Dynamic Optimization of Employees Work Strategies in a WeChat-Based Evaluation System

Abstract

In recent years, social media platforms and, especially, instant messaging applications have been witnessed to play an increasingly important role as a communication channel among employees to build effective organizations, which results in a considerably large part of individual activities moving onto the cyber-based workspace. In this paper, we collect the unique real-world data set from a WeChat-based work performance evaluation system built and used by a medium-sized organization in China, in order to study the optimization of the employees’ work strategies, especially the work time determination, with the purpose of maximizing the total utility comprised of the work and nonwork utilities. In the system, the performance evaluation is completely based on the employees’ work reports and includes three major measures including score, level, and rank. First, we formulate a dynamic optimization model, incorporating the work utility into the reputational and the substantive utility, so as to examine the employees’ work strategy. Then, we conduct both empirical studies and computational experiments to make an in-depth analysis to probe the employees’ optimal work strategies. The main results include: 1) the optimal work time is greatly affected by the weight of the reputational utility; 2) the optimal work time is always the threshold time to achieve a certain level or a certain rank; 3) the total utility is with the trend of decreasing after increasing with the growing work time; and 4) the optimal work time does not always make the employee achieve a good work performance.