TikTok Parent Plans Bonuses to Thank Employees Amid Turmoil

TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. plans to hand out cash bonuses to its 60,000-plus global workforce to thank them for helping the company “overcome challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and changing macro environment,” the company said.

Full-time employees who worked 26 or more days between July 1 and Aug. 31 will be eligible for a bonus worth half their August base salary, ByteDance said Tuesday in a letter to employees. It will be the first extra bonus paid by ByteDance in recent years, several employees told Caixin.

ByteDance faces a Sept. 15 deadline set by U.S. President Donald Trump to divest its popular TikTok short video app or face a ban in the U.S. Trump last week reiterated the deadline and said the federal government must be “well compensated,” or the service will be shut down.

ByteDance is in discussions with suitors including Microsoft Corp., Walmart Inc., Oracle Corp. and the company’s current investors. But uncertainty around a deal escalated last week after China revised technology export rules so that any sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations may require Chinese government approval.

After Trump’s threat, ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming sent two internal letters to employees last month, saying the staff was working “around the clock to get the best possible outcome.”

The bonuses will come ahead of the company’s routine fall performance reviews, usually a period of high turnover. The payments may help retain some employees considering leaving, some workers told Caixin. The company didn’t disclose how much it expects to pay out in bonuses or the amounts payable to typical workers.

Instead of five days a week, ByteDance employees work 11 days every two weeks. That makes it easy to have 26 working days in two months, making most employees eligible for the bonus, some employees said.

ByteDance hasn’t had any layoffs in the U.S. or India, where it was among dozens of Chinese apps banned in June, but TikTok’s team in the Beijing office has a significantly smaller workload than before, some employees said.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer’s abrupt resignation last month also adds to uncertainty. The high-profile American former executive of Walt Disney Co. joined TikTok three months ago. He said in a letter to employees that the “political environment has sharply changed.”

Contact reporter Denise Jia (huijuanjia@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com)

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