In this episode, Stephen Hopkins discusses China’s third-party payment platforms. China’s third-party payment fees are much lower than the west, this made us wonder how WeChat and Alipay work. Hopkins explains the technical side of these platforms in comparison to PayPal.

Jump to the question:

• 1:10 How is Alipay and WeChat pay different from Paypal and why are third-party payment fees so much lower in China than in the west?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

This article Daxue Talks 51: How do China’s third party payment platforms work? is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Welcome to Daxue Talks, a show powered by Daxue Consulting, a China-based strategic market research company founded in 2010.

My name is David Ammerschlaeger, I am a psychologist and I am the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic. I am also an executive coach and a member of the shanghai international mental health association and the British Psychological Society and I am very happy to be here tonight.

What conflict management techniques exist that can be applied in a crisis situation?

There are many models in conflict management. I am not going to go into the specific models because that would be a really long discussion, there is a lot of training and coaching out there as well and in the end, it’s important to adapt I think the right response to the specific situation, the culture of the people, the organizational setting and each person’s personality. So, there is no easy answer to that basically. Most of these models analyze individual or collective responses to conflict and these include options like inaction, withdrawal, capitulation, domination through physical or psychological means, the clarification of goals, the involvement of stakeholders, negotiation, mediation – I mean there’s so much that you can find and that’s more or less complicated models.

At the individual level, I would say the opposing behaviors of the two parties are split between cooperation and assertiveness and that’s actually fundamentally the question, how much you accept to bear of the specific behavior and what I have seen in my practice is that often it’s the same person or the same people that take on to their shoulders the blame or the whole pressure and that can also again create frustration, low self-esteem, feeling the loss of control over one’s life, and meaninglessness or something like that.

So, in terms of solutions – what I would like to point out here is the need for trust and it is important that people trust each other, but it’s also important that you honor this trust, that means that whenever your manager, for example, is trusting you, you have to show him to prove that you’re able to satisfy this trust or at least that even if the result is not there, that you actually did everything that you could to achieve this result.

If you’re not able to trust and the other person is not able to prove this trust, then it can also make later conflict resolution more difficult, and that’s true for the opposite way. If there is this trust, later conflict can be more easily solved and there’s psychological research that shows, for example, that if you put together two teams, one team that is made of friends, that know each other quite well and another team of complete strangers, the team made up by friends performs best by far in crisis situations, whereas the team of strangers is much lower in the crisis resolution and usually comes up with less performant ideas, less innovative things, more consensual things. And the team performed even worse and even sometimes counterproductively if the team was made up of people who had preconceptions about the other people in the team.

Preconceptions that are like – biases, I don’t know, if you put an international team together and people will say – ah! The Italians are like this, oh! The Chinese are like that, and the Indians anyway always do this and so on, so if you have these preconceptions this is totally counterproductive. You have to be open-minded, tolerant and to go into this without any assumption about the other people because, in the end, you will actually have no idea right. And there is no subjective interpretation of what is happening within the team.

If you ask the teams, many people in the team will say that they have good relationships with their colleagues, but the question here is really the trust and the ability to correctly understand each other’s reactions. That means a relationship and the ability to reduce conflict is dependent on the ability to truly understand each other and communication here is important but not sufficient – because if you’re not empathizing with the people that we’re talking to and that are around us, we experience immediately a certain disconnection and, in the end, we will have what is called egocentricity. Ego centricity is different from selfishness. Egocentricity means that you project your own feelings, your own expectations on the other people and you think that everybody will react just like you would react in their situation, which is actually not true. Many people react differently and they have sound reasons to do that. Even if you’re not necessarily understanding them right now, they have their own reasons which you might ignore, to react in this way. And that’s one of the bases of empathy.

I would say, even especially if you have a conflict with somebody and the other person point of view seems completely absurd, completely incomprehensible, then actually there might be more reasons for trying to understand the other person because that means that if there is no rational way for that person to have this stance, maybe there are some emotional reasons for this position and maybe if there are some emotional reasons for this person to behave in this way, then maybe there is some underlying frustration and other things that have never been said before and that actually might have a huge impact on the team’s performance over time.

So mutually understanding each other and having active empathy is the key here for conflict resolution.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #48: Conflict settlement for remote work team during the coronavirus outbreak is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

The next guest on Daxue Talks is a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, David Ammerschlaeger. In this China business vlog, we are talking about how to choose the right conflict management technique and what are the options in this particular situation with coronavirus, quarantine and remote work.

Jump to the question:

• 00:40 What conflict management techniques exist that can be applied in a crisis situation?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

Learn from these inspiring crisis responses to SARS and COVID-19

This article Daxue Talks 48: Application of conflict management techniques in crisis situations is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Welcome to Daxue Talks, a show powered by Daxue Consulting, a China-based strategic market research company founded in 2010.

My name is David Ammerschlaeger, I am a psychologist and I am the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic. I am also an executive coach and a member of the shanghai international mental health association and the British Psychological Society and I am very happy to be here tonight.

Many people have adapted to closed offices and logged down by working from home. What consequences have you observed from the new way of working together?

As I mentioned before, the Chinese Psychological Society has found important surges in psychological distress over the last few weeks, especially for anxiety, trauma, depression and there are many other things going on. In addition to that, businesses have been suffering a lot as well and because the economy was already under a lot of strain, I think we can assume that this is one of the economies’ biggest challenges for decades.

So, in this situation of uncertainty, hardship, distress, people are on edge basically. People for their employment, for their job, they don’t know if they’re going to get a bonus, or maybe – I’ve heard companies that are actually cutting down all the salary increases for the current year. So, you don’t really know what is going to be happening.

Lacking communication information amongst colleagues and within the teams can lead – in this context to a lot of tension, frustration and conflicts. So, what happens right now is that this current situation brings everything into one place. That’s actually home. Family, work and everything and that’s very dangerous and difficult for people because something that is very important is to keep healthy boundaries between the different aspects of your life and that’s true between people but also between tasks and activities that you’re performing during the day.

The other thing is that when you are working in an office environment, you are getting used to people around you, so actually your attention is trained to let go of other people’s presence, the noises and whatever is going on around you. When you’re working from home, the whole setting is different. If you don’t have a family you might welcome the quiet and the calm, but actually, very quickly you might feel lonely and isolated and then you want to watch TV, play video games or maybe connect with other people on social media because you feel lonely and disconnected from the world. On the other side, if you have a family and if the whole family is here, sometimes it’s difficult to set boundaries and to tell your children and your parents to let you alone and to work. And it increases the burden, even the children might suffer from that and they might not understand why suddenly their dad or their mother is saying – leave me alone, let me work, and they might feel rejected, punished, or anyway sad and any other way. So, this can also create conflicts between spouses and within the family to know who is taking care of these children. And for teams, it means that very quickly people must find a new way to work together. Many managers are not used to this and feel insecure, uncomfortable and stressed because of this situation because they are not used to that and right now, they don’t have the habits, the ways of working through this whole process.

I have seen many bad reactions where people have been mixing their own feelings of insecurity, their lack of confidence or fear of feeling useless and many people want also, for example, to assert themselves their existence to say – hey I am here and so they start to be noisier in meetings, to become very authoritarian, harsh and so on and that’s very counterproductive in many cases.

Is there a tendency towards more conflicts at work during a period of anxiety like the current virus outbreak?

Yeah definitely. As I indicated probably just now, and research has shown that anxiety, in general, has significant effects on conflict and relation but also on making conflict resolution more difficult. In cases of fear, conflicts also tend to be solved by responses increasing suppressed emotions like frustration, anger, sadness, feeling of rejection and it can even lead to paranoia. Several research studies from the early 2000s have shown that anxiety also interferes with attention performance. So, the reason behind that is that emotional processing is most of the time prioritized by our brains before the cognitive processing. It means that whenever there is something emotionally tough for us, actually our rational mind shuts down and our emotional mind lights up and tries to process and digest this first.

So for this reason, anxious people, compared to non-anxious people, maybe more susceptible to disruptions and attention because they devote more – focus more energy in the emotional processing than other people and they will try to process all the anxiety-related information or the hardship, whatever is actually psychologically triggering their distress.

Another research has shown that fear and anxiety hinders objective processing of information and sound decision making. So, to explain that – sometimes stress is increasing more performance to a certain degree right, and that’s what sometimes we experience as the efficiency stress or whenever we feel stressed and we feel super, super motivated and performant, so this is I would say healthy levels of stress and it makes us more performant but this stage can only last for a certain time, and it’s not sustainable in working overtime. So, at some point, this stress becomes unbearable and results in psychological fatigue and possible burn out which increases also here the risk of tensions and conflicts. Cause whenever we have this situation where people are more and more emotionally charged, actually they are discharging this inner tension towards other people, and because they are at home, lonely and isolated, they can do that directly against the colleagues and it can affect team performance and team understanding during the conflict.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #47: The consequences of remote work during the virus outbreak is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

The next guest on Daxue Talks is a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, David Ammerschlaeger. In this China business vlog, David talks about how a forced business transformation and remote work change relationships in the team and at home, as well as what opportunities can exist in the current uncomfortable and anxious situation.

Jump to the question:

• 00:40 Many people have adapted to closed offices and logged down by working from home. What consequences have you observed from the new way of working together?
• 4:50 Is there a tendency towards more conflicts at work during a period of anxiety like the current virus outbreak?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

The ultimate Coronavirus economic impact in China report

This article Daxue Talks 47: Opportunities and threats of working from home under quarantine is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

In this episode of Daxue Talks David Ammerschlaeger, a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, answers to the question of how to support staff during the virus outbreak.

Full transcript below:

Welcome to Daxue Talks, a show powered by Daxue Consulting, a China-based strategic market research company founded in 2010.

My name is David Ammerschlaeger, I am a psychologist and I am the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic. I am also an executive coach and a member of the shanghai international mental health association and the British psychological society and I am very happy to be here tonight.

How can employers support their teams working in virtual teams?

So, I see three ways that companies can deploy to support their teams. Firstly, they can train people to actually work in virtual teams. Normally in many larger companies, this is something many people have already experienced to a certain extent. We have companies in the United States, in Europe for example who have experience with that and have programs and collaborations with psychologists for employees doing teamwork. And psychological services can be done in this case and the concern mainly is around feelings of isolation, loneliness and managing burnout. So, the training addresses typically self-management, engagement and motivation and communication and different project management techniques also to work effectively alone.

For example in my clinic, at ChingHo clinic we have developed several programs with our physicians and traditional Chinese medicine doctors to develop training that is online and on site for people who have issues during this time staying at home and working from home and to help them actually leading a healthy life from a mental point of view and from a physical point of view.

Secondly, companies can support their staff mentally, so it seems for example that many people have issues organizing their time and prioritizing, focusing on tasks and so on. So, for them, it’s a big challenge as well when they’re not used to take this kind of responsibility for themselves. So, this brings again more anxiety, stress and pressure and on the other side we have managers that have to rely more on actual results to assess whether people have been working well or not, and that can typically lead to mutual frustration and stress.

So, for managers, it might mean taking in more coaching stance for example or building up mutual trust and sincerity and that actually might seem paradoxical in a situation where the manager and his team are physically more distant. So that means on a human level we need to be closer to your teams, while physically you’re more distanced than usual when you’re working together at the office, which can be a little bit difficult for some people.

Thirdly employers have to give their staff the means to perform in their work and to live in a healthy way and to actually be able to perform I would say. So that means mainly defining clear goals for the employees and targets and it also means that employers have to define the clear limitations of the workers’ independence. So, for example – a clear decision-making model might be necessary because of the physical distance, the worker can’t rely on his manager for taking all the decisions. So, more independence means that roles and responsibilities need to be more clearly defined and managers cannot micromanage their employees from a distance. Otherwise its unbearable for both the managers and the employees. So they have also to learn to manage their own feelings of distress insecurity and that’s a big challenge sometimes from what I have seen – I don’t know in China, but it’s also true for other countries because many managers want to be reassured by their team members that actually their team members are able to handle the thing and that means that they have to relinquish part of the control and well – work on themselves basically to have enough trust and the feeling of confidence and security in their teams to let them work on their own.

Have you come across interesting examples of how employers support their teams to avoid psychological stress during the virus outbreak?

Yeah, a very good example, for example, is a company engaging in what is called an employee assistance program, so that is an EAP. EAP provides help, support and counseling for employees and their family members when they are faced with mental health and emotional issues. That means that any employee who feels the need, can require the intervention of an external psychologist, mental health professional to help them in dealing with their hardship and I myself collaborated with several companies to provide EAP services and I would say the problems that we are working with are absolutely diverse. It can be overwhelming, burnout, depression, anxiety, conflict management but it can be also actually a love relationship at the office or actually sometimes even tougher issues like harassment or other things. Anything is possible. And it’s very commonplace in the United States and in Europe so according to the American employee assistance professional association, in the United States over 97% of companies with more than 5000 employees have an EAP and 80% of companies with 1000 – 5000 employees have an EAP and for the smaller companies, 75% of the companies have such a program. That’s absolutely huge and this is something that I do not see in China happening, I think this is something that really China can probably make huge progress and is investing as well right now and working with companies on that kind of project, but it’s always foreign multi-national companies. I have not yet seen Chinese companies, okay I don’t speak Mandarin so maybe that’s the limitation, but in my knowledge, I think there are very, very few Chinese companies that have engaged in such employee assistance programs.

Research has actually shown that EAP’s are effective, but the problem here is that it has to be a fully confidential process between the employee and the psychologist and that’s one of the things that has been tagged out. Whenever there is this lack of trust, I would say there’s a problem because the relationship between the psychologist and the employee is problematic and then you have not this – what we call if you have a critical relationship which is the intense exchange of the depth of the analysis that can happen.

But it shows that by caring for the employee, the company is not always increasing his well-being and the performance but it is also increasing the employee’s loyalty and satisfaction to work within this company. So, it shows that the company actually takes care of its employees, supports then that personal life and their mental health and personal well-being. So, it builds trust and collaboration for the future and I’ve seen that a lot of employees who have gone through an EAP program also tend to stay longer within the company.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #46: How to support your staff during the virus outbreak? is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

The next guest on Daxue Talks is a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, David Ammerschlaeger. In this China business vlog, David talks about ways that companies can deploy to support their teams in controversial crisis periods. Also, we consider an employee assistance program, EAP. EAP provides help, support and counseling for employees and their family members when they are faced with mental health and emotional issues.

Jump to the question:

• 00:40 How can employers support their teams working in virtual teams?
• 4:45 Have you come across interesting examples of how employers support their teams to avoid psychological stress during the virus outbreak?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

The ultimate Coronavirus economic impact in China report

This article Daxue Talks 46: Tools to minimize psychological stress during a virus outbreak is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Welcome to Daxue Talks, a show powered by Daxue Consulting, a China-based strategic market research company founded in 2010.

My name is David Ammerschlaeger, I am a psychologist and I am the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic. I am also an executive coach and a member of the shanghai international mental health association and the British Psychological Society and I am very happy to be here tonight.

How can employers monitor the psychological state of their employees during the crisis situations?

I think the company’s leader’s hesitation around flexible work arrangement is often driven by the fear that performance will suffer if employees aren’t closely monitored and the question we might actually ask here – is it really the company’s job to monitor their employees’ state of mind. Because there is for me a difference between monitoring which can be perceived as the employee as a means of control and offer support. So, to answer your question I would say monitoring the psychological state is difficult when the employee is hiding and keeping their issues from their employers and that is part also of their private life. I mean everybody has the right to keep stuff for themselves. Now, I think the first step to do is to raise awareness of the importance of mental balance and the risk associated with distance working. So, one of the issues is that managers need to be involved in this monitoring if you want – whenever managers or even co-workers see that there might be an issue, there should be a process inside of the company to offer support. So, a huge step here is to be able to talk openly about these issues without feeling any stigma and you need to be comfortable enough telling your boss that you have problems. I mean, people are okay calling in sick and to say that they have flu, so why should it be so difficult and creating a feeling of weakness if you say that you’re having issues in managing your mood or your motivation or your psychological balance in general. So, I noticed actually that there is for many people something self-accusing or some – it’s like saying that they are not able to manage, that they are weak; it’s a sort of confession or something like that which sounds basically bad and which triggers a lot of negative stigmas. And that is not the case when they’re talking about physical health issues. When somebody calls in for being sick, then people say – oh poor dear, take care of yourself. But when people say – I can’t take this anymore, I am getting crazy or I’m burning out or I want to kill myself because I’m so depressed, everybody will scream and say – oh my god! This person has a problem and so on. So why is that in the end? Right. And we cannot say that this is because people are more responsible for their mental health than they are for their physical health. If somebody calls in because they have cancer because they have a very bad lifestyle because maybe they are smoking or drinking too much or something like that, that’s also their responsibility. So, our mental weaknesses are actually what makes us human and I would say telling that to the company is also showing that you’re not just a robot basically, otherwise you can also use some artificial intelligence in order to have something that is always working perfectly and even then there might be some bugs.

This actually, what we feel is human weakness is actually what gives us the power to create, to innovate and to connect with each other and this is what makes the genius and I would say the real added value of company basically. That’s the people of the company. And as long as there is this barrier of not being able to share these vulnerabilities without fear, I think there’s no real possibility to actively monitor this.

Now, practically companies have recourse to surveys, we can have support lines and, of course, there are also some indicators that actually can help managers to see if there’s a problem. So, for example, the American center for disease control and prevention has set out a few clues that help co-workers and managers in noticing whenever something is wrong. So, for example, if you notice that one of your colleagues is withdrawing or isolating himself. Not answering the calls for example in this set of working from home, or the personality of the person changes. If that person has difficulties focusing or remembering details, and this is something that did not happen before, or if there is for example difficulties organizing thoughts and tasks and if there are some cognitive challenges, if the person is slow in understanding, if there are big issues focusing on the work in hand or something like that or you feel that this person is never really present during a meeting and he’s always drifting away or something like that. That might be clues that actually help managers and co-workers seeing whenever there’s a problem.

But actually, often when co-workers or the company is being made aware of these issues, it’s already too late, because that means that this person is already in often a clinical level of depression or burnout or something like that.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #45: How to assess the mental wellbeing of your employees during COVID-19 disruption? is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

The next guest on Daxue Talks is a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, David Ammerschlaeger. In this China business vlog, David talks about indicators that actually can help managers to see if there are psychological balance problems caused by crisis situations in a team (for example, the current coronavirus and virus outbreak) and how to deal with it.

Jump to the question:

• 00:40 How can employers monitor the psychological state of their employees during the crisis situations?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

Learn from these inspiring crisis responses to SARS and COVID-19

This article Daxue Talks 45: How to monitor the psychological state of employees in crisis situations is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

In this episode of Daxue Talks David Ammerschlaeger, a psychologist and the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic, measures the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on employees’ psychology.

Full transcript below:

Welcome to Daxue Talks, a show powered by Daxue Consulting, a China-based strategic market research company founded in 2010.

My name is David Ammerschlaeger, I am a psychologist and I am the head of psychology at ChingHo clinic. I am also an executive coach and a member of the shanghai international mental health association and the British Psychological Society and I am very happy to be here tonight.

How can you evaluate the effect of Coronavirus on the mental health of people in China?

So, during this period of time, people of China have been strongly affected psychologically. Simply put, if you look at some research performed by the Chinese psychological society during the past few weeks, we have actually found that 42.6% of people have clinical levels of anxiety related to the epidemic and 21.5% have obvious symptoms of clinical PTSD – that’s post-traumatic stress disorder and 16.6% had mild to severe clinical levels of depression, and that is something that is way off the chart compared to normal levels which are slightly about 50% of these levels. So right now I would say these main areas of mental health have doubled and this is only the main thing that has been tested, the study focuses on clinical disorders but does not report any other issues that impact the well-being, such as family conflicts, hardship related to education, parenting, while children are experiencing online schooling, feeling of isolation and loneliness, all these things have not been include in the study because they are not really clinical disorders as such. But if you look for example on Weibo, there was a hashtag that was translated to #how to deal with feelings, very anxious at home and that was trending with more than 290 million views. That shows how many people actually are concerned about these feelings. And that’s only the ones that are in English, it’s not even in mandarin or something like that, right.

So, beyond that, many people are afraid now of losing their jobs as well because of the economic downturn. So there is a tremendous effort from Chinese authorities, so there is, for example, the psychological crisis intervention working committee from the Chinese psychological society that has strongly pointed out that we need to have a sustained focus on psychological support through professional helplines, psychotherapy and most importantly a better level of general awareness and acceptance. And that goes through less stigmatization of psychological distress.

So, for example, there’s also other things, like physical health and I have colleagues at ChingHo clinic that see a lot of people who have sleeping issues, aches in the back due to bad postures at home, they are dealing with a lot of different issues, around nutrition as well. So, there is a lot of things that are related to physical health and mental health.

How has the work-life balance of employees in China changed over the last months?

So, the problem with work from home is that there is no clear limit between the private’s fear and the professionals’ fear. Your workday kind of blurs together into your home life. So, it feels like you’re working or at least you are on duty all the time. It is important for preventing burnout to have clear boundaries. But it’s also important for emotional management to set clear boundaries of what is my responsibility of area of control, and what is outside of my control. In addition to that, schools are not physically taking charge of the children, so I have a lot of clients at ChingHo clinic experiencing some overwhelm handling children at home and work, it is probably even more difficult now that the children are home as well and the whole family is trying to focus on their respective tasks, that’s from school, overseeing the homework of the children, but also working at the office at the same time. Here we have two things that are overlapping basically. And you also have household tasks because a lot of Ai’s did not come back from their home cities or something like that. So, there’s a lot of pressure right now on parents. Now having said that, psychologically the advantages also put people in front of their demons – and that’s true because when you’re at home there’s only that much that you can do, right. And when you’re working there, on one side you’re truly independent and can get more work done without colleagues talking to you all the time, but I have also observed that in many cases people struggle with focus and concentration and actually motivation, engagement and stuff like this. So many people have a tough time focusing and staying productive and efficient the whole day.

Working from home means you must rely on self-motivation, self-discipline, focus and concentration and the other thing is that you rely more on the active effort to communicate. Usually, when you have people in the office you can talk to your colleague whenever you want, but right now it’s not possible and you have to actually make a call or actually engage into something and yet the communication is sometimes a little bit – how should I say it – fractions, because you might chat, you might send a message or an email and then the other person responds one hour later. So, it’s less direct than it is when you’re in the office.

So, work from home is something that has been very uncommon in China. Until now we have very few companies and very few instances of work from home or home office. Often companies don’t trust employees to perform well or to be sufficiently engaged, so this has actually forced companies into the situation. But if you look at other countries, it’s something that is quite common nowadays. For example, according to the bureau of labor statistics – 57% of workers in 2018 had a flexible schedule and 42 million wage and salary workers, that’s actually 29% of the workforce in the United States, could work from home. So, that actually is something that is even used by employers to seduce workers coming and working in a specific company and there has been a lot of research by the human resource department into saying okay – how much does it cost and actually how much do we benefit from these things. A lot of things that actually employees have pointed out as being advantages, working from home in these surveys was that they felt there was a stronger control over the work-life balance. They also reported increased productivity levels, less stress and many of them also felt that avoiding commute was actually improving their well-being and the way they actually saw and engaged in their work. So, I would say this is a unique opportunity for China and for workers in China to show the company that they can perform and work from home and I really hope that employees are smart enough to satisfy the employers and to prove that this is a visible thing that is happening to them so that they can actually make a significant difference in showing the employers that this can also lead to performance. There is also something that I wanted to say, the problem between – in this environment is that because of this crisis people have a tendency to distance themselves from each other, physically and maybe even emotionally. People have stayed at home – and that is true for the work-life but it’s also true for the personal life. A lot of people have not seen their friends, their families for a long time. So, people have lost a little bit of touch with each other and if that is true for family and friends, this is also even more true with colleagues. People haven’t engaged personally and usually when you are in the office, there’s a lot of small talks, a lot of non-verbal cues and a lot of physical communication basically that happens, and that is not the case anymore and whenever now after so many weeks of not talking to each other – suddenly we start talking to each other through phones or something like that, it seems more disconnected and more artificial basically.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #44: Measuring the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on employees’ psychology is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.