This week our team is staying in a vacation park in the south of the Netherlands. All have their own cabin, except me. Family logistics mean I am spending most time at home, and commute to the holiday park.

This afternoon we discussed our office. What to do with it, how to make it more useful to us.

We opened an office exactly 2 years ago, and more than half of that time we didn’t use it much because of the pandemic. We opened the office because some of us need a place away from home to work. I am used to working either at home, en route, or at a client’s, and have been doing so for 17 years. Having an office, especially a centrally located one as we have in Utrecht, within a building with other facilities available to us (meeting rooms, restaurant/catering services, event spaces, roof terrace), to me is however very useful as a meeting place, and to be able to host groups. During the pandemic some of our team used it to escape the four walls of their limited living spaces in the inner city of Utrecht or Amsterdam. I handed my office keys to a new hire early on in the pandemic.

The central question today was, moving forward, given our pandemic experiences, and the likelihood of at least some measures being in place on and off, how do we want to use our office? And given that use, how do we want it to look / feel?

We split in three groups of three. That in itself was already an important first realisation for me: we can actually split in three groups of three. And the office should work well for all 9 of us, as well as for a handful of frequent collaborators.
In our little groups we discussed our ideal office, and shaped it with the material at hand. One group got to paint the office, another group to build with Lego (serious play is the applicable term I think), and the group I was in used clay.

Patterns in the results were that, while it is still needed to have a few desks, most of them can be removed, that we want to make the office much greener with plants and more colourful in general, that shaping it as a social place is important, as well as a place where things can be created. A few immediate actions (such as removing two thirds of the desks, doing some painting, and adding plants) were decided upon for the summer. Another conclusion was that we simply cannot already know how office use post-pandemic will really be, meaning having plenty flexibility is key. Think furniture, devices, or dividers that can be very easily rearranged at will by those present. Think not investing in a ‘perfect’ design, but doing it as we go along.