'Physical human proximity is key to Zerodha's growth': CTO Kailash Nadh

Kailash Nadh, chief technology officer (CTO) of Zerodha.

After nearly four years of Covid-19-led lockdowns that forced several companies and startups to announce work-from-home (WFH) setup, Kailash Nadh, the chief technology officer (CTO) of Zerodha, on April 1, has penned down his first-hand experience and lessons from going fully remote to slowly getting back to hybrid work mode.

While Zerodha initially felt the transition to fully remote work was smooth, but over time it witnessed a slew of challenges emerging like maintaining real-time communication, creativity, collaboration, and employee well-being.

"Zerodha is an organisation where people sit together, laugh, discuss, debate, and collaborate, where spontaneity serves the crucial role of being a facilitator. Our stint with fully remote work served as a stark reminder that the way we have built the org over the years, physical human proximity is key to its growth," Nadh wrote on Zerodha's tech blog on April 1.

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Similar to other organisations and startups, Zerodha too announced 'work-from-home or fully remote work during the first COVID pandemic lockdown in 2020.

However, presently, the firm has made a collective decision to switch to a hybrid mode, where about 10 percent of the workforce involved in creative and decision-making endeavours come to the office three days a week while 90 percent continue to be fully remote.

"Two days at home to zone-out, avoid commuting, and to do focused work, and three days specifically for conversations and collaboration across teams. We also introduced a fixed number of annual work from home days an individual could use to plan their year better," Nadh wrote.

Nadh also shared the importance of synchronous communication in organizations like Zerodha due to the highly time-sensitive nature of tasks.

"The significant majority of communication and work at Zerodha, and similar organisations riddled with extreme complexity, have to be sync and any lapses carry extremely high risk," he said.

He also shared the company's experience of searching for the right tools to communicate that will give a seamless experience.

"For chat, we finally settled on a self-hosted version of Mattermost...For video, we mostly used Google Meet which came with the organisational e-mail account anyway," He wrote.

Remote-first skillsets

Sharing some of the significant remote-first skillsets that companies need to look for in hires, Nadh wrote that employees should have the ability to do effective, fast, back-and-forth 1:1 and group textual communication; A knack for being conversational, beyond tasks, with peers on online mediums; A good understanding and grasp of remote coordination and more.

"Knack and patience for documentation writing. Copious amounts of documentation really and Ability to be focused and be productive in isolation and in arbitrary environments," He wrote.