At Netstudio, we have three offices: in Agios Stefanos, Agios Dimitrios, and Chalkida.
We could have none, since our work can be done remotely. We know this because we've done it. When we all had to work from home during lockdown, the team's performance stayed strong. Still, today we choose to keep three offices.
Remote worked. But something was missing.
During the first lockdown, we all worked from home. The work got done, projects moved forward. What we lost was something you can't see in any task. Our people's ideas.
At Netstudio, a big part of our job is solving problems that don't have ready-made answers. Most of our solutions are custom. We build them ourselves, based on what each situation needs. Many solutions don't start with a meeting and an agenda. They start with a conversation. Someone mentions a problem, someone else listens and throws out an idea. These unplanned moments are hard to fit into an online meeting. When everyone worked from home, this part mostly stopped happening.
Some things we now take for granted started from these chats.
When we needed to do usability testing with Greek users and no tool had the panel we wanted, we built Userfeel.
When email marketing platforms couldn't cover our clients' needs, like easy newsletter design, Tigramail was born. The same goes for almost all our internal tools, from Netstudio Support to Netstudio ERP.
None of these started as a big plan. They started as a problem we talked through until we found a way to solve it. That's when we realized something:
We don't need the office because we can't work from home. We need it because there are things we want to happen when we work together.
If we want offices, why three?
Here's another problem. The office comes at a cost for anyone living far away. A daily commute across Attica isn't a small thing. We didn't want to lose people just because our only office was too far from their home. So instead of asking everyone to come to one spot, we did something else: we brought the offices closer to our people. The Agios Dimitrios office first opened for Michalis, Mastro, Penny, and Giorgos. Later, many more joined. The Chalkida office opened for Konstantina, the Giorgis (yes, we have several!), and Cynthia.
This wasn't some big strategic move like "next month we'll have three offices." It started much simpler. We wanted to keep working together, without distance being a reason for someone to leave the team.
There's a paradox, though. We tried to solve the distance problem and ended up, in a smaller way, with the same problem again. Our teams aren't all in the same place every day. So we've found two ways to handle it. Each team has a daily online meeting to see what needs to be done, where we're stuck, and how to move forward. Every week, colleagues from the other two offices come to headquarters for meetings and to work with the rest of the team. Put simply, online meetings keep us aligned on "what we're doing." The days we meet in person keep "what we're thinking" alive.
What haven't we solved?
The three offices didn't magically fix everything. Even now, it's hard to have daily interaction and bonding between everyone. The morning coffee chats are gone. Some small conversations that would happen if we all sat together just don't happen. And the connection between people who don't see each other every day can take longer to build. We know this, and we chose it knowing the cost. Because we've already paid the other cost. The cost of everyone working remotely and losing those small, unplanned moments where a chat can become an idea, and an idea can turn into something new.
For us, that cost was bigger. That's why we have three offices.
