You can’t turn on the TV or go online without hearing news about the war in Ukraine, which began over a year ago when Russia invaded. In this bonus episode of Punk Rock HR, my guest is Yulia Kudina, an HR leader who is vice president of people at Reface, which is based in Kyiv, Ukraine.
In this conversation, Yulia and I talk about how Reface prepared for war last year, what life has been like in the past year and how she is connecting with the local HR community through the People First Club.
Preparing for the Unexpected
Like many people in Ukraine, Yulia didn’t believe that the war would happen: “I couldn’t grasp that this could be it. A full-scale war in the 21st century in the middle of Europe,” she says.
But in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, Yulia and her co-workers at Reface began to prepare for war, professionally and personally. Work-wise, Reface is based in Kyiv, but its data is on U.S. servers.
“In a way, we were safe and secure in that way,” Yulia says. “But if we talk about people, most of Reface, most of our team was located in Ukraine on the 24th of February.”
Much of the company’s focus leading up to the war was about what to expect, how to deal with anxiety, and what to do if they had to flee the area. And while Yulia is able to move freely, and has even traveled outside Ukraine, many of her fellow citizens must stay for the war’s duration.
Life in Ukraine a Year Later
A year later, the war continues, but people are living their lives in Kyiv. Yulia has even settled into a routine of sorts. “I have my workouts before the office, then I can go to the office or work from home if I have electricity there,” she says. “Then after work hours, I meet with my friends. But the thing is that usually the restaurants close at 9.”
But this new normal doesn’t distract from the cognitive dissonance many people feel. “Everyone is super-tired, and many people didn’t take days off last year. You work a lot,” she says. “For me, and for my colleagues, work is a coping mechanism because it’s something stable in your life. You have this routine; you have your standups, you have your planning, your retrospectives, the road map of the project, and so on.”
The office has become a place of stability, with Yulia and her colleagues providing space for each other to talk through their thoughts. But even that has its limits.
“It’s not the normal that we need or want. A lot of focus, on my team, for example, is on extra care for the team generally,” Yulia says. But she recognizes that HR professionals aren’t psychologists or therapists. “And that is a very relevant question for every HR person — ‘How far can you go?’ — so people don’t get hurt, because we are not experts,” she adds.
Generally, Yulia is not someone to bring up politics at work. But the war is a bigger issue, where she will speak her mind and values as a Ukrainian citizen, and she’s grateful that Reface is aligned with that by taking pro-Ukrainian stances, by not doing business in Russia, and so forth. And while perhaps unintentional, those actions are important for employer branding.
“We had the employer branding community meeting in Ukraine, and it was so clear that now people in Ukraine tend to choose companies whose position is clear and transparent and is Ukrainian, and it’s super-patriotic,” Yulia says.
Connecting With Other HR Professionals
Yulia also finds support through the HR community in Ukraine, including the HR development platform People First Club, where she’s a lecturer. Being around industry peers is helpful because they understand what the other is going through.
“I can talk to my friend who is a developer and or to my partner who is a product manager. They also work in IT, but they don’t have this pressure that we have,” Yulia says. “So only talking to people from your same community is something I find that helpful.”
The People First Club is a space where HR professionals and leaders can discuss their concerns about the war’s effect on their workforces. The platform has enabled connections with HR leaders internationally.
Separately, Yulia has also had the privilege of hearing Dave Ulrich and Josh Bersin speak on HR topics.
Yulia’s message for the world is to remember the people of Ukraine and the bigger issues at play. “I just want people not to forget about what’s happening in the middle of Europe these days,” she says. “Even spreading the word is a big support.”
People in This Episode
Yulia Kudina: LinkedIn, Instagram
Laurie Ruettimann: LinkedIn, Instagram
Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
Hey everybody, I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Yulia Kudina. She’s the VP of people at Reface, and she’s also based in Kyiv, which is the capital of Ukraine. You can’t turn on the internet these days without hearing an update from Ukraine and how the war is going. A year into it, Yulia asked if she could come on Punk Rock HR and just talk about life as a human resources professional during wartime.
In our conversation today, I think you’ll find a brave, interesting, courageous woman who is also trying to live an ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances. I really appreciate Yulia reaching out, and one of the things I’d like to encourage you to do is to connect with her on LinkedIn to say that you heard the podcast and to infuse her life with interesting ideas, things you’re working on, and topics you find interesting. After all, the point of living is to learn and grow, and that’s how you do more than survive. That’s how you thrive.
So if you’re interested in hearing a story about a woman who is doing the best she can in human resources and doing a great job in Ukraine, well, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Yulia Kudina on this week’s Punk Rock HR.
Hi Yulia, welcome to the podcast.
Yulia Kudina:
Hi Laurie. Thanks for having me.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Oh my goodness, it’s my pleasure. Before we get started, why don’t you do me and everyone else who is listening the honor of telling us who you are and where you’re joining us from today.
Yulia Kudina:
Hi guys. My name is Yulia Kudina, and I am talking to Laurie now sitting in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Today was a good day. It was quite calm in the capital, and I generally had a nice day in the office of Reface, where I currently work.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yulia, I am so pleased to talk to you because you reached out and you said, “I have a story. I work in human resources in Ukraine, and we’ve been going through a lot lately. And I would like to tell it, and I’m not sure how to tell it.” And I invited you on the podcast to get this process started.
So I would like to hear about what it’s like to work in human resources in Ukraine during a war, during a pandemic. There are a lot of things going on in the world, but I want to know what your life was like before the war. What was that like?
Yulia Kudina:
It was calm and peaceful, and I didn’t appreciate that enough. It’s always like that. When you lose something, you understand that your life was really perfect at that time. I enjoy being in HR. This is my passion. Work hasn’t been really easy because COVID hit, but that you are well aware of, I’m sure. But generally, it has been just fine. We moved on to a hybrid format. For many businesses in Ukraine, it was not a problem any longer. We didn’t wear that much of masks anymore. So yeah, we all started kind of having a normal life, in a way, and hoped for the better.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. You knew that tensions had been rising for the past decade with Russia and their reach into your country and their totally bogus claim on your territory. And there had been wars in the past decade with Russia. They came in, they invaded your land, and yet you made a normal life in the capital, and you went about conducting business. I think of Ukraine being a very international country. So were you expecting war to become very real on February 24, 2022?
Yulia Kudina:
I was among those people who believed in the better, and I couldn’t grasp that this can be it, a full-scale war in the 21st century in the middle of Europe. I was on the positive side, definitely. But there was news, and people talked about such a possibility starting autumn of 2021. We talked about the bags that need to be packed. If anything happens, you need to be ready to leave, to flee, whatever.
As a business, we were preparing, of course, because especially in winter, it was getting tougher and tougher. So we talked to the team, we had lectures on what to expect and on what can happen. We had psychological sessions about anxiety, how to live, and work with anxiety. We did those homework steps, but I don’t think that any of us really thought that it can happen.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You did prepare. I mean, that’s very interesting, because most of us didn’t prepare for COVID. We didn’t prepare for the pandemic, and when it happened, we were surprised.
So you prepared for a potential invasion and an ongoing war. Do you feel like the preparation you did was effective? Looking back, do you feel like it was, I don’t know, even what you needed?
Yulia Kudina:
No. One hundred percent, no. Because we prepared, for example, everything was stored on a company level in the cloud, so the entity was safe. The work that we were doing was safe. Just to describe a little bit more, Reface has a couple of products that work with AI and ML Magic. We are most famous for the app that is swapping people’s faces in videos and pictures and movie clips and so on. So all the data, all the models, it’s being stored in the server in the U.S.. In a way, we were safe and secure in that way.
But if we talk about people, most of Reface, most of our team was located in Ukraine on the 24th of February. I don’t know whether it’s obvious for the listeners, but when it’s a full-scale war, it’s like the government says that no one and no man is allowed to leave the borders until it’s the end of the war.
So I think that the window of opportunity to leave the country for men was like 10 hours, maybe, since the start at 4 a.m. So it was really half of the day. And of course, if you are in Kyiv physically — and Ukraine is a big country — it will take you around 10 hours to get to the border. And you can only imagine how crazy the situation on the border was because there were millions, literally millions of people, fleeing Ukraine. So people feel kind of like COVID because you cannot leave the country, but on the other side, you can also be mobilized and go to war, go to fight. And of course, not everyone is prepared for that, neither physically nor emotionally.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Do you think you had any understanding of the challenge — choosing between being a worker and being a citizen? I mean, that’s kind of what you were just mentioning, this tension between wanting to flee to preserve the status quo, to preserve your family, to continue working, but also this desire to stay and fight and be proud of your country and be involved in the battle. Did you have any understanding of how that would play out?
Yulia Kudina:
Well, I can say for myself only because I am also in a position where I can leave Ukraine as many times and come back as many times as I want, which I actually did over this year. I did leave for two months in spring, then I came back, and then again, I had my vacation. So I had this opportunity actually to leave and to live without air alarms, to live with electricity — not at certain times, but all the time — and with a stable internet connection.
So my brain could relax a little bit over this time. But yeah, at the beginning, it felt a little bit like COVID because you are trapped. You cannot freely move outside Ukraine. I still don’t want to move to some other country, and I’ve been talking a lot about it with my friends, with the family who really wants me to go for some time to some other country. And I’m not going to fight. I’m not a fighter. I don’t have a military background or anything, but I just love it in Kyiv; that’s my home. At the moment, I have everything I need to work, to continue my life. I have my friends here, so I don’t understand the reasons for moving though, of course, there are new answers.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I have two questions. I want to know what Kyiv is like. As a city, what is it like, and also what’s your life like there today? What are you doing? How do you spend your time?
Yulia Kudina:
So it’s normal, Laurie. You won’t believe it. I have my workouts before the office, then I can go to the office or work from home if I have electricity there. Then after work hours, I meet with my friends. But the thing is that usually the restaurants close at 9. Not so long ago, I was in the Netherlands, and we went out and we could be out till 11, and I was like, “Oh wow. Wow, I don’t need to go home at 9.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
Can you describe what your city looks and feels like? Every city has a soul, a style of architecture, what is Kyiv like?
Yulia Kudina:
So it’s active, and full of people now. So three-fourths of the city are already back and we are talking about — I don’t know, 4 million officially are back. So yeah, it’s like there are traffic jams that give so much life.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Are people walking their dogs in parks?
Yulia Kudina:
Everything. Everything. Even during air alarms. Today, for example, there was only one air alarm during the day. And I was out, and I saw people walking their dogs literally and just moving around. For example, if you happen to be in Kyiv now, at this moment, you won’t understand that there is war in Ukraine. Only until you hear the air alarm or you hear the explosions. So it’s like the life on the edge was this war, because businesses try their best to survive — small and medium businesses like restaurants, cafes and small companies. But there are days that are better, and there are bad days, of course.
Laurie Ruettimann:
And I would imagine just like during the pandemic, during COVID, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. People are trying to pretend like things are normal, and yet you have the trauma, even if it’s not firsthand, it’s with your extended family or your friends, people who’ve lost people.
So you’re constantly aware that you are one decision away from having an inviting tragedy into your own life, whether it’s from a bomb or from somebody sneezing on you with the pandemic. So I would imagine your workforce must be feeling exhausted. Well, you tell me, how does your workforce feel?
Yulia Kudina:
You are 100% correct. After a year of this state of mind, I feel the same. I remember last spring, LinkedIn suggested to me a course on resilience, and I was laughing out loud because resilience is not the skill I can listen about from some other people at the moment.
Laurie Ruettimann:
No, I think you could teach that at this point.
Yulia Kudina:
Yeah. So, of course, everyone is super-tired and many people didn’t take days off last year because it’s all mixed. You work a lot. And for me, personally and for my colleagues, work is a coping mechanism because it’s something stable in your life. You have this routine, you have your standups, you have your planning, your retrospectives, the road map of the project, and so on.
So you know that, on Monday you will meet with your team, and it’s some kind of stability. And I realize that — yeah, it’s super-hard, especially working with many people and having a lot of conversations and connections at work. But then I cannot imagine my life without it because otherwise, it’ll be just tragedy. Mostly tragedy. We do go out. We do try to live our normal lives, but of course, it’s not normal. It’s not the normal that we need or want.
So yeah, a lot of focus is, on my team, for example, on extra care for the team generally. But this line between how much is not much, also, because we are not psychologists here. That is a very relevant question for every HR — how far can you go, so not to hurt, because we are not experts?
Laurie Ruettimann:
I think about some of the lessons we learned during COVID and during the pandemic here in the United States and in Western Europe. We learned that we fix work in human resources by fixing ourselves first, and that if we’re not happy and healthy in human resources, there’s no way that other people can be happy and healthy.
But I wonder how realistic that is when you’re living during wartime. I mean, Yulia, you’re doing the best you can. In perpetuity, you don’t know when this is going to end. So how do you feel? How are you holding up? I mean, you mentioned early in the conversation that you’re still doing some of your same routine, but truly, can you do this for another couple of years?
Yulia Kudina:
That is a tough question about a couple of years, but I do live, and I do understand there is no clear end. There was a moment when I realized that if I don’t stick to my routine and do what makes me happy; for example, workouts, the meditation — I don’t know, journaling, whatever keeps you sane, then you definitely cannot help other people. That’s like it. And I really think that my team and fellow HRs that I talk to and I’m close with in Ukraine — we are all superheroes in a way because in a way, it is similar to COVID times because it’s something that you don’t know what to do.
So we learn on the go. There is no one who can come up and say, “Yulia, this is the best way to do.” So we just research on the way, we try, we are flexible, then we switch the patterns, and so on. It really helps to talk to other people and ask for opinions. But then at the end of the day, you are here to make the decisions.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, and who knows better than you at this point? You’re the boots on the ground, and you’re in the trenches. I was just thinking, during COVID, we thought everybody would be upset about the pandemic. And people were upset about the pandemic, but they also brought in their childhood tragedies and their traumas and their broken relationships with their parents, and they hated their co-workers, and they were jealous of somebody’s merit increase.
There were still all the day in, day out, issues that existed before the pandemic that HR still had to deal with. And you were like, “Really? You’re making a big deal out of the fact that you don’t like the way this person eats their food.” You don’t like the way that they show up on a Zoom call. But it was important still.
Do you find that struggle still exists? Because it’s easy to say you’re being petty, but on the other hand, these are legitimate concerns. So do you feel that tension yourself in your workforce at all? Are you dealing with that?
Yulia Kudina:
Frankly, I was happy at the end of spring last year. We started receiving such concerns and questions because it meant that we are nailing it. We are back to normal, or whatever the normal is. But when I was thinking about what I wanted to share, and when I was preparing for our podcast filming, I just realized that the full-scale war started on the 24th of February, and on the 1st of March, we had an onboarding for a new person.
And it did happen, Laurie. So my colleague who is responsible for onboarding is Tanya. She made the call, and the person was in a safe place. So they texted at first, “Are you OK?” “Yes, I’m OK, let’s get in touch.” So the person started on the 1st of March.
That was crazy, because most of the people were broken, and they had the right to be broken and not think about work. And I think that we just have a purpose in HR. We always have the special cause, and that’s what made us not stop. We couldn’t allow ourselves to stop and wait for some better times. We just continued, and this routine did help us in the end.
Laurie Ruettimann:
As you continue your job in human resources, you mentioned that it feels good to talk to other people. It feels good to seek feedback. Are you talking to other human resources professionals in Ukraine? Do you have a community internationally? Do you want that? What’s your goal in connecting with human resources, and what energizes you, and what’s helpful?
Yulia Kudina:
We do talk a lot with the HR community in Ukraine. We have a great place for HRs — it’s called People First Club, which was born in Ukraine, and it’s only growing now. This is the place to seek support from your colleagues, and no one outside HR can understand how it is.
I can talk to my friend who is a developer and or to my partner who is a product manager. They also work in IT, but they don’t have this pressure that we have. So only talking to the people from your same community, I find that helpful. Yeah, I think this is very important and I have a great team at Reface. So we talk a lot. We have the space to discuss any concerns or anything that worries us. Then there is the local community in Ukraine, and also there were a couple of meetings from the international community. For example, Dave Ulrich had a lecture for Ukrainian HRs, and Josh Bersin. It was really, really cool.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m not surprised that Dave Ulrich and Josh Bersin are out there talking internationally. I just think there is a community of human resources leaders who are trying to do great HR work in Palestine, in Jerusalem, in Mexico, and in different areas on the African continent where there’s conflict. What I really am curious about from you and your perspective is how helpful it would be to have a community of HR professionals who operate under wartime — because war is a constant on this planet, and yet so is capitalism. Work needs to get done.
Yulia Kudina:
That is true. And frankly, last year was about survival. It was really a survival mode. At the beginning of this year, when we got in touch, I could feel some fresh air in my work. And it was when you answered immediately to my email, I was like, “Oh wow, this is important, and someone wants to hear about it more.”
As I told you before, I know that people want to, because I have a couple of colleagues from other European countries and they were reaching out and asking, but you won’t do it over a LinkedIn message, this is a story. That could be a great thing. So if there is a way to connect with the leaders who face the same troubles, it can be totally interesting, especially if we are talking about a longer situation. If it’s not one year and off we go to a normal peaceful life — and come on, it won’t be normal at once, it will take time, and it will be a new normal. So there will be other challenges.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m also curious about this notion that human resources professionals are supposed to be neutral and stay out of politics. At least, that is a trope, a line that we hear a lot in the United States and Canada, even in Western Europe: “Keep politics out of work.” And yet you’re the living embodiment of someone who is dealing with politics at work. So have you heard people say that, and how do you feel about that when you hear it from me?
Yulia Kudina:
I can understand what you mean, and I’m not the person to talk about who is a better president for Ukraine or whether what’s a normal life in peaceful times. I’m definitely not the one to discuss it at work, and I usually don’t. But at the moment, we as a company have a very strong Ukrainian position, and a number of things have been done to show this position. Starting from how we know from the banners in our products for millions and millions of people around the world, from stopping business in Russia, and for donating to the Ukrainian army, and so on. So it’s a strong position; I totally support it.
And if on the 21st of February, I was working in a company that didn’t have this position, I wouldn’t be still there, for sure, because as a patriot and — I am in Kyiv. I decided to stay when I could leave. And there are many other people who did. I can’t imagine not being political in this specific situation. So my position on Instagram, I can totally post stories about what they think about our neighboring country. I don’t feel bad about that. I think I have the right as a Ukrainian citizen to share my thoughts. Since it’s supported by the business that I work at, it’s a perfect match.
We had the employer branding community meeting in Ukraine, and it was so clear that now people in Ukraine tend to choose companies whose position is clear and transparent and is Ukrainian, and it’s super-patriotic. People want to donate, people want to volunteer, people want to have big projects with the military companies and so on to help Ukraine. So we don’t do it for the branding purpose, but it does help with employer branding.
Laurie Ruettimann:
God, that’s so interesting. When I think of Ukraine and what’s happening in the world in business, I swear to you, the last thing I’m thinking about is employer branding. And yet life continues, life goes on, you need benefits, you need employer branding, you need talent attraction strategies, you need to be competitive and steal the best from your competitors. So all of that continues. I just wonder what your big goals are for this year work-wise? What are you trying to accomplish this year?
Yulia Kudina:
Well, I’m happy to say that we have a great business strategy, and my function here is to support it. And when it comes, for example, for employer branding, it’s also important to think about it and not forget about it. Because we continue hiring. We never stopped hiring last year; I would say 25 great Ukrainians joined our company last year. So we still need to be out there telling about our values and our product.
For us, Reface is more of a startup. We are not the best with the processes and with the structure. And let’s say last year was, as I told you, more about surviving and keeping the people and places stable, which we are super-happy we achieved, especially with the tech layoffs in the world. We continued hiring, and I’m proud of us.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You should be. And how about you professionally? Are you studying for anything? Are you trying to improve your levels of certification? Any HR goals for you this year? Because you can’t just think about the war all the time, and also you can’t think about work all the time. You have to think about you, and learning and growing, right? So what are you doing for you?
Yulia Kudina:
So this year, I’m taking a long, half a year, course on organizational coaching, and it’ll start in March. That’s the topic that I’m interested in. And I’ve never learned — I mean, the general understanding of the coaching concept is the topic, I think, will help us as a company grow and me personally as a professional grow. And these are the skills that can be used not only at company X for example, but in my personal life, too. Are you into coaching?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I have to say, you talked about the tension between human resources and psychology and how we’re not psychologists, but you will move one step closer to having a framework, to having a methodology, to hopefully being a little bit more responsible than a lot of other HR professionals who are winging it. So I love that you’re doing that. So that’s a six-month course and at the end of that, do you have a certificate of completion?
Yulia Kudina:
It’s a certificate. Yeah, I will get some kind of certificate, but I am not really a believer of the help of certificates, so to say. So I am more into practical experience, frankly. You can get so many certifications, but at this point of my career, I understand that it will be more for my ego to get some international certification, and I’m totally fine with that. But I prefer some other things when I have free time.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m laughing because under any other circumstances this would be a normal and ordinary conversation with a human resources leader talking about ego and pursuing certification. And is it worth it, except that you’re doing this during wartime and being very brave. I’m just so appreciative that you took the time to talk to us today.
I want to make sure that you leave us with your version of the story or any other important messages that you want us to hear that we didn’t cover today. So is there anything else we need to know about what you’re doing, what you’re experiencing, what you’re feeling that would help us to help you or just help us to be more aware as human resources leaders?
Yulia Kudina:
I really like your idea about connecting to HR professionals who have similar experiences, maybe in the past or currently. So if there is anyone listening to this podcast who has ideas and wants to discuss them, I would be super-happy. Please reach out. And generally, my goal is to share that there is active life in the business community in Ukraine, and we are brave indeed, if you say so. And yeah, you don’t think about it every day. But generally, I think we are super-brave to stay here and fight for the economy of the country and for the country itself. I just want people not to forget about what’s happening in the middle of Europe these days. Supporting is — even spreading the word is a big support.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well Yulia, it was so amazing for you to come and make time today. We will include all of your contact information in our show notes, but I know you welcome people to connect with you on LinkedIn, correct?
Yulia Kudina:
Yes. Sure.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Good. Great. Well, thanks again for being a guest today, and please be safe.
Yulia Kudina:
Thank you, Laurie.