Please note that this interview was conducted before Russia launched its war against Ukraine. Certain sections have been edited to reflect a post-invasion view and are noted as such.
Eugene Goland is the founder and president/CEO of global software engineering firm DataArt, working closely with the leadership team, contributing to the company’s strategic planning, development, and global management.
“The business environment is changing fast, so it’s no good to try to recreate success stories,” Goland tells us. “Business models need to be new, and core principles need to be focused on how you treat people.”
Things have changed for every business over the last 24 months, but it would have been hard to predict which industries might survive or even thrive during the society-altering COVID pandemic. Goland calls the last few years both challenging and exciting.
“None of us, including business leaders and analysts, expected that our industry could turn around so drastically,” Goland says. “We also didn’t expect that DataArt would be able to adapt to market conditions, and to grow at a remarkable pace of almost 60%.”
DataArt’s values – flexibility, expertise, and trust – just happened to be the very type that can still attract and retain talent even during a time like the so-called Great Resignation that has followed in the wake of the pandemic.
“Our culture has become our key competitive advantage in the labor markets at a time when the competition for talent has become super-heated,” Goland says. “It became critical for companies to be able to hire and retain, and our culture was very compatible with it.”
That is even more true in a post-invasion environment with talent exiting Russia at an unbelievable speed. Goland later added, “We have been against this war from the very beginning and we understood that given the recent atrocities, there is no way for DataArt to continue operations in Russia. That said, we have been working with our Russian colleagues to relocate them and their families to other locations. We are also ready to work with new talent that hails from Russia – as long as they are willing to relocate.”
It was over the last 18 months that DataArt became a truly global brand, a company built now on the ability to deliver from different locations. Goland says their strategy as they expanded to each new territory was to aim to be either first- or second-best in the market on a three-to-five-year horizon – a goal they have met. It is a strategy that has served them well in a post-invasion world, as they continue to build their global offering.
DataArt is now hiring heavily for remote work. Once they have debuted their presence in a new region, new employees tell their networks about the excellent experience of working for the company. This leads to what Goland calls “critical mass” in a specific location, meaning that point where the company opens a physical office in the area.
We asked this successful leader to offer any advice to other leaders during this unprecedented shakeup of just about everything in our world, and especially in the world of business. He offered a plethora of ideas.
“For one thing, one can’t overestimate the value of thinking globally when you’re depending on a remote workforce in some rapidly democratizing markets. It’s vital to know:
- how to access a global pool.
- how to make people from any location welcome at the company.
- how to scale the culture.
- how to make sure that processes that were originally designed to work from offices are applicable to working from home.”
“As I mentioned, our culture is very compatible with this notion of this new way of working from a business standpoint,” Goland continues. “We have always been decentralized. We have always had all decisions made remotely by teams which are not located in the same geography. Staffing for clients was always done from different locations.”
From a business flow standpoint, DataArt was ready for the changes the last few years have brought. With this vantage point, Goland sees The Great Resignation of recent times as something of an opportunity and a challenge.
Goland says there’s no secret sauce to DataArt’s culture, no special formula that other companies don’t know or can’t access. It comes down to always hiring the right people and then treating them well.
“Most services companies say that people are their primary asset, and everything is done around people. But in reality, most corporations are built around profitability and efficiency. It’s ultimately all about money,” he says. “For us, a people-first approach is much more than words. It’s our core principle, and it’s just more compatible with this new reality. This has come to life during this time of war. It has been humbling to watch our employees come together in support of our community in Ukraine and it has been truly remarkable to watch the day-to-day heroism of our employees across Europe.”
It’s all about professionalism, Goland tells us. Professionals want to work for the right team, they want to experience professional development in their career, and they want to feel that their company really cares about them.
“This is just how we operate,” he says. “This is just how we built the company. From the very beginning, those principles were something we wanted to experience. We wanted to put professionalism in the center of the system, from the very beginning.”
Goland says his advisors Initially resisted this way of building a company principles-first. By the time the company had reached 500 employees strong, those same advisors continued to insist that such an experiment should not continue to work.
“And today at over 6000 people, those same advisors now saying, ‘how is this working? How did you do this?’’ he says. “The answer is because we felt those were the right things to do, even though the outside world would tell us it’s not supposed to work, we still did them. And now it’s our competitive advantage.”
“Once this war began, we had to put those principles to the test. That meant providing for our employees in Ukraine and exiting Russia in a manner that is definitive, strategic and consistent with our values and commitments to employees and clients – despite outside pressures. Working through the human and business complexities this exit represents has been a challenge but our principle-first culture has been centric to every decision along the way.
