After the last customers leave, the waitresses at Shanghai's upmarket Tang Dynasty Restaurant - teenagers and twenty-somethings - swap their cheongsams for tight trousers and dance to pop music in the lobby.
Dancing is a popular way to build team spirit among younger workers, notes Gabriel Fung Wai-kwok as he leaves the restaurant.
Some 240 million strong, China's Generation Y will one day be the pillar of the workforce, and managing them is an unprecedented challenge.
Fung, who, as fashion retailer Bellvilles' chief operating officer, is responsible for 530 stores across the country, has had to learn new ways of communicating with his saleswomen, nearly all of whom were born after 1980. 'I am chief operating officer, but I tell them to call me Gabriel, not Fung zong (boss), to get rid of any feeling of rank,' he said. 'I am learning to make friends with them and speak their language, which is basically symbols.'
The Gen-Y traits of individualism, consumerism and tech-savviness is spreading across the globe from advanced nations to China's nouveau riche middle class. Fung is in a near-constant state of culture shock. In his mid-forties, he was astonished to find many of his staff communicate silently most of the time, through short messaging or by computer. They lead an internet-oriented life of online shopping and games and blogs.
Managers of a well-known shopping mall in Jilin in the northeast held a one-day meeting two weeks ago to study the behaviour of their 'new generation' staff and to map out ways to manage them.