Zoho 25 People Values and Convictions

People

To run a successful company, you first have to build a community of people with shared purpose and clear vision. The employees you hire, where they come from, what their backgrounds are, and how you treat them, define your organization more than any product you build or service you provide. At Zoho, we place our people and their quality of life at the center of every decision we make.

Making space to find your life's work

Given that nearly half of our waking hours are spent on the job, people want work that feels meaningful, that speaks to their passions, and that offers an opportunity to grow. That's why Zoho invests in its employees from the start, offering them the space and flexibility to discover their true potential.

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Making space to find your life's work

The tech industry doesn't prioritize long-term relationships between employees and the companies they work for. Instead, most people put in their time, and then moving on, taking the next step in their career path. Zoho is different. At Zoho, we've managed to retain many of our earliest employees for decades. These pillars of our community have mentored generations of new employees, including many who were born after those old-guard mentors first started at the company. That longevity says something important about our company culture and the impact it has had on the lives of our people.

Over the last 25 years, we've seen how important it is to provide employees with a deep sense of fulfillment through the work that they do. So how do you make work life more fulfilling? You look at employees as people to be nurtured, not assets to be exploited. You see them for their capability, not just for the measurable capital they currently produce. You provide them with meaningful, challenging work, and you give them time to build the skills and expertise they need to succeed.

Long-term investment reaps big rewards

If you look at Zoho as a whole, you can see numerous examples of people who were given this opportunity: our Chief Evangelist started in IT; our Head of HR for the US, started as a content editor; the Marketing Manager for one of our largest products started as an app developer. The list goes on. In each of these cases, we identified talented people and gave them room to pursue their passions. With time and encouragement, those passions evolved into true callings for the employees and invaluable assets for the organization.

Cultivating opportunity in communities that need it

We've never believed that big cities have a monopoly on talent, so that's not where we look to build or hire. Instead of limiting our pool to the same group of people everyone else is fighting to hire, we decided to open up our ranks to non-traditional candidates who live outside the usual tech industry hubs. We'd much rather find diamonds in the rough than buy polished, cookie-cutter thinkers.

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There’s enough latent talent in the world that’s waiting for an opportunity. At Zoho, we believe in providing that opportunity.
Sridhar Vembu CEO and Co-founder

Cultivating opportunity in communities that need it

Talent alone doesn't guarantee success. Sometimes, success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, of knowing the right people, of being given the opportunity to showcase your skills. But over the last few decades, it seems that the only places tech companies think talent exists (or should live) is in densely populated, high-priced, traffic-jammed cities.

But great talent doesn't only exist in high rises; amazing work happens in small towns and villages around the world.

Erosion of the community top soil

The problem is that the allure of high-paying, interesting jobs draws local talent away from the very places where it is most desperately needed. To borrow a metaphor from farming, these smaller, rural communities have witnessed a wholesale erosion of the "top soil" of their talent pool.

We saw firsthand the impact this erosion had on local communities. When the people with means and vision leave rural areas for high paying jobs, opportunities dwindle and growth slows. Without that economic vibrancy, more people leave, leading to fewer opportunities for those who stay. It's a negative feedback loop that has resulted in tremendous wealth inequality and political unrest all around the world.

Bring jobs to where the talent is

We knew we wanted to do something different. We wanted to incentivize the best and the brightest to stay local, rather than luring talent away from small towns toward big cities. We wanted to help build deeply-rooted, local communities. We wanted to inspire the people around us to reach for a better future for themselves and their families.

Our approach? We build offices in smaller towns where we can make a bigger impact and where employees can buy homes, spend time with family, and enjoy a higher quality of life. We staff those offices with great, local folks who are eager to get their shot, and then give them the opportunity to succeed. The results thus far are very encouraging; in places we've opened these offices, communities have seen increasing economic opportunity, employees enjoy a higher quality of life, and towns that were once struggling are thriving again.

This has taught us something we always expected; that when done right, what's good for business can also be good for the community.

Redefining education and corporate credentialism

Just as we reject the view that talent can only be found in big cities, so too do we reject the idea that only graduates from expensive universities are worth hiring. Drive, fortitude, and flexibility are better indicators of who will be a great colleague than a high GPA or a fancy name on a resume. Once we rejected the conformity of credentialism, we started to see potential new employees everywhere.

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Redefining education and corporate credentialism

We believe that education should be practical and contextual. Unfortunately, most universities offer neither. The reality is, what's being taught in Comp Sci classes doesn't remotely resemble the challenges a software engineer actually faces. Education, especially one that costs an arm and a leg, should prepare people for what comes next, but most college programs are more concerned with theory than practice.

The classroom failed to prepare us for the real-world challenges we faced when trying to build a company. There were no courses on "how to reinvent yourself when the economy collapses" or, "what to do when customers are unhappy." We had to figure this out ourselves, and in real time.

Breaking the debt cycle

Besides leaving people unprepared for work, college also leaves them entrenched in debt. 18-year-olds sign away their financial freedom for a piece of paper that is worth less and less every day. Instead of being an asset that helps you foster growth, college is increasingly turning into a liability, creating generations enslaved to debt for decades to come.

Once we realized that a diploma is only a piece of paper, we found a lot of incredibly talented people that had been overlooked because they didn't have the right credentials, connections or GPA. We decided you didn't need to go to college to be a good engineer; what you needed was passion, enthusiasm, and a chance.

Moving beyond the diploma

In 2005, Zoho Schools of Learning launched with a cohort of six recent high school graduates who came to Zoho directly from an assortment of villages across rural India. Over the course of a year, we trained them in math, engineering, and English. Afterwards, those six students had the opportunity to serve as apprentices with our engineering teams. Every single team went on to hire the apprentices as full-time employees, and multiple members of that first batch of students are still employed at Zoho more then 15 years later.

Now, Zoho Schools of Learning has become a major hiring channel for the company, with graduates of the program making up approximately 10% of our current workforce. Over the last decade-and-a-half, we've expanded our course offerings to include dedicated tracks in technology, design, and business. We have graduated hundreds of students who have taken up every role imaginable across the company, including development, IT administration, UX design, product management, and marketing.

The fresh ideas and energy these folks bring has helped make us the diverse and dynamic company that we are.

Embracing professionalism that doesn't erase the personal

Usually, the journey from startup to enterprise means a lot more formality and a lot less genuine human interaction. Because employees all have to fit into the same mold, they stop bringing their personalities to work. The creativity stops, and when the creativity stops, so does the innovation.

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Embracing professionalism that doesn't erase the personal

Most company culture explicitly or implicitly teaches employees to flatten their personalities in order to conform to the expectations of the organization. At its heart, that's what "professionalization" means at a lot of companies. Do you follow the rules? Do you blend in? Do you color inside the lines? When you're in the office or on the clock, you must conform to the character of the company at all costs.

But the truth is, every organization is built on personality. The personalities of the people who work there. The personalities of the customers they interact with. The personalities of senior executives. The personality of the founder. Trying to erase the personal from the professional merely stifles creativity and multiplies unhappiness.

Tapping into the power of the personal

While all jobs have their moments of tedium, we think it is imperative that people enjoy what they do, deeply and genuinely. We don't see software development as a factory line job, one where everyone on the line is interchangeable, or disposable. No, we want people with passion, curiosity, and most importantly, personality.

We hire people who stand out from the crowd, but not because of the degrees they hold or the wealth they may have attained. We'd rather have colleagues that are multifaceted in their interests and talents, and who want to put those interests and talents to use. We'd rather empower our employees to take creative risks, to try new ideas, and to bring their unique experiences to work.

Long-term investment results in long-term employees

By clearing space for people to find their callings, not only do you increase productivity for the organization, but you also optimize quality of life for the individual.

The results of this commitment are borne out in our employee ranks. We are proud that many of our employees have spent more than half their lives working at Zoho. Others have spent their entire working careers here, and still others have seen their children go through Zoho Schools of Learning and emerge as full-time employees.

The Zoho family