News Update, September 2: Ukraine Counterattacks, AltexSoft Expands Its International Presence

For over 6 months now, the full-scale Russian invasion has been going on, affecting the lives of millions of Ukrainians and people from other countries alike. In April, we posted a brief report on the situation in the country and AltexSoft. Now, it’s time for some updates on how life has been for us lately.

The situation in Ukraine: a new phase in the war, Ukrainian counterattack, hope for the end of the active phase

The ongoing war efforts have transitioned to a new phase. Russia has localized its efforts on Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the East and temporarily captured territories in South Ukraine. 

Ukrainians started the counterattack. Ukrainian forces have been able to push the enemies away from Kharkiv and launched a counterattack in the South of Ukraine. The heavy fighting continues along the front lines in the above-mentioned regions, while attacks outside these regions are becoming rarer. 

The situation somewhat stabilizes. Outside of the occupied regions and regions that border them, we consider the overall situation in Ukraine to have been stable for the last three months. 

We hope the active phase will end soon. Although we see the war transitioning into a more long-term conflict, we believe and hope that its active phase will be over either by the end of this year or sometime in the first half of 2023. At this stage, we expect it to turn to political negotiations rather than active war efforts.

How we work: employees are in safe regions, support activities are provided, and productivity stays high

Employees are relocated. As we’ve mentioned previously, almost all our Ukrainian employees are located in the stable part of Ukraine or abroad. Our colleagues who had to relocate from fighting zones over the last several months have successfully settled in new locations. 

The company provides support. Most of our staff members have been able to accept the current situation despite the struggles they had to go through in the first several days or weeks of the war. As a company, we have worked on organizing a number of various supporting activities to help our people through these transitions:

• relocation coordination and help with finding suitable apartments in new locations;
• recurring online physical training programs to help tackle stress on the physical level;
• free therapy sessions with professional therapists to work through the emotional struggles for those requiring such assistance;
• regular all-staff, departmental, and one on one meetings to provide transparency into all aspects of support;
• and many more unique actions to help each person in need on a case-by-case basis.

Productivity is stable. As we can see now, these activities have paid off immensely as no significant drop in productivity was witnessed among employees once their relocations have been completed. People are AltexSoft’s greatest asset, so we will continue doing everything in our power to support each team member as we move things forward.

AltexSoft news: hiring internationally, new role implementation, testing of hybrid working format, global events

We have also been able to return to our everyday operations on a company-wide level, implementing and improving multiple activities in the process.

The hiring process was transformed to recruiting worldwide. As part of our planned company-wide strategy, we have transformed our hiring process, mainly focusing our efforts outside of Ukraine. 

This has allowed us to hire two-thirds of our new employees in several different locations around the world – Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Tajikistan, and a few more (among which the most unexpected was Australia). Currently, many new candidates in our hiring pipeline are coming from countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. 

In addition, due to increased flexibility, we can now hire at clients’ locations if needed.

The new Unit Manager role is implemented to increase efficiency. We’ve created a new internal role — Unit Manager. Our colleagues in this position will be responsible for the employee and business development of people working within specific technological units (hence the name of the role). It will allow us to clearly distinguish our efforts focused on technology development within the organization overall and the development of specific employees according to their interests and company needs. 

In addition, Unit Managers will focus on building operational excellence in their areas of responsibility, while Technological Competency Leads, as their counterparts, will now have more time to focus on technological excellence within the organization. Since the start of the year, we’ve been able to test our hypothesis that this will create added efficiency for the company and fill the positions of Unit Managers for all three newly created Units.

We keep improving and digitizing our legal and financial operations. In addition, in the last three months, we’ve also been able to improve our operations related to legal and financial departments through process improvement and technological automation. As we believe that continuous digital transformation is essential for the success of any organization, we are constantly working on implementing it internally, just like we help our clients go through it.

We test a new hybrid working format. Now, turning to our external activities – one of our recent new clients was particularly interested in launching a hybrid working format with us. Within such a format, our employees would alternate between working in their standard working location and the client’s office. In our experience, this is an excellent way to improve communication and better understand more complex product-related issues. 

We believe this to be a perfect format for practically any engagement. So, a few weeks ago, one of our colleagues went on a business trip to the client’s office right after the start of the project. This has been the first such cooperation since the start of the war, and we expect a few more to come soon.

AltexSoft actively participates in global events. In early May, our team participated in Arabian Travel Market 2022, a leading travel industry event in the Middle East. This year, the event has attracted about 20,000 attendees from all over the world. 

Later, at the end of June, we also participated and exhibited at Phocuswright Europe in Amsterdam and the TravelTech Show in London. These events have allowed us to have exciting conversations with many travel tech professionals from all over the world, deepening our knowledge of the problems and opportunities in the industry.

We organized an event in Georgia. As part of our AltexSoft Lab international internship program, we held another event in Tbilisi, Georgia, on June 11th. Our colleagues who hold the positions of Node.js developer, QA competency expert, people partner, and talent acquisition specialist had a chance to share what it takes to become a successful technology professional. 

As we enter autumn 2022, we can say it has been a challenging yet productive year. We as a country keep fighting and standing strong against the enemy, while we as a business keep developing and delivering best results in our job.