携程的四十五天实验：信任能不能当生产力？

When it comes to employment practices at Chinese internet companies, most of the time what we hear is negative news.

Overtime, involution, nine-nine-six, alternating work weeks.

But what Ctrip announced yesterday is a signal in a completely different direction.

Starting May first, Ctrip will launch a one-year "no-reason personal leave" management experiment.

Participating employees will receive up to forty-five additional days of personal leave per year on top of all existing paid vacation.

And taking leave requires no explanation of any kind.

Forty-five days.

No reason required.

These two keywords, placed in the context of China's internet industry, are almost counterintuitive.

Let's first look at the specific experimental design.

Ctrip selected approximately six thousand employees as the sample.

These six thousand people are randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group.

The experimental group enjoys the new policy.

The control group maintains the existing system.

After one year, they compare the two groups on differences in work efficiency, employee satisfaction, retention rate, and other metrics.

This is a standard randomized controlled trial.

Very common in medicine and social sciences.

But using it for corporate management policy is a first in China.

This point alone is worth paying attention to.

It means Ctrip isn't making decisions on a whim.

They want data.

Now let's talk about several key details.

First, these forty-five days are unpaid.

Not paid leave.

If you don't work, you don't get paid.

This is very important because it directly determines the actual utilization rate of this policy.

For mid-level employees earning twenty to thirty thousand a month, taking a few days off occasionally isn't a big deal.

But for entry-level employees earning seven to eight thousand a month, every day off means one less day of pay.

Second, no reason whatsoever is required.

This is the core innovation.

In the vast majority of Chinese companies, taking personal leave requires an approval process.

You fill out forms, write reasons, get your direct supervisor's signature, and sometimes it needs to be reported even higher.

This process itself is a form of invisible pressure.

It implies: taking leave is the exception, being at work is the norm.

You need to prove you have a "good enough" reason.

Ctrip has removed this step entirely.

You don't need to explain.

You just need to press the apply button.

Third, the leave can be used flexibly.

No restrictions on consecutive days.

You can take one day today and two days next week.

Or you can take a whole month at once.

It's entirely up to the employee.

Honestly, when I first saw this news, my first reaction was skepticism.

Unpaid leave — to put it bluntly, it's just letting you rest at your own expense.

What's there to celebrate?

But thinking about it more carefully, the core of this matter isn't about "unpaid" versus "paid."

It's about the signal behind those three characters: "no reason."

The message it sends is: we trust you.

You are an adult.

You know when you need to rest.

You don't need to prove to anyone that you "deserve" a break.

This is an extremely rare attitude in China's workplace environment.

Let's compare this to the broader landscape.

The nine-nine-six system was an open secret in China's internet industry in previous years.

Nine to nine, six days a week.

Although after 2021 the government explicitly stated that nine-nine-six is illegal.

Many companies made adjustments in form.

But in substance, the overtime culture hasn't truly disappeared.

It just went from explicit to implicit.

It's no longer called nine-nine-six.

But your team leader sends messages in the group chat at ten PM.

Do you dare not reply?

There's an urgent request on the weekend.

Do you dare say you're on vacation?

During year-end reviews, "engagement level" is a rating criterion.

If you take too much leave, this score gets marked down.

So many people's situation is: I have leave but I don't dare take it.

This is the truest reality of Chinese workplaces.

Against this backdrop, what Ctrip is doing isn't just a human resources experiment.

It's more like a declaration of values.

Liang Jianzhang is a very unique entrepreneur.

He is Ctrip's co-founder and also an economics professor at Peking University.

He has devoted enormous energy to studying China's population issues.

He has written many articles calling for reduced working hours, higher birth rates, and encouraging flexible work.

Ctrip introduced the "three-plus-two" hybrid work model back in 2022.

Three days at the office, two days at home per week.

Later they also launched a post-maternity remote work policy.

Allowing new parents to continue working while caring for their children at home.

These policies all generated considerable discussion at the time.

And this no-reason leave can be seen as a natural extension of this series of experiments.

Of course, skeptical voices are also numerous.

The first type of skepticism is about practicality.

Unpaid leave is a benefit for high-income employees but may be completely meaningless for low-income ones.

If you're paying a mortgage, car loan, raising children and supporting parents every month, where's the confidence to take unpaid leave?

The second type of skepticism is about cultural compatibility.

Even if the company says you can take leave whenever you want.

In a corporate culture that emphasizes "hustle" and "dedication."

The people who actually dare to take lots of leave might be very few.

And those who do take a lot of leave.

Might they actually become the first ones to be eliminated?

The third type of skepticism is more pointed.

Some people directly ask whether this is a signal for disguised layoffs.

Give you leave so you'll go, then after you go say your performance didn't meet standards.

This kind of operation is not without precedent in China's internet industry.

All of these skepticisms have merit.

But I believe it's precisely because there are so many unknowns.

That this experiment is worth doing.

One year from now, the data will tell us.

How many people actually used this leave.

How many days they used.

Whether their performance went up or down.

Whether their attrition rate compared to the control group is higher or lower.

If the data proves that giving employees more trust and autonomy actually improves efficiency and retention.

This will be a very persuasive case study.

Not just meaningful for Ctrip, but a reference for all of Chinese corporate management.

Conversely, if the data proves this policy has no effect, or even negative effects.

That's also a valuable conclusion.

At least we'd know the problem isn't about whether to give leave, but about something deeper.

Actually looking globally, experiments on reducing working hours are quite numerous already.

Britain ran a large-scale four-day workweek trial in 2022, with sixty-one companies participating.

The results were interesting: ninety-two percent of companies chose to permanently keep the four-day system.

Employee burnout decreased significantly, and attrition dropped by fifty-seven percent.

And company revenue during the trial period grew by an average of one point four percent.

In other words, working one less day didn't mean earning less money, and people were more stable.

This result isn't hard to understand from an economics perspective.

The output of knowledge work isn't linear.

Sitting at your desk for eight hours doesn't produce one-third more output than six hours.

Much of the time, the efficiency of those last two hours approaches zero.

You're just pretending to be busy.

Reducing total working hours actually squeezes out those inefficient hours.

Ctrip's experiment isn't exactly the same as a four-day workweek, but the underlying logic is the same.

Both are asking: are we trading ineffective presence time for a false sense of security.

Regardless, I respect that Ctrip is willing to commit six thousand samples and an entire year to doing this.

In an industry where most companies are still debating whether to cancel alternating work weeks.

Ctrip asked a bigger question.

If we truly trust our employees, what happens?

The answer isn't known yet.

But at least someone is seriously looking for it.