Sridhar Vembu, Zoho co-founder and Chief Scientist, announced that the SaaS company will not expand work-from-home arrangements, reversing his earlier signal that Zoho would revisit remote work in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fuel conservation appeal. Vembu attributed the decision to internal feedback that face-to-face collaboration delivers stronger outcomes in research and development.
“Ultimately, after a lot of people inside weighed in on my X post, we decided not to expand WFH because the productivity of face-to-face problem solving is much higher in R&D,” Vembu wrote on X. “I have experienced this in my own development team. Issues take longer to resolve when you are not meeting the people involved in solving the problem. Collaboration happens more fluidly face-to-face, and we come up with better solutions.“
The reversal comes a week after Vembu had publicly indicated the company was open to remote work again. On 11 May, he had written on X: “I hope all of us heed the Prime Minister’s appeal. As a company, we adopted Work From Office fully in recent months, but we will revisit Work From Home now. We have adopted natural farming in our farm and we are also actively looking for ways to cut diesel use.“
The post followed PM Modi’s appeal urging citizens to cut fuel consumption, defer gold purchases, and reduce foreign travel for a year amid pressure on the Indian economy from the ongoing West Asia conflict.
Vembu said Zoho would instead pursue other measures to reduce fuel and energy use. “We are looking at electric bus fleets and electric cooking in our canteens to save fuel. We have made heavy investments in solar already,” he posted. He also said the company would continue supporting canteen staff and drivers, and would distribute free food to communities around its offices, as Zoho had done during the pandemic.
The decision places Zoho on the opposite side of a growing list of Indian employers that have at least partially embraced WFH in response to the PM’s appeal. The Supreme Court has shifted hearings on miscellaneous days to video conferencing and allowed up to 50% of registry staff to work from home for two days a week. The Union Power Ministry has asked its PSUs to explore one day a week of remote work. RPG Group’s Harsh Goenka has directed employees to cut foreign travel and adopt WFH where possible, and Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal introduced a weekly WFH policy on May 13.
Vembu’s pivot underlines a recurring tension in India’s WFH debate: the trade-off between fuel and commute savings on one side and in-person collaboration intensity on the other. With Zoho’s R&D-heavy workforce concentrated across Chennai, Tenkasi, and rural campuses in Tamil Nadu, the company’s verdict carries weight in the wider Indian tech sector’s ongoing return-to-office calibration.
