The office our people need

Remote work changed how we look at our office in a major way. Here's how we're planning to update our workspace.

Much like every other company, we have shut our doors for a little while in the past year. It was a necessity, and nothing could be done about it, but we weren’t happy.

We love our office.

We are a people company, and the happiness of the folks that work here is second to nothing. When we realised that it wasn’t going to be available for a while, and that when we got back things might be quite different, we immediately knew we had to make some changes to ensure that our second home was ready to suit whatever the team’s needs were.

And besides, our team is growing.

We asked and the team answered

We quizzed our team: what would you like to happen when we reopen? The answers were fascinating. We expected people to have different points of view, and that’s exactly what we got:

20% of the team wants to stay home in the coming months;

30% want to come in to the office every day;

50% want to be flexible.

What were we to do? We decided to please everyone.

We became remote friendly for good

The way the team responded to working from home during the pandemic was brilliant. The company never stopped, and we couldn’t have asked for more. We already were quite flexible with people working remotely, but now we realise that the office will mean something different when this is over.

It needs to be a space that is comfortable, desirable, and most of all safe for people to enjoy. We want everyone to enjoy the option of being with their colleagues, daily or sporadically.

We also want everyone to know that the company isn’t imposing on their homes. No one should have a permanent home office if they are not so inclined.

Hence, the office will no longer be the default, but it will always be available. We like to think everyone will still cherish coming in, a little or a lot.

We are creating dedicated spaces

Video calls will become a bigger part of what we do, both during reopening (some social distancing measures will still apply and we’ll be following them to a T) and, we believe, for the foreseeable future.

There will be dedicated spaces for this, both to communicate with clients and colleagues stationed elsewhere. These will be separated from the deep work stations, where we will be ensuring that people can focus without the background noise that a call inevitably entails.

And, it goes without saying, we will have spaces for collaboration within the physical space of the office. For meetings, for co-working, for actually being together.

Our office will become more dynamic. Instead of thinking in terms of static workstations, we want people to take advantage of the whole space, moving around at will according to whatever they need at any given time.

This will also allow for teams to gather with whoever they’re working with for any given project, instead of being separated by arbitrarily determined immutable workstations.

We’re opening our doors to our clients

We will also be inviting clients, and their own teams, to join us and work alongside us, taking advantage of this office organization. Since the spaces won’t be assigned to specific team members anymore, clients and their teams will be free to join the Untile people they are working with wherever they are stationed.

We take pride in the relationships we build with the people who trust us with their projects. This will make it even more organic and seamless to build such rapports.