Immediate Commentary | How can "employees rarely leave work on time" be considered a competitive advantage for a company?

Recently, at the 2025 annual performance briefing, Miao Jianmin, Chairman of China Merchants Bank, said that a bank’s true moat is to internalize the philosophy of “customer-centricity” into corporate culture and convert it into employees’ everyday behavior. He gave an example: after 5 p.m., if you go to a China Merchants Bank branch, you will find it is very different from other banks—“China Merchants Bank employees rarely clock out on time.”

The moment he said this, it immediately sparked heated debate online, with no shortage of sharp sarcasm and criticism—something the chairman himself likely hadn’t anticipated in advance. His original intent was clearly to praise his own employees, believing they have put the “customer-centricity” philosophy into practice and sacrificed to get the work done well. How does praising employees’ dedication end up becoming the target of mockery?

In fact, looking back at the public discourse in recent years, there have been plenty of entrepreneurs who ran into controversy after promoting and praising employees’ overtime work—advocating “forgoing rest” as “dedicated service.”

The reason these remarks have sparked controversy is probably that business leaders haven’t stood on the employees’ side to look at the problem. Going a step further, it’s that managers are still clinging to a low-efficiency competitive strategy. Over the years, “anti-unfair internal competition” has been one of the regulators’ key focuses. Although the meaning of “involution-style” competition is relatively broad—mainly including companies’ disorderly expansion of production capacity, waging price wars, and engaging in zero-sum or even negative-sum games—at the micro level, the work systems that run for extraordinarily long hours and implicit overtime are what make it most painfully felt by people in the workplace.

One should recognize that “involution-style” competition has already become ill-suited to today’s market environment and is hard to sustain. Not only are the profits many companies draw from it getting thinner and thinner, employees are also left feeling mentally and physically exhausted. In fact, in day-to-day work, if employees are worn out just trying to keep up with KPIs, it’s hard for them to maintain sharp insight, and it’s also difficult for the company to further improve competitiveness. Obviously, completing work with high efficiency and high quality is far more competitive than “rarely clocking out on time.”

Perhaps some people think overtime is no big deal, as long as there are sufficiently generous pay incentives. But don’t forget: for employees, the inequality of bargaining power in the “game” means they do not have enough say. Under evaluation pressure, whether “rarely clocking out on time” is truly “voluntary” is something only the employees themselves can know for sure. In any case, using sacrifice of rest rights—even sacrificing physical health—to realize the philosophy of “customer-centricity” is not a workplace culture worth promoting.

More importantly, we should understand the significance of resisting “involution” from the height of high-quality economic development for the nation. On the one hand, when employees should rest, they should rest well, so that work enthusiasm can be energized; on the other hand, only by giving employees sufficient rest rights and leave rights can we continuously improve quality of life, and consumers’ potential can also be fully unleashed.

In this regard, only if more and more managers actively embrace people-centered management can they respond to the public’s expectations and create a harmonious workplace environment for resisting “involution” and fostering healthy competition. “Modern management + efficient systems + a harmonious environment” may be the true “moat” a company genuinely needs in its course of development.