News Flash: Your office is full two days a week and paid for five

What the research found

NOS reported on 7 September 2026 that the Dutch working week has settled into a shape the industry now calls the camel. Figures from the Center for People and Buildings, cited by director Jacqueline Schlangen, put office attendance at 65 percent on Tuesday and 63 percent on Thursday, against 19 percent on Friday. Knowledge workers spend roughly half the week at home and around 38 percent of it in the office.

The consequences reach beyond the building. The ANWB calculates that the Tuesday and Thursday morning peaks together account for 58 percent of total congestion severity across all morning rush hours. NS reports that the Friday morning peak is about 45 percent quieter than Tuesday, while its trains run at an average of only 30 percent capacity.

The behavioural explanation is unglamorous. Liza Luesink of behavioural agency Duwtje compared it to switching banks: we prefer to keep things the way they are. Tuesday became the norm, and norms are self reinforcing. Employers are responding. The Dutch central government runs a project internally nicknamed the camel hunt, testing travel allowances for off peak days and team level agreements on office days. Van Lanschot Kempen took management meetings off the peak days after concluding they had what Philippe Glaubitz described as a pull effect, and now reports stable occupancy from Monday to Thursday. NS moved its own executive board meeting to Wednesday and expanded off peak ticket pricing.

What we see happening

The camel is usually presented as a mobility story, because that is where it is most visible. We think it is a coordination story that happens to congest the roads. Nobody chooses Tuesday because Tuesday is better. They choose it because everyone else did, and the value of coming in depends entirely on who else is there. That makes the peak self stabilising: as long as Tuesday is the day your colleagues are in, going in on Wednesday is a worse day at work, not a more considerate one.

Which is why the most instructive intervention in the whole NOS piece is the smallest one. Van Lanschot Kempen and NS both moved leadership meetings off the peak. That asks nobody to be virtuous. It moves the reason to be in the building, and attendance follows the reason. Allowances and pricing nudges work at the margin. Moving the thing people came for works on the whole curve. The financial argument is the one to take to your board. A building is sized for its peak and paid for by the week. At 65 percent on Tuesday and 19 percent on Friday, you are holding real estate for a condition that exists on two days and heating it for five. Flattening the curve by ten points on each side is functionally the same as acquiring space on the peak days and disposing of it on the quiet ones, without a lease negotiation.

There is a warning attached. The instinctive response to a lopsided week is a mandate fixing anchor days, and mandates tend to be written for the days people already prefer. Formalising Tuesday and Thursday does not spread demand. It cements the camel and removes the flexibility that made hybrid working tolerable. Note also that the goal is not five identical days. A perfectly flat week would mean nobody is ever in with their team, which removes the only reason the office beats the kitchen table. The goal is two moderate humps instead of two sharp ones, where the peak fits comfortably inside the building and the trough is small enough to justify keeping the floor open. Every measure in the NOS article is a behavioural experiment, and experiments need measurement. Not a badge count, and not a booking count, which records intention rather than presence.

What this means for how you run a workplace

See it. iotspot Insights shows attendance and actual occupancy per day, floor, zone and hour, measured by desk and room sensors rather than inferred from reservations. That turns "Tuesdays are busy" into a specific statement about which floors saturate, at which hour, and how much of Friday's footprint is genuinely empty. Anonymised and aggregated, so the conversation is about space and never about a person.

Shift it. iotspot Team and Co-working lets teams agree their own office days and see who is coming in, which addresses the coordination problem directly rather than issuing a rule about it. Desk, room and parking booking follow that plan, so someone choosing Wednesday can see the day works before committing to it. Given the ANWB figure, parking is worth singling out: it is often what people are really solving for when they pick a day.

Stop paying for the trough. iotspot Smart Climate drives heating, cooling and ventilation from measured occupancy rather than a fixed schedule, so a 19 percent Friday costs less than a 65 percent Tuesday instead of the same. Floors can be closed on quiet days, and cleaning and catering dispatched on real headcount. iotspot ESG Reporting carries the same record into your sustainability figures.

The honest caveat

These are national figures from three sources gathered in different ways: the Center for People and Buildings measures workplace use, the ANWB measures traffic, NS measures its own network. They describe the Dutch average, not your organisation. A regional office, a shift based operation or a firm with heavy client travel will sit elsewhere on the curve, and in a specific building the peak day is sometimes Wednesday. Use 65 and 19 as evidence that the problem is real and widely shared. The numbers that should drive a decision about your own floors are the ones measured on them