The clip was posted on the internet on September 23 with a note that the woman’s behavior was a solution to train her sales staff: “All people on the site burst into tears when the members of the team who had a low KPI and could not fulfill their duties were snapped with an elastic band by the president."

In the clip, a group of well-dressed women standing on a stage are communicating with the female CEO. The female boss stretches the elastic band on each employee's hand and releases it, causing their wrists to turn red and swollen.

While snapping the elastic bands, the female CEO shouts loudly: "Khong xung dang la nguoi dung dau” (Not a fit leader), "Tai sao doi nhom khong trung thuc?” (Why is the team dishonest?), “Khong no luc” (Not trying hard enough).

The women standing in front of her felt pain, and collapsed or sobbed. After the snapping with rubber bands, the female CEO hugged the employees and some of them burst into tears. Other employees present also shed tears.

Shared on social networks, the clip has stirred controversy. Some people criticized the strange training method of the CEO, while others commented that this was a PR trick to polish the image of the company.

The clip was shot at a staff meeting of a cosmetics brand.

D.T.T, born in 1995, was one of the participants at the meeting. T did not appear in the clip, but she took part in the challenge of snapping rubber bands on the wrist.

“There were different levels of the elastic band snapping experience. The level shown in the video was the highest one, applied to team leaders,” T explained.

According to T, the lesson for employees is that leaders always have to take responsibility for their team members’ mistakes.

T was also snapped on her hands, but it was not too painful, she said. With the experience, T said she could understand the hard work and the responsibility that her superiors bear. T and her co-workers understood that they needed to make more effort to fulfill their duties.

T told VietNamNet that she did not care too much about the public’s criticism. “Different people will have different views and assessments from different perspectives,” she said.

“They (critics) are not members of our company and they don’t have such an experience, so they cannot understand the significance and the lesson of the move,” she said.

T also stressed that, though it looked serious, the pain lasted a short time.

T has been working for the sales network of the brand for many years and has attended a lot of similar training sessions. She said she had experienced more severe challenges than the elastic band flipping, and she believes the challenge was normal.

Hoang Phi Huyen, CEO of the cosmetics brand, told VietNamNet that the clip showed a training session organized by the sales division of the company. The division worked with an event organizer to implement mindset games, and one of them involved snapping elastic bands on hands.

“The rule of the game is that all members of the team have to pull many rubber bands at the same time, trying to break those rubber bands. A 10-member group must be united to succeed. If someone does not play wholeheartedly, their leader will be punished. The clip was filmed when the leaders were punished when their team lost. The person who shot the rubber bands was the business director,” Huyen explained.

“The aim of the game is making workers understand the heavy responsibility their leaders have to take,” she added. “The consequences of workers’ lack of responsibility will be put on the leaders."

The female CEO said she had not been informed about the game before the event. However, she said she believed that it was an interesting and effective game. Denying that it was a PR trick by the company, she said the video clip was posted by her assistant. Because of the heavy criticism from the public, however, she has taken down the video clip.

Thanh Minh