Chennai: In Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli, coders and engineering managers sit in a converted shed in a sprawling farmhouse with bananas ripe for the picking, but they are cramming for the deadline of a Zoho analytics product they will ship for customers all over the world.

The cloud-based business intelligence and analytics platform is the latest among Zoho’s product lines to be built by rural talent in India

The Tirunelveli centre is one of the 30 offices run by Zoho in mostly tier-2 towns – rich in human capital but starved of jobs in modern sectors like software. From a lone office in Tenkasi, southern Tamil Nadu a decade ago, Zoho has pushed ahead on its drive to open more rural offices after employees were forced to return to their hometowns in the wake of lockdowns since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

CEO Sridhar Vembu recently said the rural office idea was essential for Zoho and that it would require technology leaders within the company to commit to the idea and relocate to work at these offices.

“The office can accommodate 30 people. Currently, 18 employees are working here, with most of them belonging to the Zoho Analytics team. Zoho Analytics is the company’s cloud-based business intelligence and analytics platform,” said Prakasa Raman Valli, product manager – BI Labs, Zoho Corp.

This year, Zoho will open at least ten offices that can accommodate 500-1,000 people in tier-2 or tier-3 cities and towns, and surround these offices with smaller ‘spoke’ units, extending the hub-spoke model to managing talent geographically.

The spoke offices draw talent from local neighbourhoods and those at the company’s central office off Chennai, a glass-walled structure typical of IT offices run by India’s large software exporters. For its rural setups, however, Zoho operates offbeat, minimalist structures located near farmland. Even at its American headquarters in Austin, Texas, where Zoho is building a large campus, the company is in a bid to position the office near a farm.

The idea, according to several executives, is to decentralise work culture and enable people to be where their homes are and write software from offices nearby.

“It’s the number of employees hailing from a particular area/region, and the interest among leaders to move to a location voluntarily and act as the anchor and catalyst for the spoke office,” said Valli, when asked about how Zoho chooses its spots.

The company runs another small office in the same district. Outside of Tamil Nadu, Zoho has a presence in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Bihar.

For talent, Zoho deprioritises college degrees, hires fresh talent and trains them. For its Tirunelveli offices, it picked up graduates from colleges from districts nearby. The move aligns with its own Zoho University initiative, which cuts an alternative path to the oft-trodden job route through placements at tier-1 colleges. “To start with, we hired a few students from two colleges for the Zoho Analytics team… We provided them with hands-on job training on product development,” said Valli.

“The increase in the number of rural offices fits with the overall talent strategy of Zoho, which is to invest in its people, train them, and take a long-term view of their careers,” said Sharad Sharma, co-founder of the iSPIRT Foundation.

With the industry in a state of flux about returning to offices, Sharma, a product software evangelist said companies that have built a distinctive people culture would have the room to navigate the return at their own pace.

“Companies like Netflix, which invested far ahead in building a culture and focusing on making their managers reflect that culture will have the ability to replicate that culture in a remote setting. The rest may need to be in office,” he said.

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