Employees in China may take a breath from the grueling "996 work culture" — where people work from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, as several Chinese conglomerates have issued internal reminders to prevent formalistic overtime working or meaningless competition in the rat race.

The central government has also shown greater determination to regulate the unwholesome work culture. In a recent released action plan by the State Council, China's Cabinet, local authorities are urged to better protect workers' rights to rest and tighten supervision over employers' behaviors of illegally lengthening employees' working hours without permission.

Before the release of the action plan, several domestic companies have shown tactful gestures to relax the tiring working schedules.

The Shenzhen-based drone manufacturer DJI got itself several trending topics at Sina Weibo recently after some of its employees posted their experiences on social media of not being allowed to work overtime after 9 pm. The posts said that DJI's human resources officials patrolled around the building and asked the employees to leave the company by 9 pm rather than keep working.

Midea, a home appliance producing group, issued an internal notice in late January, asking its staff members to streamline working patterns. News outlet The Paper in Shanghai said that Midea confirmed the existence of the notice.

Midea's notice said that "any work not putting focus on customers or core businesses and not creating value or incomes are histrionic". The group asked the employees not to have meetings or working overtime formalistically in off-duty time, reduce the number of WeChat work groups and prohibit any formalistic behaviors.

Employees on the Chinese mainland have seen increasing working hours in recent years, even longer than the regulated length by the nation's Labor Law, and the employees' complaints about the unreasonable schedules have intensified after the "996 work culture" being promoted among some large companies or industrial titans.

"My colleagues and I usually joke that we got 'sense of shame' stepping out of the office at 6 pm sharp. It has been a wired stereotype that you are not hardworking if you don't stay up very late for work in the office," said Wang Xiaofeng, a telecommunications engineer in Beijing who works from 9 am to 8 pm and on Saturday every other week.

The 30-year-old said he was happy to see this news and hopes that his company can relax the working schedules someday, as the job has almost taken all his time so far. He, however, also has concerns about these early duty-off policies, as it may be hard to quantify the overtime work and overtime fees if the employee has to continue the work after back home.

Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show that employees at domestic companies have seen longer working hours in recent years — reaching 49 hours of a week in 2024, pulling even with that in 2023. The number was 47.9 hours on average in 2022.

However, based on the national Labor Law, employees work no more than eight hours a day and 44 hours a week at most. The employers can lengthen working hour by one hour at most after negotiating with trade unions and employees.

Experts and industry insiders said that the measures taken by companies to shorten working hours or optimize working patterns will help protect the employees' working rights, health — both physical and psychological, and win themselves better future prospects by putting more emphasis and cares on humanistic concern.

"Both overtime work and '996 work culture' are moves to help companies earn greater market share in the fierce commercial competition. However, as jobseekers' ideas about career, labor relations and working patterns may have all changed in the new era, employers may find that their workers are losing passions or loyalty for the job by simply asking them to work overtime," said Li Qiang, vice-president of recruitment portal Zhaopin.

Li Chang'an, a professor at the Academy of China Open Economy Studies at the University of International Business and Economics, in Beijing, said that unreasonable work cultures like 996 have hurt people's working rights, under which the employees are hard to balance their personal life and the work, and may have health or marriage problems due to the unreasonable working schedules of rat race.

He said that explorative steps by these companies to change the current grueling working schedules will help promote a full and high-quality employment, with the length of working hours better meeting the national regulation.

"The companies themselves can also improve attractiveness to workers as companies' social responsibility and sound protection to the workers' rights to rest have become an important part of their competitiveness in the market," he said, adding that he hopes that more companies can adopt reasonable and humanistic work culture to ease the people's workload, which can help create harmonious working relationships, expand the consumption and raise the marriage rate.