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If it feels as though the whole of the Netherlands goes to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that is because it more or less does. Those two days are by far the most popular for office working, leaving workplaces, roads and railways crammed on Tuesday and Thursday and noticeably quiet the rest of the week. It is a pattern that experts have given a memorable name, and that employers are now actively trying to break.
The ‘camel problem’
According to the Center for People and Buildings (CFPB), a knowledge centre on workplaces, 65 percent of office employees come in on Tuesdays and 63 percent on Thursdays. On Fridays, that drops to just 19 percent. Plotted on a graph, the week’s attendance forms two distinct peaks, which is why experts have nicknamed it the “camel problem”, after the two humps of a camel.
The pattern is not new. “The Tuesday-Thursday peak existed before covid, but became clearly stronger afterwards,” said Jacqueline Schlangen, director of the CFPB. Part-time work, 36-hour weeks and fixed days off have long created differences between weekdays, she explained, and since the pandemic, hybrid working has been added on top. Knowledge workers now spend on average about half their working time at home and around 38 percent of it in the office.
Why it’s a problem
This system also has its downsides. On the quieter days, such as Monday and especially Friday, offices sit half-empty, yet still have to be heated, lit and powered, which is both expensive and not exactly sustainable. On the busy days, everything strains at once.
In particular, with traffic and on the trains. The ANWB motoring organisation notes that congestion is markedly worse on Tuesdays and Thursdays: together, the Tuesday and Thursday morning rush hours accounted for 58 percent of all morning tailback severity in the first half of 2026. The railways tell the same story. “The Friday morning rush is about 45 percent quieter than the one on Tuesday or Thursday,” said a spokesperson for the rail company NS. “You see packed trains in the ‘hyper-peak’ on Tuesday and Thursday, but across the day a train is on average only 30 percent full.”
The NS comparison is a familiar one. “It’s just like the electricity grid: you tune your whole infrastructure to a peak of two hours a day,” the spokesperson said, echoing the argument behind the company’s recent discounts for travelling just outside the rush hour. “Spreading it out is the solution.”
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The ‘camel hunt’
That is where employers, and the government, come in. The national government has been experimenting with what it calls a “camel hunt” (kamelenjacht), aimed at lowering the two humps. Simply tempting staff is not enough, according to Reint Jan Renes, a behavioural scientist at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences involved in the project. He suggests a mix of incentives, such as reimbursing public transport on off-peak days, and social pressure, by making agreements within teams. “If I make the effort to come in and work on Wednesday, I expect someone else to make an effort too,” he said.
The difficulty is that this means changing deeply ingrained habits. “It’s like switching banks: we prefer to keep things as they are,” said Liza Luesink of the behavioural agency Duwtje. “And it’s the norm to come to the office on Tuesday. We really are herd animals, and we like to belong.”
What actually works
One company that has tried is the asset manager Van Lanschot Kempen, which began spreading out office attendance earlier this year, partly out of necessity: its Amsterdam office is too small for the 1,100 staff based there. It talked to teams that tended to come in on the busy days and asked them to spread out, and, crucially, moved management meetings off the popular days. Those meetings, it turned out, had a magnetic effect. “You saw that other employees then also came to the office more quickly” when the directors were in, said Philippe Glaubitz, an executive at the firm.
It has worked, up to a point. Attendance from Monday to Thursday is now stable, and meeting rooms that used to be empty on Wednesdays are fully booked. Fridays are improving but still lag the other days. “You don’t achieve a culture change from one day to the next,” Glaubitz said.
For the many Dutch workers who have settled into a comfortable Tuesday-and-Thursday rhythm, the “camel hunt” may prove a hard habit to shift. But with congestion, costs and half-empty offices all pointing the same way, employers have good reason to keep trying to flatten the humps.