Out of Office

We had our annual Away Day last week.  It’s a day for staying out of your office and meeting with the whole Embassy team to chat about how to improve what we do (and how we do it) in the following year.  And then to have some fun relaxing together.

This year we had  really good morning sessions on how to build on the impact we have here in Hungary and in London, and on imagining the ideal workplace of the future.  There were so many ideas about how we can make the Embassy an even better, more fun place to be.  Some do-able, some (like having an Embassy dog) a bit more aspirational.  We selected our favourite twelve and I promised everyone we’ll work to realize as many of those twelve as much as we can.  Though I’m not sure how I’m going to arrange getting the Embassy building moved to the seaside!

In the afternoon we broke into smaller teams and did a “treasure hunt” around the city centre.  It was themed around our Emergency Plans (the plans we have in case of a local crisis in which British people are involved).  So while we had fun following clues and working out routes round town we also practised some of those crisis – related skills.  And there was a crisis-related quiz.  One of the questions was how many Brits live in Hungary today?  [Answer at the end!]

The big bonus was that it was such a beautiful day – the best of the year so far – so it was a real pleasure to wander round from checkpoint to checkpoint, especially when we had to do a task next to the river.  It’s good to mix things up at work once in a while!

PS. The answer is that we estimate approximately 5,200  Brits live in Hungary today.