EP054 - The state of distributed work in India with Shyam Nagarajan at GoFloaters
About the episode
This episode explores the current state of distributed work in India, from offshore talent recruitment to the internal startup ecosystem and the current landscape of remote workers. To discuss this, we invited Shyam Sundar Nagarajan, founder of GoFloaters, one of the largest networks of coworking offices in the country and a solution provider for hybrid work.
About the guest
Shyam is the founder of GoFloaters. He has been building GoFloaters since December 2017 to empower teams to adopt the changes and implement new working methods.
SMBsure was his first step into the startup world. It was an Insuretech startup with a vision to make SMBs resilient. He worked at Cognizant Technology Solutions during the largest part of his career, where he became an Associate to Chief Architect and CEO for InsuranceNext Venture.
He always enjoys discussing Hybrid Work, Innovation, the Insurance domain, Mobility, Location Intelligence, Enterprise Architecture, and Business Strategy.
Connect with Shyam on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the leadership anywhere podcast. Today we will discuss quite a new topic that is not really discussed in most of the podcasts that are focusing on remote leadership or remote work. One of the things that I, and I'm sure that others also noticed that most of the surveys, most of the data, most of the topics and most of the media articles around return to office, remote work and distributed work are all focused and concentrated in or around the U S or from or in or around in Europe, but we do have an amazingly big remote work community, not just in these continents, but also in Asia, especially in India. And we usually don't really know what is happening there. We don't have the voices from there. But it's a significant amount of workforce and it's getting even bigger and bigger. So today we are going to focus on what the heck is happening in terms of remote work in India. And I do have Shyam Nagarajan. And he's from the GoFloaters, which is a platform for coworking and distributed workforce. And they also published a a huge report about hybrid work, especially in India. So welcome, Shiam.
Hey, thanks Peter. Thanks for having me here. Like you said a lot of the data and lot of the knowledge that's available out there is concentrated. So it's good to be able to share the the trends and what we are seeing from the front seat in India specifically. Thanks for having me.
Appreciate for your time. Thank you for joining. So tell me a little bit more about yourself. What's your personal background? How did you end up working remotely? And now you're managing this co working platforms, GoFloaters. What's your story?
I'm an engineer software engineer, I love software and I specifically try and solve more complicated problems with software, with technology. That's what I've been doing all my corporate life. To sum up my corporate life. I spent close to 18 years split between Infosys and Cognizant. These are two very large MNCs based out of India. And as part of that, I've been, I've the one aspect of being part of such an MNC that I loved the most is the travel part, right? I used to be. Almost every month, I would probably spending a week at least outside of my home, right? Traveling to different parts of the country, traveling to different parts of the world. And after 18 years of doing that and I'd led product teams within the companies, a lot of cutting edge work. But at some point I was finding difficult to understand or relate to the problems that I was trying to solve, right? Because as an IT services company, you're writing software that will be used in Japan, right? You are writing software that will be used in North America. You're writing software that will be used in Philippines. But I've never met these people. I never know what they really go through, right? And also the information that you get is filtered by multiple layers, right? So it bothered me, it started to bother me but then it took me quite some time to understand that's the nature of the work I was doing, right? You're working for a company and the company is contracted to work for somebody else. And so on and so forth, right? So it dawned upon me roughly after 15, 16 years of being in the corporate industries it dawned upon me that I can't get the kind of satisfaction, the kind of the feedback that I was expecting being an employee of a company, it's going to be difficult to get it. So that's when I also got the opportunity to be a Fulbright scholar, so I traveled to the U. S. I'm talking about 2014. This is where I went a lot of startups in the Valley, a lot of startups in the Pittsburgh ecosystem which is where I was studying, right? And that kind of gave me the trigger that the only way I could address the challenges or the frustration that I was having in my mind is to actually become an entrepreneur, right? So after 18 years, it took me some time to drop, how to say it, hang my shoes or hang my boots finally. And then jump and become an entrepreneur. So I decided that the corporate life comes to an end there, and I would love to pursue something which I relate to. So 2017, I became an entrepreneur. And my first startup was not go floaters. So my first startup was an insurance tech startup where I was trying to solve for making insurance for SMBs or small and medium businesses easy, right? So that happened for seven, eight months. I was doing that and when I was doing that I would be having meetings across city. In fact, I was meeting people across Chennai, which is the city I come from, and also some adjacent cities. In between meetings, I would go to a cafe sit there work for some time, get my emails done, do all the calling that I have to do and then that's when I realized that, like me, many others are also doing the same, right? They don't have an office or they don't have a place that they could go to. And cafes were acting as those drop in offices for many people. And the experience was not anything to be you will be anxious always, right? Because you don't know. The Wi Fi will work there. It will be good enough for what you're doing. You don't know if it'll be very noisy, loud music will be going on. So you don't know that. And you wouldn't know that you can connect your laptop to if you needed to charge it up. So a lot of ips and buts and even if you get through it, you still end up paying for the food, which you never wanted in the first place. And you just wanted the space. So this frustration grew up on me. Is there another alternative way to get a workspace just for the space and and get a very reliable space, right? I realized that like doing this like a month and a half, two months down the line is when. When I was talking to again, a few of my very close entrepreneur friends, they said that all of it, all of them unanimously said that, hey, this is the startup that you should be doing, right? The insurance startup is going to take you a long time for it to get to a point where you're going to see the results, right? You want an immediate feedback cycle, right? There were a lot of freelancers, in 2018, one out of every four freelancers in the world was an Indian, right? So that's, that's the amount of freelancing talent that was either operating from India or operating from other parts of the world, but then, freelancers by definition also are remote workers most of the time, right? They might work from home, but they're still remote working, right? They don't have a traditional office. So that's when I realized that there's a huge potential in gig economy, right? And gig economy workers don't need a traditional office. They don't need a traditional and even if they could afford a traditional office, that the fact that it will be in one location in a city is going to be too much constraining for them because they, I'm a graphic designer, has to move around, collaborate with different people for different projects at the same time, right? They're not the definition of gig workers that you're not committed to one project. You might be having multiple projects at the same time. And by definition of that, you're actually meeting different people at different places, right? You're working on different time zones. You're working on different kinds of projects, right? And you're collaborating with different individuals along the way, right? So a traditional office wouldn't have made sense to them, right? Which is where I realized that there's probably a huge potential in creating an affordable network of workspaces that people can tap into when they want, where they want and only pay for the time that they've used it for. This was 2018. So I killed my first startup and then I started to work on Go Floaters from there. And ever since we have been a remote team and we've been helping other remote individuals and remote teams from across the app.
This is a really great, this is a really great journey. And how did the pandemic affected you, for example? I'm not a hundred percent sure what happened in terms of like restrictions or closures in India. So tell me a little bit about it.
The pandemic was quite disturbing for many of us. And it was a very long one, right? The lockdowns in India there were obviously periods where things opened up and then things had to be shut down again, right? But if you took the start and the end, it was almost two years long, right? The closures were at different parts, right? And that was also in a way, a defining moment for us from two perspectives. Number one is that remote work from home. alL of these became like common words, right? It became common vocabulary for everybody, right? Even my parents would talk about remote work, right? Everybody in the planet was talking about remote work, right? Previously, remote work, remote worker would be looked down upon in India, right? A freelancer would be a little bit looked down upon. Hey, maybe this person did not land a job. That's why he's scraping his life through by taking up some assignments. So you wouldn't get the same respect that you would get as a freelancer, as a remote worker, or a gig worker in India, as much as If I'm a manager at this company. Irrespective of how much money you make, right? People did not understand what that meant, right? It was almost like an anti pattern, right? But then with the pandemic, since it became everybody started to talk about it, everybody can appreciate it that people are able to do amazing work, right? By just remotely connecting over a video conference or a teleconference, right? Through these tools, they're able do and all the people could see that happening in their homes, right? Previously it was, Hey, this neighbor is doing this, right? Somebody else not in your circle who's doing it right? But now everybody was doing it, right? Which means that it kind became a very common part of life. So that happened so that is positive on the on the on the acceptance side of remote work in india, right? In my father's generation, You just had one job, right? You took a job, you stuck to it, you retired with that job, right? So anybody who switches jobs frequently was actually looked down upon. So from that level when just having one steady job was the benchmark to somebody who's a freelancer, who's having multiple jobs at the same time, who's working on multiple projects. So there's a huge acceptance gap between the two, right?
And how do they view it now? Now, because the pandemic is over most of the people are there are opportunities, even provided from you there are opportunities to work from coworking offices. whAt's the situation?
So one of four freelancers across the world are Indian, right? People start to realize that there's good money in that customer. So your family kinds of needs to know that you've got, you can sustain yourself, right? Forget about sustaining the family, but you can support yourself, right? So that started to happen, right? And with the emergence of all these gig economy platforms like Upwork Toptal and all these, they started to give a lot of opportunities to people from across the world, right? Also it started to dawn upon the really talented cream of the Indian knowledge workers to realize that it pays better for them to be a freelancer, right? It gives you a lot of knowledge. So it was a gradual change. It was happening already pre pandemic, but I would say the pandemic accelerated that, right? The reason being is like, if I don't have to be in a city, live close to work, right? And there was no reason that I had to work for a company, a specific company, or I don't have to be in a particular city to get my job. And it could be anywhere and have my job still. And to that point, in India, till the pandemic happened there are only three or four major cities where knowledge work companies existed, right? Hyderabad, Chennai Pune also to some extent was not at the level one of cities, right?
A lot of us usually, as far as I know, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's usually connected to the amount of technology universities in or around the city. And most of these universities are from these cities anyway. This is not different from Europe or any other places, by the way. Most of the like hubs they also have these university towns.
So yeah, so why not access to talent pool was the primary reasons and obviously there are other things, right? Which government is supporting which, where can you get licenses to operate quickly, right? Access to airports, international airports, access to travel, right? So a lot of, other things also came into being, but yeah, by and large, access to talent was the biggest reason, right? So obviously the tier one cities were the go to choice for companies to set up their offices. Whether you're an MNC or you're a born in India company, you would be in these cities. And then overnight you have people working out of their hometowns. So they're working from anywhere and everywhere possible.
So that broke I think probably with anywhere across the world that broke the big myth that you can work only if you are all together in one, one building, right? In one office, right? So giving my own example, I was running a large team at Cognizant that was my last employer, right? I would say at least 40 percent of my team members were not from Chennai, though they had relocated from other parts of the country to Chennai to have their job. So I wouldn't call them laborers, but migrant workers, knowledge workers who had relocated from their hometowns to a tier one city to have a job and they had to change everything about it, right? So you have to you're schooling for your kids. If your spouse is also employed, then you have to relook at Her or his employment in the new city. So everything around work, everything around your life has to be rewired for your place of work, right? And people realize that's no longer true, right? I could be in my tier two city, in my hometown, be with my parents be with my extended family, right? And we can still work. And you don't need to keep you don't need to put your kids in a daycare, right? You have an extended family to take care of kids when you're at your laptop or phone.
And by, by the, and by the way, culturally this is also a big question for me. Do Indians relocate easily? Because for example, in the us. They are relocating within the country is so easy. So how does India?
Not difficult, I would say, because if you take a city like Bangalore, which is on the map for for every technology related reasons, I think, I don't know, I don't have the report, but at least 60 percent of the workforce in Bangalore employed in IT companies are not from Bangalore, right? So a good percentage of the workforce is not from Bangalore itself, right? Because Bangalore traditionally it was a very small city, right? And it was traditionally known for, to begin with the biggest industry there was there was a government company called Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, right? So basically aircraft manufacturing, right? So that is what the city was known for earlier, right? And also a retirement town for army veterans, right? So you will see a lot of army men houses in Bangalore, right? So a lot of those initial factors switched Bangalore from a very laid back city that it was earlier on to the tech hub that we all know it for now. So anyway, so all I'm trying to say is like It's not difficult. Indians do relocate relatively quite easily. I would say that in fact, the Indians have relocated all across the world, right? So you would find you would find an Indian in almost every country that you go there. So I don't think that was a big challenge, right? But previously, it was mandated. You had to relocate, if you have to keep a job and you needed to work in a respectable company that you wanted to keep, you want to work for the best in the world, and you want to work for Microsoft, you have to be in Hyderabad. You want to work for Google, you have to be in Bangalore, right? So there's no choice per se, so now I could be anywhere in India and still be employee of a Google or a Microsoft or a Facebook or an Oracle. And that I believe was the biggest catalyst for individuals to start thinking beyond like their definition of work. And workplace and work and life.
So working remotely or at least hybrid, it came from the need of the people because they didn't want to relocate that much, but also from the companies as well, because they just saw that, not that much of a talent available for their companies. What's the situation now?
I would say like anywhere else in the world I keep tracking the what's happening in the world. Like anybody, there's a little bit of that confused state that is existing now. So there are companies want return to office. And there are companies that have said we are going to be 100 percent remote, right? We're not going to have a single square feet of office space that we're going to call it our office, right? So you will see companies across the spectrum, but by the larger companies, you would see that they are not mandating return to office, but they are in a way preferring that their employees be back at an office. Primarily driven by multiple, multiple reasons, but primarily driven by the fact that they already have an office. So they've already taken up something on a 99 year lease from the government and they have an IT tech park set up, right? So you can't justify to your board members that you having 1, 00, 000 square feet of office space and you just have 10 percent of the office space, right? So that's one thing, right? Second thing is lot of people they are already made that city their home, right? They had bought properties there. They had relocated even though they might not have been from a Bangalore, but then they were working there for so long that they now made that their primary city. So for them remote work, I mean me at the office is actually more preferred for them because they don't see any of the city as their home for now. And then they're gonna the office and they're not seeing their reportees at the office. And generally there's also the command and control approach that works for many managers. Let's say if I don't see my team members in front of me, how do I even control the the quality, control the processes, control the output, how do I monitor these people, right? So that, that kind of sense of uneasiness also exists amongst the more senior leaders, I would say. As the economy across the world improves and when jobs become a little bit more easier to find we should see a lot of people. Quitting and then taking up remote first roles but if you take any surveys coming out of India as well, you would see like 70, 75 percent of the people want some kind of remote work to be there, right. So there's definitely that want being expressed very strongly by the workforce just that they're not having their say right now, right? They'll get to have their say when things improve from an economy and job market situation standpoint.
Of course, and there are and don't forget that in the India is also not just India, by the way, but we are talking about India now, but it can be true for neighboring countries in the Southeast Asia region that they are the target for offshoring as well.
You take any annual report that came from any, and again, I'm restricting this to knowledge workers or I. T. sectors, startups. I don't follow the manufacturing sector or other industries. But if you take if you take that segment where all you need is a laptop and an internet connection to deliver your work, right? So if you see any company, whether it's listed or private only company, Every company produced better revenues during the pandemic, right? Everybody did well, right? So there's no, so all the numbers that came during the pandemic, right? peOple were fearing that it would have a nose dive, right? People, productivity would go down, right? Or people would, might not be able to have the time to they'll be bothered by too many things happening in spite of the pandemic, in spite of all the personal losses that people had. In spite of the fact that you had to stay indoors stay protected and then still manage your Life. Kids were at home, right? Kids couldn't go to schools So parents obviously had to manage the kids in spite of all of that. Everybody reported better productivity and everybody reported better living in numbers, right? There's absolutely no data point that went against remote work any financial data point that went against the motor. Obviously, everybody was saving costs as well at the same time. So you're making more revenue, you're saving costs, right? So what better could that be for your top line, right? So everybody's doing better with top line during the pandemic. And then there were a lot of what happened also is like the pandemic also increase a lot of businesses to digitize their processes, right? So a lot of companies wanted to digitize their processes. Because how would you then shut down if you had to shut down your office and paper cannot move from a desk to a desk, you have to digitize that process, right? So a lot of demand for digitalization accelerated during the pandemic, right? And obviously the Indian MNCs were a beneficiary of that because they had to deliver these projects for their international clients to digitize them, right? The other factors like Indian homes were not designed for remote work to begin with.
That's what I wanted to say that usually also families have a larger family. So homes are smaller. Everything is a little bit more crowded and it's really hard to find a space where you are calmly working.
True, very true, right? In fact, that was the reason why our solution service also became the need of the hour, right? But, yeah, so it was a mix, right? One, I don't know about large families, but that's probably a stereotype for India.
I'm not saying that they have so many kids, but I'm saying that sometimes they are multi generational within one home.
Yeah. That's again, like I said, it probably is not true in the tier one city, but then once people start to relocate back to the tier two so that became the problem there. For example, I was cognizant, right? It was employing more than two lakh people, right? And the average age of the workforce was 24 so which means that your average employee is not married, right? Your average employee is not having the financial burden of managing the family, paying home loans. Had to relocate to a city. They had to take care of their food because they didn't have their mothers or their wives cooking for them, right? They had to cook for themselves. They had to order food from outside, right? They were staying together. A lot of bachelors would stay together, right? So all that was became unnecessary, right? If you didn't have to be in the tier one city because your office is you don't have to be there, right? So a lot of those factors accelerated that and coming back to the point, Indian homes, even if they are large enough, working from home was never The way the homes were designed to be. You had obviously the common areas we had, the bedrooms and all that, but you don't have, there was like, there's no like separated room for a home office. There's no study, there's no office, there's no home office, that concept never existed in Indian homes. Even if you had a palatial house, the concept of a home office or a concept of like a study was not there, it was not in the design.
It's not just an Indian problem, by the way, I'm just saying, I'm not just an Asian problem. Usually Americans don't have this problem if they are living not in New York, but like in other cities, but because they have so many space usually in their homes. In Europe though we live in, I don't know, on an average 60s 80 square meters homes with two kids and stuff. So most of the people who are working from home are working from the kitchen or from living room or something like that. So we have the same situation as well. It's that's why, again, that's why co working offices make sense.
Then one big, another big relationship that happened is like commute travel time was a huge problem and all the tier one cities in India, right? Oh yeah. You would spend at least an hour on an average, up and down, right? So two hours of your day. A productive day is really gone and just spending in traffic, right? And traffic is not the so it's not the commute time, right? It's not so I've had colleagues in the U. S. Who commuted 45 minutes to go to work, right? But then that 45 minutes also comes with a lot of stress, right? Like you're stuck in traffic, right? Yeah, so a lot of things happening around you, your mind has to be so alert on the road, right? You have to see for everything that's coming in all directions at you, right? And you've got to sneak through the signal because if you don't, then you're stuck at it for the next 20 minutes, right? So This adds and that a bicyclist is going faster than you , when you're sitting in the car, the bicyclist is actually going faster. So a lot of things, it's a commute is very stressful to everybody, right? And we didn't realize that till you could avoid it completely, right? So that's when you realize that, hey, No, I don't have to commute to office. And that's a big blessing that I today have. And people were just cribbing and cribbing, but then they didn't have a choice. They had to go to the office, but then you don't need to crib any longer. So it is when a service like GoFloaters kind of came in handy because people could walk into a co working space five minutes from their home or 10 minutes from their home, right? They could take a public transport, right? And go to a workspace or they just can walk. Yeah. They can walk. So basically the the concept that you could actually step away from your home. Get a quiet spot that you could work right for some few hours in a day, even if it's not a full day. So how do I give a productive environment for my employees to go there and work, right? And again, people were, see the productivity never dropped because people were overworking. If you see again, a lot of the data that came across, across the world as well, that was true in India as well, right? People are spending longer hours being work from home because people were overcompensating because they had the flexibility to be at home. They were doing other chores at home. They were overcompensating by extending longer hours of work and all that. So if somebody was having a productivity loss, they were overcompensating with overworking. You can't do that forever, right? So a company started to solve for that. Hey, you don't have to overwork. I'll give you a co working parts, go there, spend four hours, focus on your work and get work done. And it was a choice, right? After that got a little bit solved. They started to move on to solving collaboration problems, right? So in our platform, for example, initially it was a lot of test bookings that were happening later on meeting room bookings started to have team collaboration happened, right? And a lot of companies started to know that travel had opened up and people could travel, they started to what are the off sites, right? So everybody across India will assemble in one city, spend four or five days together get something get make those important critical decisions for our business unit or for the entire company. And get stuff moving. And during imagine, also remember that during the pandemic, these companies are growing, which means that they're also onboard a lot of people, a hundred percent remotely, right? Those people don't know who their, how their manager looks like, right? They don't know how the team members look like, right? They don't know what it is to be a team, right? So a lot of, so once that happens, once the. So we started to realize that it's better to bring people in person for some time because then that's when they got get to know about each other better they get to like, how would I say, do those frictions that kind of got created by remote work, right?
So see that most of the examples that you shared so far, by the way is almost 100 percent similar compared to the trends that we do have in Europe or in the U S or whatever. The only difference is that the volume and the number of people who are doing that, by the way, you are available in more than 30 or even more cities across India. And you do have this remote work report as well on the site. Which by the way, will be linked in the show notes of this episode. But quickly just to wrap it up, because we are out of time a little bit, right? How people can find you?
We have a website, gofloaters.com. That's the place where you can come and see. And in fact, we put everything out there. We have for 45 cities in India, right? So we're 40 plus cities across India. Yeah. 12 are tier, all the tier one cities, which is 12 in India and remaining 33 are tier two cities, right? And these are cities where that supplied the talent to the tier one cities that we for the pandemic, right? So the entire technology that we've built over the last four, five years brings all this co working brand and the inventory of these co working brands into one intractable process, right? So one, one process. We have a separate B2B product called WorkFlexi. So for companies that want to do this for all of their employees, so then we have a B2B version of this where employees book the space, the employer does the payment, so employees are not paying and getting it reimbursed and things like that. So there's the financial part of it is orchestrated.
Thank you. Thank you. This is, again, this is a great journey and this is a great product. And thank you for sharing all the insights about your country. And I think it's super important to learn a little bit more about that too. And listeners don't forget to, to check out the report as well.
It was a pleasure, again thanks for giving the opportunity to be the voice of hybrid remote companies and remote first companies in India and also like we started off with, right? Not so much as known about outside of the Americas, outside of Europe, not much has been talked about, right? So it's a great opportunity to be the voice of parts of the world that are not usually talked about. My pleasure.
Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you, Shyam.
Thanks, Peter.
