SoftServe: almost a quarter of workers forced to move because of the war have already returned home

With the start of a full-scale war, one of Ukraine’s largest IT companies, SoftServe, has relocated more than 4,000 workers to western regions and abroad. However, since May, the company has seen a trend of returning IT professionals to their usual locations, currently 1,082 people have returned home.

Since May, the dynamics of returns of people from abroad is constant: according to the internal statistics of SoftServe, 10-15 people return to Ukraine every day.

“In May, the largest number of people outside Ukraine was 1,900 employees. Since then, this figure has been steadily decreasing, and now 314 workers have returned to Ukraine. According to polls, about 170 more plan to return home as soon as possible. However, as a company, we are the most responsive to employees’ decisions about where to work. For those who want to stay abroad, we offer the opportunity to work in local branches of the company for a year or even longer in the hub countries: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Latin America,” commented VP HR SoftServe Kateryna Gubareva.

SoftServe employees are the most active in returning to Kyiv, with more than 400 people arriving at the beginning of June. Over the past two weeks, the number of employees arriving in the capital is growing by 15-20 people every day. The number of people returning to the Dnieper (+38 people since April) and Kharkiv (+10 people since May) is growing more slowly but is still growing. However, since May, 10 workers have left Odesa.

There is also a trend towards the return to the usual places of residence of workers who were forced to leave for the western regions of Ukraine. Among the cities that the company’s employees most often chose to move to were Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod. In total, more than 1,100 people have moved to these cities since the beginning of the war. Now almost a quarter of them have left, and this process is dynamic. Also, almost half of the workers who came to the city from the beginning of the war left Ternopil.

According to SoftServe’s internal polls, 99% of employees currently say they are safe. For comparison, back in March, this figure was 84%.