The typical implementation process for Zoho People follows a structured approach that includes planning, configuration, data migration, customization, training, and go-live. The process usually begins with defining organizational objectives and gathering accurate employee data. Next, administrators configure core modules such as employee management, attendance, and leave policies, and import or sync user data from existing files or databases. Customization and automation of workflows are performed to align the platform with unique HR processes, followed by integrations with other Zoho or third-party applications as needed. Before full deployment, a pilot rollout or beta testing phase is recommended to identify and resolve issues, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments. Comprehensive training is provided for HR admins, managers, and employees, either on-site or remotely, to ensure smooth adoption. After going live, ongoing monitoring, support, and optimization are essential to maximize the platform’s effectiveness and address evolving organizational needs.
Implementation Timeline:
The typical implementation duration for Zoho People ranges from 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the complexity of HR processes, the extent of customization, data migration needs, the number of users, and integration requirements. For larger organizations or those with complex requirements, the process may take up to 25 working days or more. A phased rollout—starting with a pilot group before organization-wide deployment—is often recommended to ensure a smooth transition and minimize disruptions.
Key Steps in the Implementation Process:
Go live and monitor system performance, making ongoing adjustments as needed.
This systematic approach ensures that Zoho People is tailored to your organization’s needs, streamlines HR operations, and supports a successful digital transformation.
Zoho People can be extensively customized to fit specific business needs, offering a wide range of configuration options and automation tools that allow organizations to tailor the platform to their unique HR processes.
Custom Forms and Fields: You can create new custom forms using drag-and-drop tools, add, modify, delete, or reorder fields, and tailor data collection to your requirements. This includes customizing the Employee Form with unique fields (such as identity information, address components, or custom calculations), marking fields as mandatory, enabling encryption, and setting up conditional visibility based on rules.
Employee Status Customization: The system allows renaming, reordering, and adding new employee status values to match your organization’s terminology and processes. For example, you can introduce custom statuses like "Long Absence" and adjust default statuses to reflect your workflow.
Workflow Automation: Zoho People supports custom workflows where you can set triggers, criteria, and actions to automate HR tasks. This includes sending custom email alerts, updating fields automatically, creating and assigning checklists, and scheduling automated actions to minimize manual intervention.
Custom Functions: Using the Deluge scripting language, you can write custom functions to fulfill specialized business requirements, manipulate data, connect with internal or third-party applications, and automate complex processes. These functions are reusable and centrally managed within Zoho People.
Webhooks and Integrations: The platform enables integration with other Zoho apps and external systems via webhooks, ensuring seamless data flow and process synchronization across your business tools.
Personalization: Organization-specific settings such as company details, logos, dashboards, and user roles can be customized for branding and operational alignment.
Conditional Logic and Field Rules: You can show or hide form fields based on set conditions, ensuring employees see only relevant information and reducing input errors.
Zoho People’s core pricing is subscription-based and transparent, but there are additional costs that organizations should consider beyond the standard per-user/month license:
Custom service requests (beyond the standard onboarding) incur extra charges depending on the complexity and feasibility of the requirement.
Enterprise Support: Priced at 25% of the license fee, includes 24/7 support, live chat, a technical account manager, and change request handling. Minimum 500-user organization required.
Maintenance Fees:
There are no separate maintenance fees; ongoing updates and maintenance are included in the subscription cost.
Add-Ons and Integrations:
Some advanced features, integrations, or add-ons (such as Zoho Expense, Zoho Recruit, or third-party integrations) may require separate subscriptions or incur additional charges, especially for the People Plus suite or if exceeding included user limits.
Customization Fees:
Custom service requests during or after onboarding that go beyond the standard implementation may incur extra costs, depending on the scope and feasibility.
Zoho People provides structured, role-based training programs to help new users and HR teams master the platform. These training courses are delivered online and are designed for different levels of expertise:
Beginner Training: Covers the basics of setting up an HRMS, including employee database management, leave and attendance tracking, and document management. This is ideal for HR administrators starting with Zoho People. Sessions typically last one day (4 hours), focusing on user addition, form customization, leave policy configuration, attendance setup, and centralized file storage.
Intermediate Training: Expands on the basics to include onboarding processes, time tracking, exit policies, and workflow automation. This two-day course (4 hours per day) is aimed at HR teams seeking deeper insights and greater efficiency in managing onboarding, time logs, and automating HR tasks.
Advanced Training: Designed for HR professionals who want to fully streamline people management processes. It covers advanced onboarding, performance evaluation, learning management, third-party integrations, and comprehensive automation. This course helps organizations optimize the entire employee lifecycle and HR operations.
One-on-One and Group Training: Training can be tailored for individuals or groups, ensuring personalized attention to specific organizational needs.
Support for New Users
Zoho People offers multiple support channels and plans to assist new users during and after onboarding:
Classic Support: Free for all users (including the free edition), offering email and phone support with an 8-hour response time during business days. Users can also access a knowledge base and how-to videos for self-service.
Premium Support: Available for a fee (either a fixed monthly/yearly rate or 20% of the recurring license fee), this plan provides 24/5 phone and live chat support, a technical account manager, remote assistance, and a 3-hour response time.
Enterprise Support: For large organizations (minimum 500 users), this tier offers 24/7 support, live chat, a technical account manager, change request handling, and a 1-hour response time, priced at 25% of the license fee.
Remote Assistance: Support staff can provide hands-on help by remotely accessing user screens to resolve issues directly.
Community and Resources: Users have access to the Zoho community forums, detailed support articles, and video tutorials for ongoing learning and troubleshooting.
Onboarding Support
Zoho People also includes onboarding modules and support to help new hires acclimate quickly:
Zoho People employs a comprehensive set of security measures to protect user and organizational data at every level:
Data Encryption: Sensitive data is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), both at rest and in transit. Admins can also enable field-level encryption for particularly sensitive information, and all employee files and uploads are encrypted by default.
Physical and Infrastructure Security: Data is privately hosted on Zoho’s own cloud infrastructure, with 24/7 physical security at data centers. Data is backed up in real time across multiple servers, and disaster recovery protocols ensure business continuity in case of hardware failure or natural disasters.
Access Controls and Authentication: Zoho People provides granular, role-based access controls down to the module, form, or even field level. Access can be restricted by job role, department, location, or IP address. Geo and IP restrictions allow organizations to limit access to specific locations or networks. Multi-factor authentication and integration with Zoho Vault support strong password policies and secure credential management.
Operational Security: The platform uses secure coding practices, vulnerability scanning, and regular audits. Logging and monitoring systems track access and changes, while audit trails provide a history of modifications to all employee data.
Data Export and Portability: All data exports can be password-protected, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure even when moved outside the platform.
Compliance with Global Standards: Zoho People is compliant with major international security and privacy standards, including ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR. The platform is also ISO 9001 certified for quality management.
Privacy and Data Residency: All data is stored in Zoho’s designated data centers, with strict privacy policies prohibiting unauthorized third-party sharing. Customers can choose data residency options to comply with regional regulations.
User Rights and GDPR Features: Zoho People supports GDPR rights such as access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, and data portability, with features for audit logs, permission management, and easy deletion or export of personal data.
Zoho People releases updates frequently, typically on a monthly basis, with some enhancements and new features appearing even more often throughout the year. These updates include both minor improvements and significant feature rollouts, such as new modules, UI enhancements, workflow automations, security features, and integrations. The platform maintains a detailed "What’s New" timeline, showcasing monthly highlights and feature releases dating back several years.
Update Management:
Updates are managed centrally by Zoho and deployed automatically to all customers via the cloud, ensuring users always have access to the latest version without manual intervention.
Planned outages or maintenance for major updates are communicated in advance through multiple channels, including community forums, business emails, and in-app banners.
Zoho follows established change management and operational security standards, analyzing the security impact of every change and maintaining audit logs as evidence.
New features and enhancements are documented in release notes and blog posts, allowing users to review changes and adopt new functionalities as needed.
Zoho People’s policy on data ownership and portability is clear: you, as the customer, own all service data that you create or store within the platform. Zoho acts solely as a data processor, handling your data only according to your instructions and for the purpose of providing the service. Your data is never used by Zoho for advertising, sold to third parties, or accessed for any purpose beyond service delivery and legal compliance.
Data Ownership:
Zoho will only access or process your data as required to deliver the service or comply with legal obligations.
Data Portability:
After account termination, your data is automatically deleted from active databases within six months and from backups within an additional three months.
User Rights:
Zoho People is designed for seamless scalability, allowing organizations to easily scale up or down as their needs change. You can upgrade or downgrade your subscription plan at any time through the account settings, choosing from various plans and billing cycles (monthly or yearly) to match your current requirements. Adding or reducing user licenses is straightforward—administrators can view and manage license counts directly within the platform, ensuring you only pay for what you use.
The underlying infrastructure automatically scales to handle increased workloads, with horizontal and vertical scaling, load balancing, and redundant systems to maintain high performance and availability as your organization grows or contracts15. Customization options and centralized management tools further support multi-unit or multi-entity organizations, letting you adapt the system to evolving business structures without service disruption.
Here are the key terms and conditions for contract renewal and cancellation for Zoho People:
Contract Renewal
Automatic Renewal: Subscriptions are automatically renewed at the end of each billing period (monthly or yearly), unless you downgrade to a free plan or notify Zoho in advance that you do not wish to renew.
Notice Period: You must inform Zoho at least seven days before the renewal date if you do not wish to renew your subscription.
Payment Processing: The subscription fee is charged to your last used credit card at renewal. You can update payment details before renewal if needed.
Manual and Evergreen Renewal: Contracts can be set to renew automatically (evergreen) or manually, with reminders provided for manual renewals.
Change of Terms: If Zoho changes the terms of service in a way that significantly affects your rights, you will receive at least 30 days’ advance notice. You may terminate your subscription within 30 days of such notice and receive a prorated refund for any unused prepaid fees.
Renewal Notifications: Zoho provides in-app and email alerts to notify users of upcoming renewals.
Contract Cancellation
How to Cancel: You can cancel your Zoho People subscription through the customer portal or admin console. Cancellation can be immediate or set to take effect at the end of the current term.
Downgrading: Instead of canceling, you may downgrade your plan to a free version if available. Canceling or downgrading will limit your access to premium features.
Refunds: If you terminate your subscription due to Zoho’s breach or significant changes to terms, you are entitled to a prorated refund of any unused prepaid fees. For standard cancellations, you may request a prorated refund by contacting Zoho’s payments or sales team.
Termination for Cause or Convenience: Contracts can be terminated for cause (e.g., breach of terms) or for convenience. In the case of a breach, document the issue and provide written notice as specified in the contract.
Data Handling: Upon cancellation, your account is either downgraded to a free plan (if available) or locked and inaccessible. All premium features are disabled, and your data may be deleted, so it is advised to back up your information before canceling.
No Refund for Violations: No refunds (full or prorated) are provided if the account is terminated due to violations such as phishing, fraud, or breaches of applicable laws.
Zoho People meets several major international compliance standards, ensuring robust data protection, privacy, and operational integrity for organizations using the platform. The key compliance standards include:
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): Zoho People is fully compliant with the EU’s GDPR, providing features such as data access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, audit logs, and configurable permissions to help organizations meet strict data privacy and protection requirements.
ISO 9001 (Quality Management System): Zoho People is ISO 9001 certified, validating its ability to consistently provide quality products and services that meet customer and regulatory requirements.
SOC 1 Type II (SSAE 18 & ISAE 3402): Zoho People is SOC 1 Type II compliant, which means its controls related to financial reporting are independently audited and verified for effectiveness over an extended period.
DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency): The platform complies with DCAA requirements, ensuring accurate, auditable time tracking and approval processes for organizations working with U.S. government contracts.
