How One Ukrainian Company Cultivated Resiliency Amid War

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Crisis management is something we’ve all become more familiar with, especially following the pandemic. What used to only happen once in a while for a few companies has now become more pervasive. Companies have had to figure out strategies to be resilient and adaptive in the face of all kinds of threats and risks. There’s a huge spectrum of the kinds of crises that an organization can face, but perhaps none is as serious as war.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, millions of workers and thousands of organizational leaders suddenly had to find a way to adapt in the face of incredible adversity. Today’s guest is one such leader.

Roman Rodomansky is the COO and cofounder of Ralabs, a software development company based in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. He wrote the HBR article “A Cofounder of Ralabs on Leading a Ukrainian Start-Up Through a Year of War.” He joins me now. Welcome.

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Hello, Curt. Happy to being here and thanks for the invitation.

CURT NICKISCH: Tell us a little bit more about Ralabs and what you do there.

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Yes. So Ralabs is an agency that provided software development services. We are focused mostly on the healthcare domain. We worked with NHS – its National Health Service in UK, and many other clients from Europe, UK, and the U.S.

The company was launched around seven years ago, when I was 27, together with my partner, Andrew. The company is right now around approximate 100 in-house employees.

My formal role is COO, and I’m responsible for internal processes. I’m managing delivery, it’s working with current clients, hiring, HR, and overall just operation excellence.

CURT NICKISCH: What was it like before the war in terms of scaling the company? As COO, what problems were you solving?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: So before the war, before 2022, the company size was around 80 employees. We already were on this phase when the COVID started so the company was pretty remote-friendly. We already had a lot of employees working remotely. We set up remote hiring so we started working with different new locations like Europe, like Costa Rica, like Mexico. We were trying to hire people from those areas. At this time, most of our employees were still based on the west of Ukraine so mostly it was west of Ukraine and Kyiv.

CURT NICKISCH: In 2022, you and the rest of the world saw Russia amassing troops along the Ukrainian border. And no one really knew if this was just a show of force or for real for a long time. What was your reaction to it as an organizational leader?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: We had this pre-invasion stress that’s mostly related to our Ukrainian team, for people who are based in Ukraine, and we had external stress, that means some questions and concerns from our clients. So our Ukrainian team was stressed about the possibility of war. To mitigate all of those risks we prepared, I think it was maybe two months before so it was maybe early December, we started preparing some draft of BCP plan, business continuity plan.

CURT NICKISCH: Got it. This is December of 2021.

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Yes, correct. A few months before full-scale invasion.

CURT NICKISCH: So you’re describing the stress, and it’s also very uncertain, right. Was there a part of you that thought maybe we don’t need to be doing this, or were you pretty firm in your commitment that you needed to prepare pretty heavily for what was an uncertain outcome?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Well, definitely some of the people were skeptical about this. Others people were believing to this maybe more than others. But talking about our company, we have … So we have a collegial decision. Final decision is always on me or my partner but – except this, behind of this, we have a team called core team so it’s the head of departments are included on this team. We just decided to take a collegial decision that we accept this risk, and we started preparing to this risk.

CURT NICKISCH: Were you following best practice from other companies or was this uncharted territory and you were just doing what was logical and made sense to you as a leader?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: First of all, me and my partner, we have a few mentors, and we quite often talk with our mentor. For example, one of those is a VP from a quite large software company. We’re also regularly in touch with other founders of other companies so it’s helped us to understand the situation on the market so we are almost always up-to-date. We know what other companies are doing, what other founders are planning to do, and what the average situation on the market.

CURT NICKISCH: So it sounds like you were pretty well networked, you really leveraged your network to get good information. You’re doing a lot of things that a lot of big companies and a lot of big corporations do because they have set procedures in place for big crisis management plans. You called this BCP. Can you explain that?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: So BCP is a business continuity plan. In our case, we split our business continuity plan to three stages. It was green, orange, and red. Each stage it has specific triggers for a few groups. It was people security, business infrastructure, business environments related to clients, and appropriate actions we should take. So on the news – according from news, we know amount of troops on the borders. Based on that, we can predict in which stage we are on the green or orange or red. So, for example, on the February, on the day of when the war started, this, obviously our BCP plan was triggered on the red stage, and so our appropriate actions were also triggered.

CURT NICKISCH: What were conversations like with your external partners and your clients? Because you mentioned the external stress. What were you telling them?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Weeks before the war happened when we have these first signs of war, some of the current customers they started asking some questions like “What will you do if something happened? What will you do if Russia will declare war?”

So we transparently shared what actions we were planning to do in advance so we keep our clients updated with our continuity plan. We also were always focused on the people and people’s security so we were always showing to our clients that people are the most priority of the company and keep their safety. That’s probably it. So we had very regular communication with client, I believe it’s maybe on the weekly basis. Same it was for internally with our employees. We had regular Q&A, it was probably on a weekly basis just to answer any questions our employees has.

We prepared emergency response team. So that’s a team that consists, I believe, for the seven people and they were located in different areas of the world. Clients always knows that in case of any emergency on the project we have this emergency team that with some small response time can always help and assist with the project just in case if something will be unexpectedly happened with their team or with their project.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Well, you did a lot of things like buying Starlink internet consoles for your employees, generators so that they could keep working if electricity went out, keeping track of where people were, and also cloud storage and security backups for all of your work.

So a lot of those things were in place when February 24, 2022 came around and Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border. What was it like at that moment and for you? And how did having a plan in place change how you felt?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Yes, on the first days – I mean, when war started, we already have prepared, before this day we already have prepared email template for our customers. So we just execute this email to our clients so our clients understood that they can rely on us. For the first weeks, we also give allowance to our employees to work on the part-time basis since people need just to take care about their relatives and their personal security.

And I should say, it might sound again strange but people maybe it took a week, maybe a maximum two weeks when the performance for the whole company get back to the previous level. I remember, on the daily basis we were asking people who are ready to work just to track working hours. We were asking everyone who are ready to commit to the work and amount of hours people can work so we were able to measure amount of performance for the company. As I remember, maybe in two weeks the performance of the company was a bit more than 80 percent. The majority of the people they were back to the work.

CURT NICKISCH: Did that surprise you?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Yes. Definitely, yes.

CURT NICKISCH: Now you had to do some things like salaries were frozen at the time. There’s, obviously, a lot of cost to going part-time, to making these purchases, to allowing for all of the things that you had to allow for. And you’re also working with employees who have real fear about their own safety, and that of their families, and just the state of their nation. How do you, as a leadership team, communicate with employees around these anxieties and these fears? What was your communication strategy?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Before what was happening some of the employees, and also with their families, they relocated abroad. Some of the people decided to stay here. Talking about those people who stayed here, we had regular and transparent communication with people. So we sent on the day when war begin, we just sent prepared email that listed some useful information about the company, about the infrastructure, about the office, about the finance – so a lot of information that might be helpful to people.

Before the war we made a lot of events like internal events. They were about how to prepare your emergency bag or mental trainings. I believe it helps people. We also help this relocation to families from the Kyiv, for example, from the capital.

We had a few employees in Kyiv so we helped them to relocate to the west of Ukraine. But it was not easy because technically leaving Kyiv was not easy because a lot of people was trying to leave Kyiv, right, so a lot of people, a lot of traffic. So I know people were – usually a road from Kyiv to Lviv it takes, let’s say, five hours driving a car. On those days it might take 20 hours or even more. So technically it was pretty, quite hard to leave the cities.

At the first days we also had one employee, it was a QA engineer, so he joined voluntarily of the army probably from the first weeks of the invasion. So we prepared this policy and note, a policy, for employees who would like to be mobilized, I mean, voluntary. For the first year we paid his salary for him so it was our support.

CURT NICKISCH: A lot of people dispersed or went in different places but other people are still in the same offices. How do you gather as employees now? And how do you build culture and relationships after so much change for so many people?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: What you should know about Ralabs, that we invest a lot into relations with people, and I’m talking about both clients and employees. So for employees, we were always trying to keep transparency with people so employees knows about company plans, company goals. We have such activity called Monthly Digest. It’s an all hands meeting where all of the employees joining, and each department just sharing news and plans … News from the previous month and plans for the next months.

We also continuing doing internal events. We also continuing supporting people like education, we have internal mentoring program. We have a lot of learning and development activities. We have a lot of internal mental activities that help people to keep high performance.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, your business climate changed as well, right? There were sanctions against Russia, for instance. That’s shifting as well your whole competitive landscape. How do you set business goals as it’s been shifting and as things could continue to change?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: You’re correct that some of the clients they migrated from Russia to Ukraine. I cannot say it was a large pipe of the clients who decided to migrate from Russia to Ukraine.

All of our clients, that’s completely 100% of our clients, they support us fully, the company. They didn’t decrease the team or stop the project so they continued support Ukraine and us as a company. We haven’t failed this trust, or we haven’t failed relations. I believe that’s because that’s paid off, our preparedment, that BCP plan keep the performance of the team good and the quality of service on the same level as it was before the war.

But talking about goals you are correct, that it’s changed. So before I think our focus was how to grow so we were trying to find tactics and strategies, how we can grow up and become more mature. Now I would say that probably focus is more to stabilize company, make it more stable. But still, I would say that there are a lot of clients that continue to support Ukraine, especially those clients who has some previous relation with Ukraine. They worked with Ukrainians, they know the culture of people, they know how people are motivated, they are hardworking, so they are ready to continue work with Ukrainians. Some of the clients asking to balance and split team between people who are located in Ukraine and between for example, Ukrainians based in Europe, we have also a few cases like this. We are very grateful to our clients for all of the support.

CURT NICKISCH: What advice do you have for others who may not face a crisis like this but have to prepare for uncertainty in the future or potential crises, whether it’s a natural disaster or fires, or government instability where they are? What’s your advice?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: My personal advice – It’s not business advice but personal advice. And what helped me is to, first of all, calm the mind and create the maximum good conditions for yourself in which you will feel safe and calm. And after you just make decisions in a calm and safe conditions. It’s healthy just to keep your mind calm and make proper decisions.

But talking about the business, that’s definitely scenario planning. I mentioned that our BCP plan has three stages: green, orange, and red. So green is something optimistic, orange is something, let’s say, realistic, and red is something very pessimistic scenario. We were always preparing to the worst-case scenario. You asked before that if we had any team members that believe in one version of the future scenario so that’s correct. But believing in one version of the future scenario does not negate the need to be prepared to any other possible scenarios.

So probably the second advice would be scenario planning. I would say that first, especially days, we made a lot of quick decisions so probably quick decision-making. A lot of decisions we didn’t make, and these days they cost twice in the next week. So every problem must be solved quickly and with dignity. Transparent communication with team it should be prioritized, it’s very important.

I should add that without people there is no company. People always need to be valued. If they follow you, if they work with you then they believe in you and your company so you should always support them and keep trust and relations with them. And probably one more: it’s also thinking a few steps ahead. For example, we started hiring abroad a bit before then war started so we were ready. Our processes were in place so we were ready to hire people abroad.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, you talked about personally making decisions when you were calm of mind. And it sounds like all this preparation for the organization helped the organization make a lot of decisions in a calm manner. What’s your hope for the future of the company?

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: I think our hope is not only to survive but also grow up and become more mature as a company, as a business. I was reading Antifragile by the Nassim Taleb, and he has a good phrase about crisis, that each crisis makes us stronger. But giving more specific answer, I think we want to attract several large healthcare clients, we want to retain as much as possible our employees, we want to grow in a headcount. And for sure we will continue to support the army of Ukraine.

CURT NICKISCH: Roman, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about your company’s story.

ROMAN RODOMANSKY: Thank you, Curt, it was a pleasure talking to with you today.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Roman Rodomansky. He’s the COO and cofounder of Ralabs, a software development company based in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. He wrote the HBR article “A Cofounder of Ralabs on Leading a Ukrainian Start-Up Through a Year of War.”

And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, we get technical help from Rob Eckhardt, our audio product manager is Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Curt Nickisch.