Raju Vegesna, Evangelist Leader, Zoho, explains how organizations can create offices in remote areas outside major cities to improve the quality of life for workers, access new talent and stimulate regional economies without losing projection or productivity.
Talent is universal, but opportunities are not. There are qualified and brilliant people in every corner of the planet who, unfortunately, do not have the means to move to major cities or access proper training for some jobs. This reality ends up becoming a loss not only for these potential employees but also for organizations.
At Zoho, we discovered that the solution to this problem was to bring opportunities to those small towns and regions where these people live and are part of the community.
It is part of a philosophy that we call Transnational Localism. We started utilizing this philosophy several years ago by opening small offices in different villages in India to support our existing employees and hire new people. These offices restored the dignity of many workers and boosted the economy of those rural areas.
Zoho’s experience
With more than 50 applications for the main business areas, including sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, administrative operations and a wide variety of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the most prolific software companies in the world.
Zoho is a private and profitable company with over 10,000 employees, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with an international headquarters in Chennai, India.
The organization has direct offices in the US, India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates.
Zoho respects the privacy of its users and does not have an advertising-based revenue model for any of its products, including its free versions. More than 75 million users worldwide, in hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho to manage their daily business, including Zoho itself.
Lower costs with a higher quality of life
Now we aim at having a global presence outside of large metropolitan areas, in places with lower costs and higher quality of life, such as Utrecht in the Netherlands, Yokohama in Japan, Tenkasi in India or Chía in Colombia.
One of the lessons that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is the need for employees to have physical socializing spaces with their colleagues in person but also to have the possibility of working remotely to be close to their families and communities.
In fact, according to the 2022 IT Job Market Report, remote IT jobs represent 23.5% of all job offers. According to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), the IT sector had an increase of 10.1% in 2021. Colombia is one of the industry leaders in Latin America, with Mexico and Brazil.
Transnational Localism has allowed us to create a balance between in-person and remote work, also helping to bring our brand closer to communities and better understand the challenges that companies face in those places. Hiring talent in those areas provides an opportunity for local economies and allows us to access first-hand knowledge to create better products.
Where do we start?
To implement Transnational Localism, we started by creating central offices which can control satellite offices within their field of action. For example, our headquarters in Austin, Texas, supports two smaller satellite offices in McAllen and New Braunfels, where some of our employees live and which are more than respectively 500 and 80 km away.
These satellite offices have allowed us to recruit local talent to take advantage of their experience and skills without losing control of the operation and promoting our international projection.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), approximately 80% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and many face difficulties finding work.
In Latin America, we want to expand this proposal, in which employees increase their productivity and maintain their quality of life close to their families.
We are confident that this philosophy will help to reduce inequality and the lack of opportunities. Without a doubt, companies must play their role by taking advantage of global connectivity to redistribute their wealth and revitalize economies in countries where markets are not as developed.
Success should not be evaluated in numbers but in the impact on employees, families, customers, industries and local communities.
