It’s a lovely Monday morning, but you are feeling gloomy as you enter your office, making a mental list of things that have to be done. You greet your colleagues, who are equally preoccupied, with a nod. Then one of your peers smiles at you, and you find yourself smiling back. That’s all it takes – a smile – to make you smile back and relax for a bit.

A smile is also a great stress-buster, like laughter, and that’s one reason why you should smile in your office, especially if you are having a stressful day. It’s as important to be happy at your workplace as in your personal life and here’s why: Read more →

I’m surprised when my friends tell me they know nothing about the culture of a company they are about to join. ‘It pays well, and I like my job title. That’s all that matters.’ ​Does it, really? These are important factors, for sure, but if you can’t be happy where you work, you won’t stick around for long.

Happiness is subjective, of course. What makes me happy, may not matter to you. I feel happy when I am doing the kind of work that satisfies my creative needs, in a workplace where I can see myself learning and growing as a person and in my career. ​This is greatly influenced by the company’s culture.

How can you determine what a company’s work culture is before taking the plunge and accepting the job offer?

Read more →

For about six years now, I’ve been working in a cross-cultural environment. Our teams are split across offices in India and the US, with the majority of our development efforts based out of India.

I work remotely out of New Delhi, whereas most of our India teams work from Chennai. To give you an idea of how far these two places are:

In this unique situation, I’ve had the opportunity to work with teams across different locations and time zones. These differences no longer come in the way of teamwork and collaboration. In fact, they ​help us evolve and adapt our own business apps to make this combination work – no matter where you are and what time zone you’re working in, you’re always connected and in sync with other people.

What could get in the way though, are cultural differences.

It’s usually good practice to mix people from different cultures. Everyone brings in their own cultural perspective to the table, and people get to learn from each other.

But it’s tricky for people from different cultures to work together, especially when they’re not all working at the same time, under the same roof.

Tricky, yes. Impossible, no.

Here are a few things that can make it possible: Read more →

“There are now 9 different kinds of bread being sold at the store? I don’t like having so much choice in life. It’s frustrating!”

When my friend told me this, I thought he was crazy. How can too much choice ever be a bad thing?

Let’s explore.

The paradox of choice states that the more time you spend analyzing your choices, the less happy you are with them. We deal with this paradox everyday.

Psychologists have tried to understand this paradox more.

The Jam Analysis:

This was a popular experiment by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University, in 1995. ​Professor Iyengar and her team set up a booth of Wilkin & Sons jam in a market. Every few hours they changed the number of varieties they put on display from 6 to 24 jams.

They found that about 60% of people sampled from the larger selection as compared to only 40% from the smaller selection.

But what about purchases? Only 3% of those who sampled the larger selection of jams made a purchase. In comparison, 30% of those who sampled from the smaller selection made a purchase.

For those interested, this New York Times article covers the research in some detail.

This paradox of choice is something the software industry has also been wrestling with for some time. Apple released a simplified version of its wireless router software that removed many of the advanced menu of choices that users found too confusing.

Another famous example is the “Off” option on the old Windows Vista. From the start menu there were a staggering nine different options to choose from. 2 icons, plus 7 menu items. 9 different options to shut down your computer? That’s bonkers!

Samsung is now on overdrive launching numerous tablets. Since the start of 2014, Samsung has announced 11 models of Android tablets. In addition, ​Samsung still sells 11 different tablets that they launched earlier. For those who haven’t lost count yet, that is a remarkable 22 tablets! I’m probably forgetting a few too. Just imagine how much stronger Samsung, ​and its vaunted support, would be if they focused on just a few products.

Looking internally, ​we at Zoho, too were guilty ​of overburdening and confusing our customers with numerous choices. Zoho projects used to have 8 different pricing plans broken down into monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly. That makes it 32, ​yes, 32, different pricing plans!

We learned from our mistakes, and reduced the pricing plans down to a simple 4.

So, what’s the solution?

Here’s the thing: choice is useful only when it means something. Flooding consumers with hundreds of variations of the same basic concept, a la Samsung, simply causes confusion and dilutes the brand. There is no exact science that says you should limit your product offerings to 5 or 7 choices. More important is to offer choices that have some unique value in their own way and to make the ​decision-making process effortless and enjoyable.

Too often, products do not have a clear well-established value proposition. Consumers will always pay for what they find valuable. The key is in clearly establishing what the value of the product is.

A good example of this is the way in which Apple markets the iPhone. Their commercials show the product being used in a situation or use case, thus clearly establishing its value.

If you’re struggling with deciding how many choices to offer, a good practice to follow is continuous A/B testing. Launch your product or plan one at a time, gauge the response to it and make a decision accordingly. ​That way, you avoid overburdening your customers with too much, and you give them a simple option with a well-defined value proposition.

P.S: If you’re interested in learning more about the paradox of choice, here is a great TED talk by Barry Schwartz.

Quick note:
All Zoho servers are patched, and your data is safe.

The details:
Soon after the information about this vulnerability became known, we started patching all our servers using the newer, protected versions of OpenSSL. This operation was completed in a few hours after the news broke out. We renewed our SSL certificates too. So, we are no longer vulnerable.

As of now, we have no indication that the vulnerability has been exploited against any of the Zoho applications. However, we would like you to follow these safeguards.

1. Change your Zoho account passwords immediately.
2. To be doubly safe, enable Two Factor Authentication (TFA) for your accounts.

We will update this post, as and when we have more new info about the vulnerability.