The Underlying Logic Behind Dreame’s Company-Wide Short Video Initiative

The decision by Yu Hao, founder of Dreame Technology, to encourage all employees to create short videos is not primarily debated over its rationality, but reflects the strategic resolve of business leaders: are you prepared to endure short-term controversies and issue such unconventional management orders?

First and foremost, this initiative is far more than a single management decision; it serves as a complete organizational stress testing system. As an experienced corporate decision-maker, Yu Hao fully anticipated tangible risks brought by involving R&D staff in short video creation, such as diverted focus from core work and widespread employee resistance — these are common negative outcomes of conventional managerial moves.

He ultimately pushed forward with this strategy mainly to quickly classify and evaluate internal personnel. By issuing asymmetric instructions, he observes employees’ different behavioral responses, distinguishing active adapters, passive executors, resistant participants and those who choose to leave the company directly.

This management approach acts as an organizational governance method under extreme scenarios. Through quasi non-contractual directives, it realizes rapid categorized labeling of human resources. Employees who insist on sticking strictly to defined job duties show low adaptability to future flexible organizational structures. In contrast, those who prioritize organizational needs over rigid job responsibilities constitute the core talent pool. While the test results will not serve as the sole criterion for staff elimination, they objectively reflect employees’ attitudes and priority setting when faced with unexpected tasks.

In addition, this move brings incidental brand communication value. Regardless of the actual outreach effect of employee-produced short videos, the initiative itself has drawn widespread industry attention, achieving low-cost brand exposure.

From the perspective of input-output analysis, the success rate of this company-wide short video strategy follows a power-law distribution. Among some 5,000 participating employees, only around ten accounts may eventually go viral. These outstanding creators will grow into official corporate KOLs, product sales benchmarks, and even core leaders responsible for new consumption business lines.

Yu Hao never held the unrealistic expectation that every employee could achieve success. He has publicly mentioned that even his own popular content often gains unexpected traction. The core purpose of this strategy is to select talents with content creation capabilities from mass participants. The value created by such talents can easily outpace tens of millions of yuan invested in public domain traffic promotion and the regular output of dozens of full-time marketing staff.

This logic aligns with a high-risk, high-return probabilistic game model: investing fragmented daily working hours at extremely low individual time costs to reap excess returns cultivated by top-tier content creators.

Such company-wide participation strategies targeting emerging traffic platforms are not unprecedented. Company-wide Weibo operations in 2011 and Moments promotion campaigns in 2015 essentially represent iterations in the definition of work.

The employment contract of the industrial era is built on fixed job rights and obligations: enterprises purchase employees’ fixed working hours, and employees finish standardized tasks within job boundaries to deliver quantifiable and certain results.

By contrast, Yu Hao’s management philosophy adopts a competency-oriented employment model. Enterprises pay salaries not merely for employees’ existing professional skills, but for their full range of potential capabilities. Professional research and development constitutes core value, while employees equipped with additional capabilities including content creation, livestream operation and sales conversion can multiply their personal professional value. In turn, salaries for staff confined to single-duty work will stay in line with market rates for such limited competencies.

This model is by no means exploitation of employees’ spare capacity, but an upgrade of employment relations from position bondage to competency-based compensation. Salaries are directly tied to the total value contributed by employees’ comprehensive capabilities, and those with broader competency boundaries gain a larger share of benefit distribution. Such practices have matured across the internet industry. Initiatives such as all-staff customer service, all-staff sales and all-staff recruitment all aim to break down internal departmental silos and enable dynamic deployment of human resources.

Judged by traditional management theories, this decision apparently has obvious flaws: low content production efficiency by non-professionals, distracted energy of core-position employees, and potential internal mood fluctuations. Nevertheless, it boasts strategic rationality when assessed from the new perspective of dynamic organizational capacity building. Divergent views on this initiative essentially stem from different evaluation standpoints and dimensions.

A deeper conflict lies in widespread employee resistance. Most employees believe their time and energy are devoted to low-success-rate projects whose benefits do not belong to individuals. They see their efforts serving organizational goals misaligned with personal career development rather than facilitating self-growth, and such sentiments are reasonable.

This ultimately leads to three core questions in management philosophy: Is it valid to affirm the value of individuals taking the initiative to break competency boundaries, step out of comfort zones and maintain an open mindset? How to evaluate the rationality of competency expansion enforced by organizations rather than chosen voluntarily by individuals? When judging such managerial moves, should strategic motivations or practical implementation outcomes take precedence?