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Play@Work at Yonyou
Zhang Mian, Mao Chuanjiang
Version Date: 2019-5-30
Product No.: TU0119
Play@Work at Yonyou: A Warm Cultural
Empowerment Tool
Play@Work is a mobile internet-based tool for managing corporate culture. On April 7, 2018,
Cheng Caohong, Founder of the Play@Work Project of Yonyou Network Technology Co Ltd, was
invited to present the idea to a class of the Tsinghua SEM MBA Program:
“Every year Yonyou’s presidents used to give hongbao to employees through
WeChat groups as an incentive to encourage hard-working teams, successful projects,
and examples of dedication. However, the motivation of those responsible for
distributing the hongbao could be affected by various factors, while genuinely
committed employees would not necessarily receive one. We wanted to keep the donors
motivated, and make sure worthy employees were recipients. This required a product
like Play@Work that could serve as both an emotional and material incentive. Yonyou
employees might be dispatched on project implementations to client locations in other
areas for as much as two to three weeks without returning home, and would have to
stay there, burning the midnight oil, before the system went online. Nobody would be
aware of this unless they spoke out; they might even fall sick due to the heavy workload,
and they would receive no proper reward for their contribution. Following the
introduction of Play@Work, project managers or colleagues could award them
honorary medals such as ‘for dedicated work’, which could serve as an incentive to
the recipient, make more people aware of their contribution, and give them immediate
recognition.”
Cheng Caohong’s presentation aroused great interest among the students, who raised some
problems that might be encountered during the introduction of Play@Work. The employees were
accustomed to a culture of direct appraisal – how difficult would it be to introduce a non-appraisal
This case was prepared by Zhang Mian and Mao Chuanjiang of Tsinghua University School
of Economics and Management as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either
effective or ineffective of an administrative situation.
Copyright © Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. No part of this
publication may be duplicated, transmitted or used in any form or by any means without the
permission of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management.
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For the exclusive use of F. Amoah, 2022.
Play@Work at Yonyou
tool like Play@Work? What should be the criteria for the award of medals? Would there be cheating
behavior of “click farming” – awarding each other medals for flattering? Would it increase the
burden on communication? Would it be suitable for older employees? Cheng Caohong gave careful
consideration to each of these questions.
Creation of Play@Work
Cheng Caohong joined China’s leading business cloud service platform, Yonyou Network, on
graduating from university in 2004. In 2013 he joined Alibaba, the leader in China’s e-commerce
industry, and later returned to Yonyou in 2016. The two companies have very different cultures,
and this gave Cheng Caohong a profound understanding of the impact of culture on business
development:
“A picture and a heart are two things of the greatest importance to an enterprise.
The ‘picture’ is the strategy, and the ‘heart’ is the mission. A business must have a
clear mission and a unique culture that supports the mission, but typically enterprises
lack effective means to implement their culture.”
Cheng took the view that service providers and enterprise applications usually focused on
solving business management issues. They provided substantial software applications and cloud
services to facilitate a company’s business transformation, but there were no products dealing with
values and implanting culture. The core positioning of Yonyou Cloud was empowering Chinese
enterprises, 1 and cultural empowerment could naturally become an important component of this.
Cheng wanted to take organizational culture as the starting point, and help organizations implement
their values and manage their culture through gamified fun approaches.
Cheng returned to Yonyou in October 2016, and one of his tasks was to build an efficient, safe
and intelligent cloud platform. He put together a project team in March 2017 to design a new
product for cultural empowerment. The project team identified some tricky issues in building
corporate culture: insufficient tools for the implementation of great ideas, less creative cultural
activities that consumed excessive human and material resources, difficulties in digital presentation
of culture-building results achieved, single basis for promotion, demotivated employees,
difficulties in team management, inability to give incentives to the right persons, time and energyconsuming process for customized welfare plans.
The project team asked itself: how can we help enterprises manage their culture? How can we
be genuinely people-oriented? How can we build organizations that are warm and flat? How can
we make employees see their jobs as a game? With these issues in mind and after five months of
effort, the project team introduced Play@Work, a culture-focused new organizational product in
1 Yonyou Cloud: a leading business cloud service platform with high customer value formed by Yonyou based on new
cloud computing and mobile internet model, which aggregates all customer, application and service resources into a
core, and gathered substantial third-party services and other resources to the greatest extent.
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Play@Work at Yonyou
August of the same year. It was based on the latest cloud computing, big data and AI technologies.
An open and transparent mobile software designed to help enterprises manage their employees in
terms of values, it was integrated into the system of You Space. 2 According to Cheng Caohong’s
analysis,
“As a business develops, its management needs to deal with all kinds of crises in
a complicated, rapidly changing and dynamic environment. But crises in
organizational culture tend to be neglected and can cause catastrophic damage. Even
though some companies are aware of the importance of organizational culture, they
have a limited approach to managing their culture. In terms of traditional human
resource management, areas such as Key Performance Indicators, Objectives and Key
Results, 3 talent review, promotion, salary adjustment, selection for excellence,
candidate interviewing, and employee development all tend to follow top-down
management-oriented approaches, which inevitably rely on subjective judgment on
the part of managers. Employees lack high-quality interactions, and the
organizational structure can be extremely rigid and lacking in agility. It’ is very hard
for this kind of record-focused and over-rigid management style to do its intended job
in an environment populated by the post-90s generation which advocates freedom and
equality. It is precisely this common pain point for culture management that calls for
an internet-based tool, and this is why we have introduced the cultural empowerment
tool Play@Work”.
As the post-90s generation gradually constitutes the main mass of employees, businesses
develop a common perception that ‘It’s hard to manage the post-90s’. Cheng Caohong took the
view that solving this issue represented both a difficulty and an opportunity for Play@Work. He
found that the post-90s had relatively strong self-awareness and were inclined to be independent in
personality. They valued equality and respect, did things matching their hobbies, and expected to
grow based on their interest. Play@Work used company culture to empower employees and let
them work in an ‘warm’ environment, and its approach was of particular interest to post-90s
employees. Play@Work integrated performance and cultural ideas into daily interactions between
superiors and subordinates or colleagues at the same level, to compensate for the fact that
performance measurement and instilling cultural ideas seemed too formal a process to younger
employees.
The question of how to make work interesting became the top priority in Play@Work’s
2 You Space: the unified application gateway of Yonyou Clould and the social OA platform created for MLEs and
organizations, which provides enterprises with OA, communication, collaboration and other core values as well as
improves management and work efficiency.
3 Key Performance Indicators: (KPIs) are a set of objective-oriented quantitative management indicators used to
measure process performance through setting, sampling, calculation and analysis of key parameters at input and output
terminals of organizations’ internal processes, and are the bases of business performance management.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a set of management tools and methods used to identify and track objectives
and achievements.
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Play@Work at Yonyou
product design. They focused on how to stimulate employees’ independent judgment, encourage
ideas on business, and explore employees’ inner drive. The project team believed that unless these
issues were resolved, a company could not guide and manage employees’ values, motivate them,
and their growth and that of the business.
Content and Functions
Positioned to help enterprises manage corporate culture and designed to motivate staff, reduce
labor costs, and improve employee efficiency, Play@Work provided integrated online and offline
services that focused on managing the culture, inspiring the organization, empowering talent,
managing teams, organizing activities, and corporate welfare. According to Cheng Caohong,
“We can help personnel inside an organization form shared values and basic
underlying assumptions, and gradually develop a uniquely competitive and attractive
organizational culture through substantial SBI (Situation – Behavior – Impact)
techniques. Play@Work means finishing work in a relaxed atmosphere. It helps to
realize a flat, flexible and warm management style by means of real-time, 360° and
gamified rewards and punishments. We allow organizational culture to motivate and
regulate each member’s actions in a subtle way, and manage the culture through an
honorary medal system and establishing emotional connections. During this process,
employees can clearly perceive who appreciates them, encourages them and inspires
them.”
Managing the Culture and Inspiring the Organization
Play@Work allowed an enterprise to customize a series of honorary medals system, each of
which represented one of their core values. For example, Yonyou created ‘for dedicated work,’
‘innovation and breakthrough,’ ‘the mission must succeed’ among others (See Exhibit 1). When an
employee demonstrated the values of the organizational culture, their superiors and colleagues
might award them medals representing these values as a form of real-time motivation and
recognition. The medals received were made public within the organization, and everyone was able
to see other people’s value-related performance. Managers could use classified rankings of medals
awarded based both to stimulate the employees’ sense of honor, and to serve as a reference for
personnel appraisal. At the same time, ‘golden beans’ could be distributed along with the medals,
which could be used as virtual money to purchase benefits and real gifts of business partners in a
points mall. For instance, employees could purchase a cup of coffee from a machine in the company
lobby, or enjoy a workout massage chair by using golden beans. If employees worked overtime,
their superior could use golden beans to send them home in a personal limousine. If employees
worked overtime for several days in a row and their superior awarded them several ‘for dedicated
work’ medals, this would be apparent to the HR Department in real-time in the system, and time
off in lieu could be arranged accordingly. In addition to positive honors, the system could also be
used to highlight shortcomings and encourage corrective action. The system also offered the
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Play@Work at Yonyou
function of organizational culture circle, which allowed employees to share their posts.
Talent Empowerment
With data collected over a certain period (such as a year), the value-related performance of an
employee could be evaluated in a clear, quantitative way. Play@Work could construct an objective
employee work profile based on honors acquired, which could be used by the company for precise
job-oriented training, skills development and exhibition of cultural achievements.
Play@Work also provided for ‘cultural ranks,’ and employees in possession of the appropriate
number of medals might apply for a rank appraisal. Yonyou established nine cultural ranks –
corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain, major general, lieutenant
general and general. As employees moved through the ranks they would be eligible for benefits
such as project resources, working-time autonomy, and innovation incubation support. Employees
in the higher ranks were given priority in accessing the company’s innovation and entrepreneurship
projects, and were allowed to hold roadshows and recruit other employees from inside the company
to their teams. If they developed promising new products, the company would establish new
business divisions or subsidiaries, and the employees initiating those projects would be eligible for
promotions in the new units. Employees in the higher cultural ranks had the autonomy of arranging
their work time. Yonyou referred to the 15% - 20% of working hours allocated working-time
autonomy as ‘closed-door periods.’ When employees in the higher cultural ranks tagged themselves
as in a ‘closed-door period’ in the system, their superiors and colleagues would not interrupt them
other than in exceptional circumstances.
Levels based on employees’ daily data reflected the quality of an employee’s work and their
commitment to the company’s values, and this could be used as a basis for talent review,
comprehensive appraisal and promotion. The Business Division of Yonyou Cloud Platform had a
wall display of cultural models with the names and photos of outstanding employees. The category
and number of medals obtained by each employee of the Business Division were visible in the
Play@Work system in a transparent manner and in real-time. It was no longer necessary for Yonyou
to assign specific human and material resources to comprehensive appraisal, as the system had
already recorded employees’ daily data, and the role model would be there naturally.
Other Functions
Play@Work supported team management and provided team behavior records in Play@Work
groups, which could help managers manage individual members of the group. The manager could
set phased group objectives or project objectives for thorough implementation of KPIs, update and
display project progress and results in real-time, and issue real-time commendations and incentives.
The group would get an honor ranking list that reflected others’ recognition of each individual’s
contribution and represented each person’s achievement of medals in digital form. Various
auxiliary tools could meet the group’s needs in areas such as working, learning, and recreation.
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Play@Work at Yonyou
Play@Work provided ‘learning’ (study), ‘guessing’ (riddles), ‘ride’ (free ride), ‘meeting
invitation’ and other daily training tools. Play@Work also offered a lottery, giving out golden beans,
and other daily activity tools applicable to business activities, year-end parties, and team building.
Play@Work provided various welfare and other benefits which could be used for building the
social side of the company (birthday activities, employee care and club activities), business
activities (annual meetings, product release conferences, marketing campaigns and summer camps),
and departmental rewards (outward bound activities, trips and gatherings). Yonyou set up
agreements with JD, NetEase Yanxuan, Ubox and other e-commerce platforms, and more than a
hundred global suppliers, selecting over ten thousand items as employee welfare and benefits,
covering physical devices, lifestyle services, e-commerce products and others.
Design Ideas
In Cheng Caohong’s opinion, Play@Work was neither an appraisal tool (KPI) nor
management by objects tool (OKR), but a communication tool using company values as the core.
It took design ideas from the following:
The first idea was cultural empowerment. Play@Work applied cultural empowerment to
encourage the completion of tasks and improvement of quality. The basic concept was that a medal
was equivalent to a cultural credit score, which was not directly related to salary, bonus or
promotion. Instead of offering all employees job autonomy, Play@Work adopted a selective
empowerment mechanism. The more self-motivated an employee was, the higher their cultural
credit score and their cultural rank, which would give them more job autonomy.
The second idea involved timely recognition and feedback. Positive cooperation would earn
recognition and feedback, which could be recorded in real-time.
The third idea involved the use of big data. Play@Work could reflect the individual
characteristics of each employee when it accumulated enough data. Each individual would earn
different medals and attain different scores and ranks, portraying them as individuals. When an
employee obtained a significant number of medals and beans and received substantial feedback,
their strengths and value-orientation could be assessed through the data.
Application Scenarios
Play@Work could address some common pain points.
Team Incentive
Teams need mutual encouragement to go all out for objectives. There is often a lack of highquality communication, and younger team members need new working methods.
Yang Jiabo, the Executive Chef of Waterside Resort, underwent training on Play@Work in
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Play@Work at Yonyou
August 2017. He was convinced that after a month of use, Play@Work could really help him with
his kitchen team of over 30 people. He turned job and dish requirements into Play@Work targets,
and created honorary medals for those meeting the requirements. Those who failed to meet the
requirements would be criticized with constructive comments. Yang believed the gamified process
would give him an effective and flexible tool to manage his team of young chefs, and bring him
closer to his younger employees.
Professional Training
Organizing good-quality training is hard and very costly. Many instructors struggle to engage
with trainees, and trainees are often passive about training and have a low engagement.
Ye Jiaming, an expert from Business Division of Yonyou Cloud Platform, delivered a training
session on the topic of service quality in September 2017. During the session, he captured the
interest of the trainees and created a positive atmosphere by awarding the attendees with honorary
medals and golden beans for registering by code-scanning, answering each other’s questions, trying
actively to learn, and guessing the answers to riddles. In response, a number of trainees awarded
medals to the instructor on completion of the training session. Moreover, impressed by the reaction
of the attendees, some employees actively requested to attend the next training session, and asked
the organizer to share training videos.
Project Operation
Communication is a cumbersome process for project teams. There are often no mechanisms
for synchronization of different parties’ progress, and employees who work in other areas receive
less attention.
A seminar on the overall framework of Yonyou Cloud Platform was held in September 2017.
The seminar stimulated the attendees’ enthusiasm for project communication by issuing medals
and golden beans to team members who registered by code-scanning, played an active part in
discussion, were interactive and preemptive in answering questions, learned well, and guessed the
answers to riddles. After the seminar, many project team members commented on this new
approach and how effective it had been in arousing their interest. The good ideas discussed in the
seminar were recorded in memo of a project group and guided later implementation. The
synchronization of project progress was realized by the Play@Work as a channel for subsequent
project communications. As the person in charge of the project, the project manager gave real-time
incentives to project team members based on their contributions, and those working in other areas
received the same attention.
Marketing
At major marketing events, there is often no unified communication channel for attendees on
arrival. Interaction on site is often poor, and there is no structured mechanism for retaining potential
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Play@Work at Yonyou
customers.
The 2017 Internet Conference was held in Wuzhen in August 2017. Yonyou gathered more
than 300 customers to a sub-forum through Play@Work during the afternoon. All interactions
during this sub-forum were conducted via Play@Work, which created a warm atmosphere that
impressed the customers. Play@Work groups established at the site became channels for potential
customer mining and created opportunities for product promotion.
Innovation Incubation
Rewards for innovation are often given retrospectively. There are limited numbers of
disruptive innovations. Most innovations result from routine work plans, and there is a lack of
incubation mechanisms that can make great ideas thrive.
Yonyou 2017 Product and Technological Innovation Competition adopted a brand new
appraisal model, employed Play@Work as a mechanism, and was more effective in making
breakthroughs than other similar competitions. These included: a transition from post-facto
motivation to ex-ante motivation plus in-process incubation; adoption of a rapid iteration and multiround clearance mechanism for recognizing innovative talent; the provision of comprehensive
funding support, platform support, product integration, and mentors for outstanding projects.
Employee Care
In its daily work, Yonyou provided real-time psychological and material incentives by
rewarding specific actions with honorary medals, offering employees working overtime and late
into the night with benefits such as limousine taxis services, and providing free trips for the whole
family of employees. High-potential employees were incentivized with internal job rotation
opportunities. As for creative elites, Yonyou empowered them to mobilize resources of the company.
Application Feedback
Play@Work was applied throughout Yonyou; it redefined many working practices and yielded
good results.
According to Ju Xiaoyan, COO of Play@Work,
“In 2017 we promoted the use of Play@Work in our company. Medals and golden
beans were first introduced to the employees during the music festival in April, where
we chose some people to give medals to colleagues who had done a good job. We had
been looking for opportunities promoting Play@Work such as attending as many
activities as possible, and helping others in integrating honors into their activities,
which gradually helped them learn how to use such honors. After 2018 we focused
less on internal promotion since everyone had become accustomed to thinking about
using Play@Work in their work. For instance, if an employee’s innovative idea was
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Play@Work at Yonyou
recognized by others, he or she would be naturally given a medal as a reward.”
Zhu Junbin from Overall Design Department of Yonyou Cloud said that
“The honor system is the core of Play@Work, and its best feature is that it
measures top-down, bottom-up and parallel recognition in a human way. I used to be
in charge of the technical training of Yonyou. I found the classroom atmosphere
tedious because the training was monotonous and trainees had little interest in
interacting with their instructors. When we introduced Play@Work, classes became
much more interactive. Trainees’ group was established first, and cases could be sent
to the group with corresponding ‘honorary’ medal system, which included medals for
the most active participant in the class, the trainee with the highest score, and a star
for sharing. There was also an honor ranking list which was used as the basis for
recognizing excellent trainees on graduation. Trainees also included advisors of
subsidiaries, partners and clients. The records in Play@Work during training sessions
would be considered as criteria for their future sharing of benefits with Yonyou or
undertaking of Yonyou’s projects. Excellent records mean greater possibilities of
contracting with Yonyou, a better discount from Yonyou, and a better profit-sharing
policy.”
Yang Chenchen, a new employee, said
“My boss awarded me the medal of ‘courage to act’ during my internship, which
gave me a strong sense of belonging. During the formal induction of new employees,
others gave us gold beans as welcome gifts. I finished revising the official website the
other day, and the department manager gave me the medal of ‘focus on detail.’ He
said it was recognition that I had taken my job seriously and completed it on time,
even though my home was a long distance from the company. I had earned it by my
hard work, as he knew the situation and the contribution of every employee.
Colleagues would give honorary medals to each other, and I would give others
honorary medals and golden beans for answering my questions.”
According to Xie Zhengnan who worked as the Manager of Quality Testing in Yonyou for
many years,
“It’s very common to award medals and golden beans via Play@Work in our
team. Giving employees cash in recognition of their behavior is inappropriate, but
awarding honors is different – it’s much more motivating. Awarding honors reflects
people’s trust, and formally recording this trust turns into a management style. There
are lots of advantages. For instance, golden beans could be used to buy massage chair
time or coffee – people could relax and communicate while recovering from the stress
of their daily routine.”
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Play@Work at Yonyou
Cheng Caohong believed that Play@Work had transformed human resource management. He
emphasized:
“Current technologies could realize complete connections between people and
people, people and machine, and people and external partners. We have made many
products, which give us a deep feeling of the trend of people connection. However,
there is a lack of the soft power of culture management implementation, which could
facilitate people to reach consensus and share results. We expect Play@Work to be
used by more organizations and individuals, and to penetrate areas such as smart
working, team empowerment, the Play@Work idea of warm working, and the
peofessional work in Yonyou. We hope Play@Work ideas will run through the whole
process of business social interaction and collaboration, and truly lead professional
work, which is the goal we strive for.”
Challenges and Thoughts
Cheng Caohong saw Play@Work as an innovative approach to managing company culture.
Play@Work accumulated substantial experiences during the design and promotion process. It
created formed products, and had professional operation teams and strategic partners that provided
consulting and support services. However, since it was a new and innovative product, it needed
more testing in practice, to achieve continuous improvement and optimization based on user
feedback.
Students responded to Cheng Caohong’s presentation on Play@Work with many questions.
Some typical ones were:
(1) The employees are accustomed to a culture of task performance appraisal – how difficult
will it be to introduce a non-appraisal tool like Play@Work?
(2) What should be the criteria for the award of medals?
(3) Would employees engage in ‘click farming’? How could you prevent employees from
simply awarding each other medals for flattering?
(4) Would the product increase the communication burden? For instance, our company has
prohibited the use of mobile phones during working hours to prevent interruptions. Should we
prescribe the time for using Play@Work?
(5) It might be easy for our company’s younger employees to adapt to this approach, but older
employees might find it hard to accept such a gamified and seemingly informal approach. Would
Play@Work suit older staff?
After responding to these questions, Cheng Caohong asked the students another question:
Would you introduce and promote Play@Work in your company or team as a manager?
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Play@Work at Yonyou
Exhibit 1: Yonyou’s ‘Honorary’ Medals
The honorary medals of Yonyou’s culture were as follows:

Attitude: for dedicated work, strong support, early bird

Innovation: embrace change, top innovation, innovation and breakthrough

Integrity: immediate response, dare to tell the truth, transpositional consideration

Service: Open Sharers, customer delight, efficient service

Execution: the mission must succeed, map out a strategy, total devotion

Result: contract signing expert, breakthrough in performance, solution expert

Professionalism: courage to act, keep improving, the expert
Source: Yonyou Network Technology Co., Ltd.
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