How Zoho Corp. is building an open culture for its people

If you have been keeping up with our previous Nudge Talks, you would have come across several interesting perspectives from our guests on the mammoth role culture plays in organizations. This series of talks on the imperative of ‘culture’ drew to a close with a fireside chat with Rajendran Dandapani, Business Solutions Evangelist at Zoho Corp and President at Zoho Schools of Learning.

Dandapani has been one of the founding members of Zoho Corp and is a significant influencer of its impressive culture. He spoke on various aspects of organizational culture that have been at the heart of Zoho, and also shed important light on what’s important to follow in the current world marked with unpredictability.

Here are the highlights that stood out:

Zoho has a tremendous score of around 4.5 on Glassdoor which tells us employees are satisfied and motivated. What’s the secret that has led to such a great accomplishment that even top organizations fail to achieve?

The only reason our rating is great on Glassdoor is that we have an internal ‘Glassdoor’ in our organization. Every week, our CEO, Sridhar Vembu would stand up before all the employees, and had a dialogue with them on their complaints and issues. Everything from as little as leakage in bathroom taps to growth prospects of the company is addressed in this unusually set-up conversation. We know it’s better to know what employees have to say internally than to read it at an online employer-review platform. Not only do we understand our employees’ concerns, but we also take immediate actions to resolve them.

What are the things that have not changed at Zoho from 1996 to now?

We continue to not have visiting cards. We do not indulge in word plays with our employees or customers. The CEO doesn’t have a cabin. The CEO doesn’t have a secretary. He has lunch with us. In fact, he doesn’t even have a sitting place, whenever he visits, he would join the team that is working on the latest projects. This physical representation of humility is what has not changed at all. The naturalness of working is still the same. The world is continuously changing. We have steered Zoho through the dotcom bubble, the great recession, and now Covid, but our primary culture has remained the same.

How do you manage to strike an equilibrium between the management and employees? There are times when there is a lack of alignment simply because there can very possibly be a difference between the personal values of the CEO and the employee. What do you think of it?

There is a phrase for it from Steve Jobs’ autobiography, RDF. It is a reality distortion field. From a certain point, things seem to be plausible, do-able, and that’s when you agree to do it. However, as you move further, the field distortion fades away and you realize that the prospect is not exactly what it seemed initially. It leads you to wonder what you signed up for. To keep such situations away, Sridhar always tells the employees not to be swayed by his personality or what he says. It’s always his best effort to give others a voice.

It does not mean that he is not going to take the decision himself. He will do so. But in doing so he makes sure that everybody is heard and every opinion is counted.

Where do you see Zoho in the next 10 years?

There are a few things I can’t share, but there are some that I can share. Zoho will continue to be independent. We will not build ourselves upon people’s money. We will be fiercely Indian. We plan to be a more full-fledged operating system for every business that we get in. We will subsume the whole bouquet of products into one universal product called Zoho One. You subscribe to Zoho and forget the rest, things will keep running seamlessly. That is the product roadmap that we have for 5 or 10 years. Lastly, we will be diversifying our area of operations. We will get into farming, research, and AI, etc. We are growing very fast, and we will not stop that.

You say, there have not been many instances of clashes in Zoho. What do you credit that for?

We generally do not have any clash of opinions because if you look at Zoho’s 80-90% of products, they have been around for over 20 years, and shepherded by one very senior manager. There is automatic continuity to it which Sridhar likes to call, ‘cultural capital.’ We have developed cultural capital over the years. Thus, we do not have any sudden changeovers or anything of that sort to rock the boat.

At the same time, we do have some differences in opinion. They do not cause any problem because there is the freedom to reject or accept. You can say that you don’t agree with somebody, it’s completely alright. We try to conclude by talking and brainstorming.

We hope that you were able to deepen your understanding of how culture plays out in an organization and are able to apply these insights in your own. Access these highlights on our YouTube channel as well.

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