More employees are becoming aware of who view their posts on SNS . Photo: Cui Meng/GT

When 25-year-old Alice Zhang (pseudonym) heard the news that a woman had been dismissed after her boss saw her words of depression on WeChat and attributed it to her job, Zhang breathed a sigh of relief. It easily could have been her.

The dismissed woman surnamed Li, who had previously worked for a company in Beijing, was awarded 20,000 yuan ($3,248) compensation by a court. The court judged that her previous employers had wrongly terminated her contract due to a post in her circle of friends on WeChat, the Beijing Morning Post reported.

"My work leader is a foreigner who does not care much about my postings on WeChat," said Zhang on August 12, who works in a foreign company in Beijing. In the past, she added a post saying that she was so sleepy and didn't feel like working, but she didn't receive a scolding from her leader.

How professional an employee's relationship should be with his/her leaders on social media is dependent on the leaders and the corporate culture that he/she works in, said Zhang. She once heard complaints from her colleagues saying that their Chinese leaders speculate too much about their social media postings and then wrongly attribute comments to their work.

However, Zhang's postings on social media do not go unnoticed by her boss, which she learned when she posted a picture of a bottle of fruit wine at noon in the office.

"I just wanted to show my feelings about the wine, but my boss joked under the post that I was actually drinking wine while in work," said Zhang. "I knew she was joking, but I still removed the posting so more colleagues wouldn't know."

In the new version of WeChat, the function of "grouping" allows users to decide what groups of friends see what. "If what I want to share does not matter much, then I will let my boss know," said Zhang. "But if the content includes some expression that could be interpreted differently, then I will not let her know."

Zhang is not alone in her concerns, with many users voicing their complaints on the Internet that social media has expanded the boundaries of office life into their personal and private lives.

In the eyes of Chen Chi, the co-founder of Xiaozhu Rentals, a local Chinese variant of Airbnb that is based in Beijing, social media is nothing more than a diverse channel of communication within a company, and isn't a tool that is used to manage employees.

"We do not request that ordinary employees must add us as friends. If the colleagues want to add me, I will agree, assuming that one day they may want to talk with me privately about their complaints or problems over SNS. It is just an additional channel of communication," said Chen.

The case of Li is the first case in which a company dismissed an employee through WeChat. It sets a precedent that warns employees to be more careful. 

"This case is just an individual case, but it tells us that employees should be prudent over their postings on SNS," said Wang Yuanlin, who works in HR at the clearing center of Civil Aviation Administration of China.

"If you handle the relationship with your boss on social media the same as you do in real life, then you will be doing it well," said Wang.