“There’s a saying in my circle, that you should quit the day your company installs DingTalk,” said Robert, who works in luxury retail in the northwestern province of Shaanxi and complains that DingTalk has “fragmented his time into pieces”. On, a question-and-answer website, a thread entitled “how does it feel like to be forced to use DingTalk at work” has more than a thousand posts and has been viewed over 7.7 million times.Īn informal Reuters poll of 30 workers using DingTalk showed that about half had negative feelings about the app, while the rest said they were fine with it - often because their companies had not adopted features such as the clock-in function. On top of this original feature, the company has added a wide range of functions that include automatic expense claims, a clock-in system to monitor the whereabouts of employees, as well as a “daily report” function that requires workers to list completed tasks.Īs DingTalk has grown, many Chinese office workers have vented their frustrations online about the service, saying it is inhumane and destroys trust. Like WhatsApp, DingTalk lets senders see if recipients have read messages, but it also has a “ding” feature that can bombard recipients with repeat notifications, text messages and phone-call reminders. In China, surveillance by the authorities and employers is already common. That also raises questions about DingTalk’s ability to expand into the West, where people are typically guarded about their workplace privacy. The company says, without providing numbers, that it also has a growing presence in Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia.īut its rapid rise - propelled by a promise to boost productivity through better monitoring of employee movements and faster responses to important messages - has sparked a backlash from Chinese workers who say the app fuels an unhealthy work culture. Since December 2014, DingTalk has grown exponentially to become the world’s largest chat service designed for companies, with over 100 million individual users and 7 million employers across China. Their installation in the hallowed flat where Ma got his start in the eastern city of Hangzhou reflects DingTalk’s place in the pecking order of the company’s sprawling collection of start-up projects.
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