It's 1:30pm in Wise's Singapore headquarters, and all the nap rooms are full.

There are four nap rooms in the office: little sleep pods with actual beds and small shelves for holding personal belongings, located along a quiet corridor that also holds several downtime rooms where people can retreat to clear their heads.

The nap rooms are a consideration for people who work odd hours, says Wise's APAC people operations lead Elyza Telog - of which the company has a good many. Wise has a presence in just under 30 markets and offices in 11 locations around the world, and it's not unusual for people to start their day on New Zealand time or to fly in from London time and need a quick nap to reset their body clock.

Some teams work in shifts as well, and although the shifts are never very late - the advantage of being a global company with people in multiple time zones to pick up where the last office left off - it's helpful for them to be able to reset and relax before ending their day, Telog added.

The real appeal of flexibility

Being able to rest properly after odd hours, and doing it in the actual office, is a benefit that doesn't necessarily emerge in most workplaces. But when it is needed - as in the case of Wise's international employees - it showcases the best of a flexible work policy.

"It's very important for us to have people in the office together, because that's where the opportunity to collaborate arises, and we can solve customer problems faster and more easily when we're all in the same space," Telog said of Wise's approach. "But equally, we also understand that people have needs. They may be caregivers, or looking after a family, or sometimes some urgent things just come up. So we have always been that accommodating in terms of flexibility."

An unexpected upside to that, she added, was that when the Wise leadership put out a return to office mandate, there were no hitches. Employees simply went right back to working as flexibly as they had before the pandemic.

The role that the office space plays

It helps that Wise's new office space is deliberately designed to encourage and almost enforce an adaptive way of working. The new space, which opened just a few months ago, is spacious enough to give the 600-odd employees a modicum of privacy even in the open areas; it is designed in a circular layout to allow easier traffic between its various zones; and importantly, it is evenly spread between collaboration zones and quiet spaces for focus time.

There are also a lot of meeting rooms - 40 percent more than they had in the previous office space. 

"We work as a global organisation," Telog says. "We might be in Singapore, but we're also working closely very with our counterparts in other locations, maybe in London, maybe in Hong Kong. There are always a lot of meetings going on, and when we designed this new space, we added more meeting rooms to cater to that."

This is the third time Wise has upsized its Singapore office, and all the aspects of its design underscore a simple but often overlooked message: the space has to enable what people do. It caters for how they work - timings, cadences, in groups and alone - and the needs that arise from those different ways of working; it also caters to the needs that arise around work.

"When the team designed this office, we really focused on creating a space that's inclusive for everybody and is also easy to navigate," Telog explained. "We wanted to build collaboration, we wanted people to be able to bond together, and we wanted to enable them to work well."

Photos courtesy of Wise.