The boss of a small company in Wuhan, China, recently sparked controversy online after it became known that he asks employees to send him screenshots of their phone battery usage before leaving work.

Convinced that the poor performance of his company in recent months was somehow related to how much time employees spend on their smartphones instead of working, a company boss in Wuhan decided to address the issue by checking their phone use daily. According to one employee who took to social media to expose the controversial productivity-enhancing method, he and his colleagues are required to go into their phone settings and take screenshots of the battery usage graph for the day and send it to their boss.

As you can imagine, social media didn’t take too well to this intrusive, privacy-trampling tactic. Many called it useless, while others advised employees of the company to simply quit and find a better place to work.

“It’s outrageous, when a company starts doing stuff like this, it usually means it’s going downhill and you can start planning to change jobs,” one person commented on Weibo.

“A clear invasion of privacy,” someone else weighed in.

Some people pointed out that people working for the company could simply bypass this controversial rule by simply bringing a second smartphone with them and just sending screenshots from it.

The employee who first exposed the tactic said that some of his colleagues were outraged by it and took it up with the supervisor, but most are worried about how complaining would impact their employment status, so they just keep their heads down.

Some sources claim that, following the online controversy, the company president issued a public statement explaining that his method was never about breaching his employees’ privacy, but about increasing productivity by making sure they weren’t checking social media and playing video games at work. That did little to calm the mob…

Chinese companies have been making news headlines for their controversial productivity-increasing methods for a while now. From publicly humiliating employees for not meeting targets, to installing timers in toilets, they’ve been busy making sure people put in the most work possible.