-network, we now see a web of interdependent courses of human activity which include instant messaging, online shopping, ride-hailing, food delivery, and other ways that ultimately put an end to “archaic” non-digital experiences. This super-app collects massive information from its users, allowing it to continually introduce new functions that change user habits and provide other companies with better services. Its complexities, however, can blur personal from career motivations. Despite this issue, the utility of WeChat remains strong in other areas of communication and business that Western tech companies such as Facebook are looking at and trying to emulate the success of the Chinese app (Park and San Jose, Ghosh).
Less Email, More Actionable Office Communication in the Philippines
With the example of how WeChat has taken over the office communication culture in China, we now look into the Philippine office communication culture and find out if a similar phenomenon is already happening or will be happening soon.
The October 2015 Philippine Labor Force Survey shows that 19.7 million Filipino millennials are part of the country’s workforce (de la Cruz, PSA), and these young people use social media more than any other generation. According to the Global Web Index Report, Facebook Messenger is the most used social platform by Filipinos getting news or keeping in touch with family and friends. The marketing insight platform Mobile Action also lists Messenger as the most downloaded communications apps in the Philippines on the Google Play store as of August 2020. It is followed by Messenger Lite, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, email apps such as Yahoo! Mail rank eighth while GMail is 31st.
Facebook Philippines has said Messenger has gained traction as a channel for business transactions and office communications, adding that over 10 billion messages transpire between individuals and businesses every month (BusinessWorld.com). John Rubio, the firm’s country director, mentions how the Filipino consumer landscape has evolved to become more “instant, direct, and personal”—three main reasons why instant messaging is now the preferred mode of communication versus the “now-traditional” email. This suggests that the use of young Filipino workers of emails in business is much different when it comes to digital communication for today’s consumer needs (Mohan). Emails are seen as a significant cause of information overload (Lavenda), giving rise to the expression “drowning in emails” as it requires a very structured and formal tone—a point that Liang also raises regarding Chinese users. In contrast, direct messaging is a “built conversation” that is easier to digest. Also, emails nowadays are relegated to the supporting role of identification for actions such as signing into a different device or verifying online payment methods.
Unlike the Chinese who normally stay on WeChat for personal and professional use, Filipinos are still very used to switching apps to enjoy the affordances of social networking and communication (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail), entertainment or browsing (YouTube, Chrome), e-commerce (Shopee, Lazada, Carousell), or mobile banking (Gcash, and bank apps). For example, Gcash is among the most popular online payment apps, but only 24 percent of Filipinos declare they have used it (GlobalWebIndex, 2019). E-commerce has also drastically changed the Philippines’ retail landscape, forcing even microenterprises to innovate to connect to their audience (Cahiles-Magkilat). And so, apps have become the main method of communication in Philippine offices nowadays, similar to China, although there still isn’t a “super-app” that amasses various technical affordances just like WeChat does. Numerous reports have already highlighted the tradeoff in the ease of use of WeChat, including government surveillance and user information collection, the latter of which the company says it uses to “generate very powerful data.” Yet according to some observers, the Chinese are less concerned with data privacy than consumers outside China (Wall Street Journal, 2018, 08:33-09:16). So in a society that has influences from Western ideology and culture, an “overarching system” as powerful as WeChat may be seen by Filipino users as too radical because it has access to their private information and online behavior and such skepticism demonstrates what Herbert Marcuse calls the “Great Refusal.” The irony here, though, is that these young people use a plentitude of applications that also have access to their information. But since there are individual apps with tailor-made affordances related to communication, we argue that Filipino users have more platforms to release their feelings of burnout or stress.
These complexities in the country’s social media and political landscape make us believe that Filipinos are not yet ready for a super-app with the level of technological advancement and control comparable to that of WeChat. However, both of us see an encouraging change in the office communication culture in the Philippines, since more Filipino workers, the millennials especially, are adapting to the need of a present and global workforce for more efficient and expedient communication. ▣
Main article source:
Liang, Lu-Hai. “Why email loses out to popular apps in China.” BBC Worklife, July 2020.
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Photo: Andy Penafuerte III