No more officespace!

When we first started our sister company 360 ICT, we’ve always done things remotely. In the first 9 years, we didn’t even have an office. But we saw some downsides to that as we lost contact with each other. We did call/email, but these were all to the point conversations, and we missed the “coffee machine talks”. These were the talks about trivial things, family, concerns about politics but also work related. Especially the minor work things that weren’t big enough to actually mention in a meeting were missed.

So we rented an office, first on Papendorp, Utrecht, it’s actually the picture you see in front of you. We met up once a week and called it an “office day”. This was quite an operation as we had people coming over from all over the (Dutch) country. We had this office for quite a while and saw the office day pretty busy as HRM/administration used this opportunity to also handle their things. So it was quite hectic, but in one day a week we had the general stuff handled. Later we moved to a smaller/cheaper/less fancy office since the office was mostly unused for 3 days a week.

Then Covid happened, and we didn’t go to the office at all, as the government advised to work remotely if possible. We kept the office day, but virtual. So we started an Office day conference call at 08:30 and kept the meeting open while we did our work. This worked pretty nice, actually. It also helped us with the issue that there was less overlap on working times. On the physical office day we had some people starting at 07:00 but also at 9:30, but this has completely gone on our virtual office day. We did however shorten it to twice a half day. So after the office in Bunnik hadn’t been used in 1,5 years, we decided to completely stop with this office. Therefore, our contact details haven’t shown an actual office address anymore for a long time.

We still had the need to physically meet, so we tried the flexible office space for a while. It was kind of fun as we switched to a city close to every employee, so everyone got to experience a close office experience. But these flexible costs were higher than our cheap office. So we switched back to the cheap office in Bunnik. It’s close to the Public transport and overall in the center of the Netherlands. We meet at least once a week, full-time if we have big projects or trainees or monthly for the part-timers (24 hours or less). It’s based on keeping the costs low, so we don’t dear to invite (new) customers, but if you already know us it’s fine to meet. It’s actually the picture next to this text.

We are growing, though, so we might change back to a respectable office again.