Like everyone else, we sent 512 people home in March with about four days' notice. Like everyone else, we discovered that a lot of what we thought required an office did not.
We are not going remote-first. Optics benches, clean rooms and calibration ranges do not work from a spare bedroom, and roughly a fifth of Terravek's people work with physical things. But we are formalising a hybrid policy: two office days a week as the default, set by team rather than by company.
The thing that surprised us most was meeting rooms. Occupancy data from before March showed our Delft rooms running at 78% during core hours, and everyone believed we needed more of them. What we actually needed was fewer, better-equipped rooms and a norm that a meeting with three remote participants is a remote meeting held from desks, not a room with a speakerphone in it.
The thing that worried us most was new joiners, and it was justified. People who joined between March and June reported feeling connected to their immediate team and to nothing else. We have redesigned onboarding around that.
The policy is published on the intranet and, for candidates, summarised on the careers page. We would rather you know before you apply.