Home working in Ukraine

Ukraine’s embrace of home working is not a passing expedient. It reflects three converging forces: the long maturity of the country’s information technology sector; the brutal necessity of dispersal and continuity under missile attack; and a worldwide shift towards hybrid labour markets that no longer treat the office as a daily obligation. Together these forces have normalised so-called "distributed work" in Ukraine faster than in many European economies, while linking Ukrainian white-collar labour more tightly to global value chains than ever before.

Ukraine’s IT industry—centred historically in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa—was already outward-facing before 2022, with export-oriented firms habituated to serving clients in North America and the European Union. Industry associations recorded record earnings through 2022 despite the invasion, and although revenue dipped in 2023 from those highs IT remained the country’s leading service export—evidence of both demand and operational resilience under fire. The state’s introduction of the Diia legal regime for registration of citizens' essential documents, just before the full-scale invasion, with lighter-touch taxation and flexible contracting models for technology firms, further lowered the frictions of running distributed teams registered in Ukraine but working for global clients. 

Wartime logistics accelerated the rest. Power cuts, air-raid interruptions and mass displacement might have crippled desk work; instead mobile networks, redundant power and satellite communications stitched together a service economy whose principal input is human capital. Starlink’s widespread availability by early 2023 meant teams could reroute connectivity almost as quickly as they moved apartments, keeping code repositories, design pipelines and customer support desks alive. In short, Ukraine’s pre-war IT export machine already knew how to work across time zones and screens; the war simply made that operating model universal.

Do people prefer it?

The global evidence is no longer anecdotal. Randomised evaluations of hybrid schedules—typically two days at home, three in the office—find no reduction in measured performance and, in some cases, improvements in retention and managerial attitudes towards remote work after they see it in practice. Beyond controlled experiments, labour market analyses suggest that the pandemic-era rise in remote days has persisted at a structurally higher level, with a substantial share of paid days now worked from home in advanced economies. 

Happiness is harder to quantify than output, but several mechanisms are straightforward. Commuting time is deadweight loss; its removal is an unambiguous gain for many workers, particularly in cities with long or unsafe commutes. Child-care and elder-care can be coordinated with fewer frictions. Autonomy rises: people schedule focused tasks in the hours when they truly concentrate best. For Ukrainian workers living under air raid sirens, the ability to relocate temporarily—to a safer district, or even abroad—without severing ties to the domestic economy confers not only psychological relief but genuine household resilience.

None of this means everybody thrives at home. Younger staff can miss tacit learning; loneliness can bite; and cramped flats are not purpose-built for creative collaboration. The mature conclusion from the data is not that home working is universally superior, but that giving people some choice—structured hybrid—raises satisfaction without degrading performance. 

Is it more efficient?

Efficiency operates at multiple levels. At the individual level, deep-work tasks often benefit from the privacy of home; at the team level, complex problem-solving can benefit from co-presence. Hybrid models reconcile these truths: use the office as a coordination and apprenticeship hub, and use home days for concentrated production. Industry-wide studies of the pandemic period find mixed but broadly neutral effects on measured productivity, which is unsurprising given sectoral differences and the abruptness of the 2020 shift. For Ukraine’s IT, where the marginal cost of an extra Zoom call is negligible but the fixed costs of safe premises and backup power are high, the efficiency calculus tends to favour distributed operations, established security practices, code review and client interfacing are well-managed.

The macro-efficiency angle matters too. Every home-worked day reduces peak-load stress on urban transport, spreads retail demand across neighbourhoods instead of concentrating it in central business districts, and frees firms to shrink or reconfigure their footprints. Those savings recycle into wages, training or war-time contingencies. None of this eliminates the value of physical offices for onboarding, mentoring and culture; it simply narrows their optimal use.

What becomes of offices?

Where home and hybrid work persist, the future of offices is not extinction but redesign and, for some buildings, repurposing. Prime, energy-efficient space that offers excellent transport links and amenities can remain in demand as collaboration clubs rather than daily desks; older, inefficient stock will struggle. That pattern is already visible in the United States, where the conversion of obsolete offices to housing and other uses has accelerated, with tens of millions of square feet in conversion pipelines and high-profile residential transformations in major cities. Even as some markets report leasing rebounds at the very top end, the bifurcation between trophy towers and commodity offices is stark. 

For Ukraine’s cities, three paths suggest themselves.

1. Renewal of the best stock. In Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro, modern buildings with resilient power, shelters, and collaborative layouts can anchor hybrid schedules—fewer desks, more project rooms and training suites. Landlords who invest in safety, ventilation and digital infrastructure will keep tenants.

   
   

2. Conversion of the rest. Pre-2000 blocks with narrow cores and shallow floorplates can be re-imagined as apartments, student housing, medical clinics, or government service hubs. Post-war rebuilding funds and municipal planning can align to make these conversions easier—updating codes, simplifying change-of-use permissions, and incentivising energy retrofits. The international experience shows this is administratively heavy but feasible with the right policy mix.

   
   

3. Creation of civic third spaces. Libraries-as-labs, neighbourhood learning centres, startup incubators and public–private innovation hubs can occupy floors that are neither premium offices nor viable flats. For a country prioritising human capital during war and after, such spaces compound social returns: they are mentorship venues for young engineers, landing pads for veterans retraining into IT, and community anchors during air-raid disruptions.

A Ukrainian compromise, a global convergence

Home working in Ukraine did not begin as a lifestyle choice; it was a survival strategy leveraged by an unusually outward-oriented IT sector. Yet the country’s experience now mirrors a broader global convergence: a durable rise in hybrid work, backed by evidence that well-designed flexibility sustains performance and increases retention, and a structural rethink of what offices are for. 

Policy can either lubricate or block this transition. On the labour side, that means enforcing decent remote work standards—equipment allowances, right-to-disconnect norms, secure data practices—so that home working remains decent work rather than invisible overwork. On the urban side, it means streamlining conversion pathways, targeting subsidies at energy retrofits, and curating ground-floor uses so that converted buildings feed lively streets rather than dark towers.

On the education side, it means using offices intentionally—apprenticeship, culture, complex collaboration—and using home days for mastery. If Ukraine follows that triad, she will turn a wartime necessity into a post-war comparative advantage: a workforce fluent in hybrid practice, cities that are leaner and more liveable, and an IT sector still wired into the world.