Back to Work

We're officially back in the office!

We're excited to be back in the office 💻 and love the new space 😊

We look pretty happy, don't we? 😁

Almost exactly two years ago, we all prepared our Work from Home setups because of the pandemic. It was a surreal experience — the transition from dressing up and commuting to work each day to getting up from bed and directly sitting in front of laptops while still in our pyjamas (yes, some of us did that.)

Yay! We are Back! 🤩

After two whole years of working from home, we finally got back to work on Monday at our brand new workplace. It felt different — dressing up, commuting in traffic and entering the new office — none of us had that feeling for quite some time. It was exciting to catch up with the team — so many of whom had joined us during the pandemic — and this was the first time we were meeting them.

We went from “Can you hear me, can you see my screen?” in our regular calls to “Let’s sit together and collaborate on this task” in just a matter of hours.

The First Day of Work — was all about keeping the balance between work and fun!

The first half of the day started with everyone catching up with their mates, team bonding games, excellent music from a band hired to jazz up the mood, and munching on some cake, cookies, and lunch. Games got out the competitive spirit in everyone — something we hadn't seen in a long, long time. We had some foot-tapping music which got all the employees to show off their dance moves. The atmosphere was electric with the music and energy from everyone.

We did work too. After the first half of fun, the afternoon was calm and quiet, with the occasional clicking of typing keyboards, teams booking meeting rooms for discussions, and the soft buzz of collaborative work.

We're (almost) ready to work from the office!

Getting back to working at an office will take some time to get used to, but the overall opinion from everyone? "We're glad to be back. All we need to do now is pull up a chair next to our teammate for any work discussion rather than asking them for an open slot in their calendars". The entire team isn't back together yet, but we expect most of them to start coming to work soon.

Other reasons we're ready to shift to WFO? We have an office space that has—

1. A filled up pantry and cafeteria with whatever we want to munch during the day,
2. Meeting rooms that still need to be named (The Dark Side, The Enterprise, The Den, King's Landing, Winterfell are some names proposed),
3. Endless space to walk around (to increase the step count for those of us who put on the pandemic pounds 💪),
4. Walls that are begging for murals, photos and posters on them,
5. Endless whiteboards for those ideation and brainstorming sessions ✍️,
6. Work tables that need decorating (or personalizing with a Rajinikanth figurine 😎),
7. Bean bags are sprinkled around from when we want to move out of our chairs and keep things casual,

8. A gorgeous view of the city from our desks (assured Instagram worthy),

9. Oversized windows with loads of natural light into the space🪟 (sitting by the window and working? oh yes!),

10. There is an open environment for easy collaboration (no more "Are you available for a call at 3 PM" time to slide the chair next to the team and get into discussion mode).

That's a good list of incentives to get us all motivated to get back to work, right? We're still working out the days and timings to come into the office, but we're super excited we now have a space to go and get our work done 😊

Yep, we were not lying about the view 🤩

DevPixel's Lead UX Designer, Swathi Kirthyvasan, has written this article. You can find her here.