Can You Prepare Enough For The War?

In April of 2022 in Kyiv, when the first cafes were reopening, I offered several colleagues to meet for a coffee and a friendly chat. During this first-after-February in-person meeting, I realised that our values had undergone a major shift: everyone we met in the near empty Kyiv streets, including waiters in the rarely open cafes, were sincerely happy just to see each other alive.

BlaBlaCar has a team of around 100 people in Ukraine. Needless to say that dealing with a war was something none of us had been prepared to do. To adjust to the new brutal and uncertain reality and support our team, we had to undergo a number of changes. The past 6 months have been a stress test for our personal and company values, with significant learnings along the way.

Let’s look at our team’s experience preparing for the war, what we went through during the first months and what we learnt.

How We Prepared

We proactively kicked off a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for the Ukrainian office back in Q4 2021, specifically addressing the increased risk of military escalation. The BCP is an important tool to ensure a company can survive potentially disruptive events. It enabled us to brainstorm scenarios of actions, allocate specific budgets and to communicate properly. Our plan had three scenarios:

1. “Unstable but peaceful” — already going on from around late 2021.
2. “Localised military intervention” — a possibility: the Donbas region has been suffering from the Russian invasion starting 2014, thus there was a publicly accepted belief that the intervention in 2022 could be localised there.
3. “Major military escalation with the entire country being invaded” — a possibility: the scenario that actually came into place on the 24th of February.

Looking back at the plan, here are the main decisions that have proven to be right to the point.

Scenarios. One out of two suggested scenarios turned out to be accurate, however not all the proposed actions were. For the second and third scenarios we planned to organise buses to take our people West, picking them up in different locations in Kyiv. The panic in Kyiv didn’t make this even a possible option. There were no available drivers. Those we managed to find, refused to pick people up anywhere other than the Western part of Kyiv, and for many people it was impossible to get to those bus stops. It’s worth saying that regardless of this panic and the lack of available transportation, everyone was trying to help others, suggesting all possible and impossible solutions to get people to a safer place.

Budget. BlaBlaCar had prepared and approved a budget for scenarios 2 and 3. It covered transportation and accommodation for all family members for about a month, which should have been enough to settle and decide on next steps.

Internal Communication. The team communication plan we built around the BCP was balancing the sense of urgency without leading to extra panic. Periodic team meetings with always-on cameras and Q&A sessions were important to keep up the morale and control the information flow.

We relied on our historical experience of the events that occurred in 2014 and 2015 to make many decisions, and back then we didn’t have global mobilisation. The latter made cross-border relocation impossible for men and we had to adjust our actions and actually relocate to Western Ukraine.

Picture 1 — Main focus points for the scenario we anticipated vs reality

First Days Of War

On the first days of war we created an Emergency Support Team composed of Polish and French colleagues, and also from Ukrainian team members, who were stationed in safe places. This team worked almost 24/7 and served these purposes:

• Tracking each team member’s status and identifying immediate needs — every single Ukrainian team member had a point of contact in the team outside of Ukraine that would check on them every day
• Helping with matching available seats in their’ vehicles with colleagues who needed to travel to a safer place
• Helping with booking an accommodation for those on the road and waiting near the border
• The Human Resources team also offered everyone relocation packages and provided salary advances so that Ukrainian team members had financial and logistical support through the chaos.

BlaBlaCar’s strong culture of fraternity and agility helped embrace these challenges and we saw impressive commitment and results from the teams involved.

R&D Team’s Capacity And Business Continuity

We had spent the last 2 years building an RnD hub in Kyiv, so the majority of the Ukrainian team is in RnD. Our BCP assumed our engineers could be unavailable for 2 to 4 weeks. We had preliminary updated our run books and transferred some knowledge required to support our products to our French colleagues in advance. We had worked through scenarios of no electricity, mobile or internet connection, etc.

In reality, the majority of our team members were able to reconnect after just 2–3 days of disruption, with the exception of those individuals living close to the border who were blocked from the first hours of the war. We didn’t have a preliminary plan on how our roadmap would change due to high uncertainty: as a result, we reworked our Bus Marketplace product portfolio which now excludes any relations with Russia, and thus the roadmap has changed by about one third.

Special Initiatives

Immediate Actions. We were doing everything in our power so that BlaBlaCar could help people to travel somewhere safe:

• Enabled free rides in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Hungary and fought unfair pricing for those who still charged money.
• Removed the maximum limits to the number of seats in cars, for volunteers to transport as many people as they could.
• Encouraged drivers who wanted to help to add the mention “volunteer” in their profile so that they could be found more easily by passengers in need.
• Posted a search engine on the homepage for those who wanted to get out to see all the trips that were departing from near their hometown, regardless of the arrival city.
• Ran a campaign to inform thousands of volunteers on how they could help Ukrainian refugees reach the border, or travel to their final destination once arrived in Poland.

Hackathon. BlaBlaCar, being a major transportation platform in Ukraine, responded to external changes in demand by introducing some product changes. We ran an urgent company-all hackathon, in which 15 different teams participated. As a result, we ended up with five projects. Although each of them deserves a separate detailed story, I would highlight two crucial constituents:

• Reliable Driver. This feature helped users in fighting scams by highlighting drivers with good behaviours (high accept rate, quick to answer their booking requests and few cancellations). This was super critical for refugees, most of whom were women with children. More than 250K seats were found using it.
• Fuel for drivers. Given that the average carpool distance had increased more than twice during the time of a critical shortage of fuel, we agreed with the leading fuel chains to increase the fuel limit by 2 for 16K BlaBlaCar drivers during the first two months.
• We also organised a special support. The company hired a psychologist for mini group sessions to support those in need and started an internal fundraising. Several internal communication channels were created, where our colleagues from around the world donated thousands of EUR to verified volunteers in Ukraine. Many of our colleagues hosted Ukrainian refugees in the EU.

Staying Strong And Moving On

My family was deeply affected by this war, and it was, to say the least, a challenge to stay strong as a leader and help my colleagues and friends. What helped us stay strong?

On a personal note, Ukrainians’ faith in winning the war to end this tragedy, and our collective ability to keep a cold head and to support each other through these incredibly harsh times. As a leader at BlaBlaCar, I was motivated by the tangible help our service provided on the ground. During the first month of the war, BlaBlaCar members helped more than 150,000 Ukrainians find a way to get to a safer place. Even though our energy was drained by the suffering all around, as individuals we also participated in volunteering activities. We donated food, supplies and money. We made sure we were present for each other. All of that allowed us to stay positive, and to be here now, meeting in person or online, sincerely smiling at each other as we grow stronger together.