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This year, we have already baked cheesecakes for the military and the children from orphanages. Today, we are baking 20 kilograms of cheesecakes, which we will take to the hospital for the military. Although this will be something great to do together, it’s very important for me to hear what one of the best tops in Ukraine thinks. To talk about how to choose «ingredients» for business in this difficult time. What advice and considerations would you give today after a year of war?
We should all use intuition because intuition is like our internal GPT. It gives us a lot of ideas, and we have to catch these ideas, rationally pass them through our thinking and choose the best ones, which we do.
Thrift should always be there. We cannot waste a good product just because we are lazy and don’t want to grind it. Let’s take the peel from a kilogram of lemons.
It should be sprinkled evenly. Even distribution – this is how it is done.
Regarding the proportions: we have more than ten kilograms of sour milk cheese and less than a kilogram of lemons, also grated. How to find a reasonable combination of young-active professionals and, let’s say, slower ones? How to assemble unique teams, forming the best ratio of different categories of people?
The way is always for the young, this is a priority. It just has to be the default, and you have to add raisins over it. The young must combine energy and experience, and the elders must share experience and guidance.
Okay, then you need to add a certain amount of sweetness. There are 2.5 kilograms of sugar per 10 kilograms of cheese. What has changed in the last year, if you compare SoftServe before the war and now? More «sugar», that is, more motivation and communication? Has anything changed at all during this grievous period for Ukraine?
Of course, a lot has changed. We live in the circumstances of war, and this increases people’s responsibility. We actually work on several fronts. First, we provide cool products to our customers, second – jobs for people, and third – we support society in the fight. Many people from SoftServe are now at war. Even before the war, when it was just expected, we assured that all people who would go to defend the country would remain on our payroll. Today, almost 300 people from SoftServe are on the front lines. The company delivered 50 evacuation vehicles, the same number of ambulances and much more to the front. We do this non-stop, this is another big project that the SoftServe is currently conducting.
Read also: Like the campuses of Google, Apple, Amazon». What Softserve is planning to build
We are now serving for the people in the military hospital, to be close to them. We go to them and bring the best-advanced technologies. It just seems that there are no innovations, but the recipe is unique.
A brand is such a sign of quality that people trust. It is difficult to convince about something, but when there is a brand, it is easy to convince. A unique protein mixes uniquely.
Everyone understands that teams need to be emotionally cohesive. You have evacuated more than 3,000 employees. This number of families simply amazes me. How can you move so many people and still grow by 30%. What is the «magic»?
In fact, we enjoyed the full support of our customers since the beginning of the war. They were shocked but supported us wholeheartedly. When we had this mass displacement at the beginning of the war, the clients tolerated the people being remote, not being able to work and so on. We actually had two weeks to do it from the clients, we had trust and support, so it worked out quite well.
But it takes years of work. If you hadn’t earned that trust ahead of time, they probably would have behaved differently.
I think so. But how do we measure our customer satisfaction? This is the so-called Net promoter score, or loyalty index. We will find out after a quarterly telephone survey of customers by an independent consulting company. The client is not one person, but those who work for the client and are involved in working with us. Therefore, the key question arises: can you recommend this company to your friends? Because you can be satisfied, but for some reason do not recommend it. You should want recommendations.
This is how this loyalty index is actually produced. At SoftServe, it is higher than 80%, and the average loyalty index among customers in the industry is 40-50%. To have over 80% during wartime is already indicative of something.
This became the basis for the first half of last year to organize the transfer wisely and to have the trust of customers that you will finish. Have some projects been somewhat transformed over time?
No, they didn’t transform, people just moved. Some were supposed to work on Wednesday or Friday, but they worked on Saturday and Sunday instead. That is, we produced all the results. There was a bit of a «pun» in the middle: a person is on his way, he was supposed to be at the call today, but he isn’t. However, when there is trust, you understand that it will be finished on Saturday. That is, a person will come to Lviv, settle down, go to the office, and there he will calmly finish his work on the weekend. And in the end, we did not have any shifts in terms, there was just a small internal adaptation to new conditions.
Everything is built on the company’s culture. This year, we had foreign guests from certain institutions in England. They asked me: «How do you build a company culture?» I responded: «You ask such a difficult question. How can I answer how we’ve been building our company culture over the past 30 years?». For example, when I say that we are a customer-oriented company, these are not just words. We can look at the history of SoftServe and see the origins of the company in the 1990s, when all sales were conducted from Ukraine, and a trip abroad was like a trip to the moon. When losing a customer was tantamount to a disaster, and we told all our people that it was impossible to lose a customer. When clients came here, they were like gods. It was like this day after day, year after year, and in 10 years it resulted in the understanding that the client is God. That is, it was created during 10 years of living together.
If you look at how people and leaders develop, then we are all plus or minus the same. As they say, hands, feet, head, and thinking are very similar. There are simply open and closed people. Open ones progress and develop faster. If someone is open, he is not afraid to go further, takes a lot of problems on his head and, in the end, he progresses. Not because he was wiser, but because he was just ready for something new.
People show great willingness to create a new Ukraine. How do your customers perceive it in the world? From what angle do you look at everything that has been happening over the last year? How can we preserve our unique DNA of a nation?
We always thought that we could export abroad, because we are not super leaders in technology. But what Western customers admire, saying «we don’t have, we don’t have that» and wanting to have it – they sincerely envy, it shows that we have a society with open people, ready to help, honest, decent, and intelligent, who give all the forces for this society to develop. Currently, Ukrainian society is in a unique state of transformation, which is happening very quickly.
Ukraine has a certain uniqueness that needs to be preserved. It is based on long years of expectations of Ukrainian society for changes. There was a huge demand for these changes, and they are already happening, and everyone is trying not to waste the chance to make these changes. We have young, talented, educated, and innovative people. This is a very great potential for the nation. And when this potential is superimposed on the desire for change, serious results emerge.
What should we all do so that Ukrainians want to return from the places where they are now comfortable?
There should be a principle of openness. You shouldn’t worry too much about people going abroad, because they will learn a lot there and come back with experience. The most determined, progressive, and smart ones who want to make transformations will return. I see that now a lot of IT companies have opened offices abroad, making, in fact, a serious leap in the global construction of their companies. Before that, they «boiled in their own juice» in Ukraine. But now life pushed them, and they went, set up in Poland, Bulgaria, Western Europe, in Dubai. Look where only now there are no Aitians. Of course, all this will not pass in vain, many of them will return, but we must build an open society. Each person must make his choice. And our task is to create such conditions here that there are maximum opportunities. It is clear that we must create comfortable conditions for life, but the main thing is that there should be an opportunity for development, self-realization, and openness. Comfortable conditions of living and recreation will come on the «second front».
Well, we have 13 molds filled with cheesecakes, we will bake them.
If I had such support at home, I would bake cheesecakes myself every day.
No one has abolished competition in the world. And despite the fact that Ukraine is currently at war, you still have to compete with the Indians, Chinese, and Americans. The global competition did not diminish because of the war, right?
The competition is only getting stronger now. Do you see what is happening in IT? Competition is growing, so one of our company’s strategies is the constant introduction of new technologies. The newer the technology, the less it has been tested on the market, the faster it is possible to bring some value to customers.
Are you tracking key trends and trying to be the first?
Yes. If you go with new technologies – you are in the «green ocean», if you provide services with old ones – you are in the «red ocean». We want to be in the «green ocean», and for this, we need an R&D (research and development) group that constantly browses all new technologies, studies them, tries to understand how reliable they are, and what can be offered to its customers. When a certain level of reliability is reached, we start to provide solutions that no one else has provided yet. Of course, they are appreciated because these solutions are unique, they did not exist until now.
Volodymyr Hlashchenkov spoke
Text: Marichka Ilyina, translated by Vitalii Holich
Photo by Ivan Stanislavsky/Your city
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