Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu, who himself works out of a remote village in Tenkasi, in southern Tamil Nadu shares that they do not have a defined date of resuming working from office. As per the ET report, Zoho has asked its employees to be in WFH mode till the pandemic subsides, without fixing a date of return to office. Consequently, some of the office leases have also been cancelled.

In fact even after the pandemic subsides, Zoho might continue to work in a remote working structure. 

Zoho VP Praval Singh said, “We will give an option for the employees to continue working from home. For those who have gone back home, we are considering opening small remote offices based on the situation in those areas. This is a long-term plan for setting up remote offices in a hub-and-spoke model.”

Zoho plans to create opportunities and encourage people to move to rural areas and enable them to work from there. 

Another SaaS company Kissflow has set up Remote plus, a hybrid remote working model where the employees are required to work from an office only for one week a month. While the company is mandating WFH until the lockdown lifts, a hybrid remote working model seems to be a permanent move.

As in the present and the future of work, hybrid remote working models become the new reality,  the leaders would now have to focus on scaling up the core digital infrastructure with robust security control, leveraging more digital tools, and building an agile and nimble virtual culture that transcends physical office space. Businesses, whether small or large, which can reinvent themselves—their processes, customer experiences, employee and social contracts—will be better staged to transition to the hybrid workplace.