‘Human decency, no other formula’: Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh on how they retain employees

Zerodha’s employee retention rate has been one of their success stories. When asked about the secret behind it, considering many big companies are offering various incentives for employees to stay back, Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh said that the answer was quite simple – human decency. 

At Moneycontrol’s India Fintech Conclave, Nadh was asked about the company’s success rate at retaining employees. The tech team at Zerodha had 33 employees, out of which only two have left in the past decade. “There is no formula. I think the key is that we don't look at people as resources or talent. We don't even use the word talent. That is not our framework. It is a group of people who hang out with each other, who have the right philosophies, who gel well with each other. There is no pretence. It is human decency, I guess and a clear focus on building relationships. There is really no real formula,” he said. 

When asked about how the company can maintain its existing framework as well as grow, Nadh said that it is a misconception that the number of people in a tech team scales linearly with the organisation. He said that it is possible for a really small team to build massive systems that scale to really massive numbers. “For me, if an engineering team grows exponentially as the company and its business grows, that is a bit of an anomaly," he added

“Keeping things really simple and having the conviction to avoid FOMO (fear of missing out). I think a lot of organisations end up building way too many things, chasing short-term growth, short-term metrics. We always had a simple and singular conviction of building things that are meaningful to our customers, so we never really rushed to release new features or build new features arbitrarily,” he said at the event. Nadh also said that the discuss shoot down most things internally, and that they have very small external dependencies with everything being housed or owned in-house. 

Following the event, Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath took to LinkedIn to say that he learned that throwing people and money at problems won’t solve them. “One counterintuitive lesson I learned on the Zerodha journey, thanks to Kailash, was that throwing people and money at problems won't solve them. They will create more, and we're seeing this around the world now,” he said.                                   

Also read: Nithin Kamath reveals that Zerodha doesn’t hire data scientists; here’s why

Also read: Bill Gates applauds Zerodha’s Kamath brothers: 'Young leaders championing philanthropy...'