A handful of major Chinese companies like home appliance maker Midea have new badges of honour this year: mandatory clock-off times for staff and bans on after-hours meetings.
Staff at Midea once toiled till late in the evening, but now they're told to leave by 6:20 pm (local time). The company's page on social media app WeChat even shows a photo of people listening to a band with a caption that reads: "What do you do after work? It's after work when life really starts."
In China, this counts as radical corporate messaging, a sharp contrast to "996" or the practice of working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week — famously called a "huge blessing" by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and an integral part of its tech sector for much of the past 15 years.
Other companies have also made changes, even if not quite as dramatic. At fellow appliance maker Haier, employees have celebrated on social media the introduction of a five-day work week. Workers at DJI, the world's largest drone manufacturer, have posted about their joy at a new policy declaring offices must be vacated by 9 pm.
"No more worrying about missing the last metro, no more worrying about waking up the wife when I get home," wrote one DJI worker who said he often used to work past midnight.
In another sign of how the zeitgeist for China Inc is slowly changing, a Beijing law firm was fined in March for not taking corrective measures after it extended staff working hours — a rare imposition of a penalty by authorities that drew praise on social media.