The coronavirus epidemic has changed the way of life and work. Companies around China have initiated a "home office" workaround. With the help of online apps, employees say they don't feel that much inconvenient.

Jiang's company announced home office policies last week because of the epidemic.

Like many of her colleagues, she uses online work apps to contact clients and report her work status.

Jiang said the new approach is not that difficult to adapt to since her daily work as a sports event planner is communication, which can be easily done on WeChat or via emails.

By staying home, she's responsible for both herself and others.

Unlike others who are adjusting to working from home, Zhang is more used to being on call 24 hours a day.

Zhang works for an international oil and gas company and needs to communicate with clients in different time zones. He said his foreign clients and colleagues understand the epidemic situation in China, and the company's IT team is upgrading cloud servers to boost efficiency as much as possible.

The epidemic has become a touchstone for the thousands of work-related applications in the app store.

WeChat Work developer Tencent said it has developed new functions like super group chat, conference streaming and online health reporting. 

He Jing, WeChat Work's senior product director, said server requests have grown tenfold Monday morning. He said on February 3, roughly 2.5 million company users and 60 million individuals were active on the WeChat Work platform, which is three times the number of active users compared to last year. 

Apart from companies, primary and middle schools are also using WeChat and Ding Talk to livestream classes and give out assignments, as the spring semester has been postponed in many provinces. According to data from Alibaba, schools from over 300 cities are using Ding Talk to hold livestreaming courses.