War in Ukraine and russian invasion have already brought a lot of pain and harm to Ukrainian people and become a real stress-test for Ukrainian business. Assuming severe shortening of internal Ukrainian markets, many companies had to find a way to diversify to external markets, which is always a challenge and especially in professional services.
BDO in Ukraine got a lot of support from other member firms and BDO Global and really appreciated all the support provided, especially, for different foreign projects where we can participate, involving qualified Ukrainian talents.
It is important to have the demand, but overall capability to render services in such difficult situation is sometimes even more important. After many months of such hybrid work in different countries we can assume, that we were in many ways prepared to the challenge.
We started to implement modern workplace elements (combining physical and remote work) in 2019 before COVID, but COVID became the real trigger to force efficient remote collaboration, which became crucial when the war was declared.
Pre-COVID implementation of cloud technologies and remote work elements: April-December 2019
In early 2019 BDO in Ukraine was more or less “on premise” company with very limited use of cloud technologies: on-premises e-mail and ERP servers, file shares and sometimes — outdated software. Everything changed on April 2019, when management strategically decided to use network-wide cloud services (BDO Portal was the first of them). We developed migration plan and by September upgraded all the endpoints to latest Windows and Office versions (capable to work with MS cloud services), switched to Exchange online and SharePoint / OneDrive as alternatives to outdated on-premises solutions, and also made training courses on Teams, To-Do, MS Planner and other services.
Development of remote collaboration: 2020-2021
Luckily, due to all the steps, performed before COVID-19, BDO in Ukraine was technically ready for remote collaboration. It does not mean that everything was smooth, as we have to build many processes from the scratch and learn things on the go, but at least everybody was online and knew what to do even at home.
Like many companies, we realised that remote work is possible, while hybrid work is what many of us want (with partial presence in the office) so we kept this rhythm even after pandemic.
But during pandemic we had to significantly invest in promoting and developing remote work culture as well as to keep our employees focused on different working conditions. We hosted a lot of training courses, provided all the technical support to our colleagues, and even implemented internal “remote KPIs”: for example, we counted space used in SharePoint and OneDrive or compared the dynamics of decrease in internal e-mails number with dynamics of number of Teams messages and groups. We even had virtual New Year party, so by the end of 2020 we were able to call ourselves “remote-ready” company.
Key changes of remote work in war times: March 2022-…
When the war was declared, we realised, that COVID-times “remote” was just partial remote as BDO in Ukraine faced much more difficult challenges: our employees were in different cities and countries due to evacuation, and they were moving trying to work in some way.
This challenge required to do many things simultaneously:
- Good thing was that war was broken out after COVID, and our employees had good experience in working and collaborating outside office. Despite this, we had to change processes immediately as now internet and fixed working hours were not guaranteed and we had to consider that (luckily, in several months this situation became better).
- Physical security and cybersecurity were the most complicated tasks: BDO Global and Microsoft helped a lot with establishing secure remote environment and strict ID control (as among other risks even risk of physical expropriation of equipment was considered).
- Further cloud migration. Before and during COVID we migrated to cloud major parts of services in use including e-mails, file shares and collaboration instruments. This time we had to immediately move to cloud everything else needed for true remote environment: implementing Azure AD as a substitute to domain controller, replicating on-premise servers to Azure gradually replacing them with SaaS solutions where possible.
As a result, BDO in Ukraine was converted from “remote-ready” to “fully remote” firm where all the employees connected to the same cloud-based network with all the collaboration services inside and full secure access to modern workspace from any point of the world.
New business opportunities in war
Despite the fact, that war has frozen internal market for professional services, BDO in Ukraine decided to find additional opportunities abroad and diversify to other countries in partnership with other member firms.
We had several things in mind: first of all, we needed work for our employees, but besides that we believed, that it was crucial to create additional jobs for Ukrainians in Ukraine to keep them working in our country and not to leave permanently abroad.
Fortunately, “fully remote” capabilities helped a lot: we found a lot of projects to participate abroad inside BDO network and also created new business model hiring Ukrainian talents for foreign member firms for 100% remote work (while retaining people, their spending and taxes in Ukraine). All these initiatives created new opportunities to our employees and talented Ukrainians being very useful for foreign member firms facing shortage of resources in their own countries.
BDO in Ukraine is going to develop this practice and involve more people into this activity to create remote hub for BDO network based in Ukraine, which would be able to fill the resource gap for member firms on permanent basis in different forms: outsourcing or hiring of Ukrainian talent on middle to long-term basis, participation in projects as white label team or even delivering separate tasks like documents or presentations.
All these things would not be possible without “fully remote” capabilities and experience, and BDO in Ukraine is not going to stop in developing them as it is not our future, it is definitely our present that helped to be successful even in such hard times.