52.3676° N, 4.9041° E

Index / 00
The brief

Workplace,
de-consulted.

I'm Daaf Serné. I ran global workplace at Miro and ServiceNow through some of the steepest growth curves in tech. PlaceWorks is what I do next — operator-grade advisory for leaders who'd rather skip the deck-ware.

See the work

201

Hyper-growth scale-ups led

Miro · ServiceNow

30+02

Countries, one playbook

EMEA · APAC · AMER

~3.5M03

Sqft of workplace shaped

From HQs to global hubs

INDEX / 01 WHY PLACEWORKS

Eight reasons.

No pitch.

R/01

You're scaling. The real estate can't keep up.

Done it twice — ServiceNow from a regional office to 78+ locations across three continents, Miro from 200 people and no office to a global portfolio. Both times it meant transforming not just the portfolio, but how the business thought about work. The playbook exists because I wrote it under pressure, not in a workshop.

R/02

The numbers have to survive the CFO.

$122M real estate budget. $28M EMEA OPEX. $6.5M saved across 150+ transactions. Workplace strategy that can't hold up in a budget review isn't strategy — it's decoration.

R/03

The office has to earn attendance.

Not "when are people coming back?" The right question is "what would make them want to?" Every space decision follows from that.

R/04

Data that moves decisions, not dashboards.

If a metric doesn't change what you do next quarter, it doesn't belong in the model. At Miro: 35% satisfaction uplift across all locations. 4.6/5 on "does this space support your work?"

R/05

Sustainability wired in from day one.

Net Zero from blank page to Board approval at ServiceNow. BREEAM Excellent and WELL Platinum delivered at Miro's Amsterdam HQ. ESG goals don't survive a procurement cycle unless they're in the brief from the start.

R/06

Co-design, not consultation.

19 teams. 7 divisions. 10 ERGs. 60%+ of Amsterdam employees in the room. People use what they helped build. That's not a principle — it's how the work gets done.

R/07

One operator. Accountable end-to-end.

No bench. No junior team doing the work while someone senior takes the call. You get the person who actually ran workplace at Miro and ServiceNow — not a version of them.

R/08

You need transformation, not a tune-up.

Optimising a broken model just makes it fail more efficiently. The harder brief — and the more interesting one — is rebuilding how an organisation thinks about its people, space, and work. I've led that shift from the inside, at multiple companies, before there was a standard playbook for it.

INDEX / 02 ENGAGEMENTS

The work.

What it usually looks like.

W/01

Workplace strategy from scratch.

Post-funding, post-merger, or post-"we've been fully remote and it's not working anymore." I build the brief, the operating model, and the principles before the lease gets signed — and I've done it at moments when the function itself didn't exist yet.

W/02

HQ design and relocation.

From site selection to fit-out delivery. Includes the co-design process that gets employees invested before day one — not informed after the fact.

W/03

Portfolio right-sizing.

Too much space. Wrong mix. Leases expiring at the wrong time. I map what you actually need against what you have, build the financial case, and run the transactions.

W/04

Work-style research.

Understanding how your people work before deciding what space they need. Study design, fieldwork, analysis, and the recommendations that survive contact with leadership.

W/05

Sustainability integration.

Carbon baseline, Net Zero roadmap, BREEAM and WELL delivery, SBTi and CDP submissions. Wired into the real estate strategy from day one — not retrofitted at the end.

W/06

Workplace function build.

You've promoted someone into a Head of Workplace role for the first time, or inherited a team without a structure. I set up the org design, the processes, and the external partnerships that make it scale.

W/07

Advisory and speaking.

Ongoing sounding board for workplace and real estate leaders, or a keynote that doesn't recycle last year's hybrid statistics.

W/08

End-to-end transformation programmes.

Not a series of disconnected projects — a connected shift in operating model, culture, space, and technology, aligned around how the business actually wants to work. The kind of engagement that changes how an organisation thinks, not just where it sits.

Index / 03
Track record

Receipts, not
retainer talk.

Client
Miro

When
2021 — 2026

Role
Global Head of Workplace

From a single Amsterdam HQ to a distributed global footprint — without losing the room.

Hyper-growth doesn't wait for a real-estate strategy to catch up. We rebuilt the operating model around hybrid-by-default: scalable hub design, asynchronous workflows, and a portfolio that flexed with headcount instead of fighting it. At the heart of it sat our 'Learning Lab' strategy — treating each office as a live experiment, measuring what actually drove better outcomes for both employees and the business, and rolling the wins back into the global playbook.

12+: Countries supported
~250k: Sqft reshaped
1: Unified playbook

Artifact / Field study

The Learning Lab strategy, made public — what we measured, what we learned, what changed.

Open full study ↗

Client
ServiceNow

When
2013 — 2022

Role
Sr. Director, Global Real Estate & Sustainability

Hyper-scaling a real-estate footprint across three regions — without the portfolio outrunning the business.

Joined as the EMEA facilities lead and grew with the company from a regional office into a global enterprise. Built the Corporate Real Estate function from scratch, ran 150+ transactions across AMER, EMEA and APAC, and stood up the sustainability practice that took ServiceNow from no baseline to a Board-approved Net Zero commitment and SBTi targets.

$122M: Global RE expense controlled
450+: Transactions in 9 years
Net Zero: From baseline to Board approval

Index / 04
Operating principles

Six rules.
No filler.

P/01

Human-centric by design.

The workplace exists for the people in it — not the other way around. Every decision starts with how humans actually work, gather, focus, and recover. Get that right and the rest follows.

P/02

Real estate is a product.

Square meters are an interface. We design them like one — with users, jobs-to-be-done, and a roadmap that ships.

P/03

Data earns its place.

Sensors and AI are tools, not décor. If a metric doesn't change a decision in the next quarter, it doesn't make the dashboard.

P/04

Hybrid is a verb.

It's an operating model, not a seating chart. Policy, technology, and space have to argue with each other until they agree.

P/05

Sustainability is an outcome.

ESG goals don't survive contact with a procurement cycle unless they're wired into design intent from day one. We wire them in.

P/06

Less, but louder.

Fewer offices, fewer slides, fewer pilots. More clarity on what the workplace is actually for, and the conviction to defend it.

Index / 05
Press & POV

In print,
on the record.

Index / 06
The founder

One operator.
No bench, no junior team.

Name

Daaf Serné

Designations

MCR · SLCR

Based

Amsterdam, NL

Working in

EN · NL

"I spent ~2 decades running workplace inside companies that were doubling every year. The advisory I needed back then didn't exist. So I built it."

Former Global Head of Workplace at Miro and ServiceNow. Master of Corporate Real Estate (MCR) and Senior Leader of Corporate Real Estate (SLCR).

PlaceWorks engagements stay deliberately small: one senior operator, in the room, accountable end-to-end. No deck factory, no shadow team. If the work needs more hands, I'll tell you — and tell you who.

LinkedIn ↗

Workplace,
de-consulted.

Eight reasons.