The journey
Distance is not evenly distributed
The same three-day rule costs one person twenty minutes a day and another five hours a week. Who ends up at each end, and why it is rarely a coincidence.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Tuesday, the first week
1 of 7One hour that had been going round in writing for a fortnight
Tuesday, the fifth week
0 of 7Wednesday, the fifth week
2 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · three of them were only possible there · one of the three days contained no such hour at all · three were made worse by being there
Three days, two of which repaid the journey and one of which did not.
For teams moving between home and office, hybrid workforce analytics tools offers a practical way to compare time, attendance, and work patterns without treating presence as the result itself.
The broader workplace question can also be compared with resources from CISA.
A rule stated in days is stated as though everybody's day is the same length. In travel terms it is not, and the differences are large: on a team of nine, the door-to-door journeys ranged from eighteen minutes to one hour and twenty-five.
Under an identical three-day requirement, that is a spread of roughly one hour and fifty minutes a week at one end and eight hours and thirty at the other. One of those is a nuisance. The other is a working day.
Who tends to be at the far end
The distribution is not random, and the pattern is familiar enough that it is worth saying plainly.
- People who joined during or after a remote period, who chose where to live under different assumptions and did so with the employer's agreement at the time.
- People with more space and less money per square metre, which in most cities means further out and means families.
- People with caring responsibilities, who are disproportionately in the group above, and for whom the journey is also the least compressible part of the day.
- People whose household has one job that cannot move. The location was decided by somebody else's work, and it is not revisable.
None of that makes a policy unfair by itself. It does mean that a rule which looks uniform on paper lands with very different weight, and that the weight correlates with circumstances people did not choose arbitrarily.
Why the far end does not say so
Three reasons, and they compound.
Saying it sounds like asking for an exception, and an exception has to be justified against colleagues who are not asking for one.
It is also a statement about a choice that was theirs — where to live — and the implicit answer, that this was known when the job was taken, is available to everybody including the person making the complaint.
And the comparison is invisible. Nobody announces their journey time. Most teams have no idea of the spread, and the person at the far end usually assumes they are nearer the middle than they are.
What to do with the fact
Not equalise it — that cannot be done, and attempting it produces worse rules rather than better ones.
What it argues for is the same thing the rest of this site argues for, with more force: that the valuable day be identified rather than the number of days be raised. A named day with a purpose is worth the long journey; an unnamed day is not worth the short one. The further away somebody lives, the larger the difference between those two, and the more a count of days costs them for nothing.
The practical form is a single question for whoever sets the rule:
What is the longest journey on this team, and does the rule look reasonable from there?
Most of the time nobody has asked, and the answer is further than expected.
The spread on one team
| Person | Door to door, each way | Hours a week at three days |
|---|---|---|
| A | 18m | 1h 48m |
| B | 25m | 2h 30m |
| C | 35m | 3h 30m |
| D | 40m | 4h 00m |
| E | 55m | 5h 30m |
| F | 1h 05m | 6h 30m |
| G | 1h 10m | 7h 00m |
| H | 1h 20m | 8h 00m |
| J | 1h 25m | 8h 30m |
Same policy, same compliance, and the bottom of the table spends nearly five times what the top does. Nobody on the team knew these figures, including the people in them, who had no basis for comparison.
What the table does when it is produced
It moves the conversation, usually in one step, because it converts something that sounds like a personal grievance into a visible distribution.
Before it exists, the person at the bottom saying the policy is expensive is making a claim about themselves. After it exists, they are pointing at a row. The claim has not changed and its reception has, which is an uncomfortable fact about how these conversations work and a useful one.
It also tends to surprise the top of the table, who have usually assumed the spread was narrower, and who are frequently the people setting the rule.
What not to conclude from it
That the rule should be varied by distance. That sounds equitable and works badly: it creates a tier system, it requires somebody to adjudicate, and it attaches a person's working arrangement to their housing situation in a way that is both intrusive and difficult to revisit.
The conclusion the table supports is narrower. A long journey raises the stakes on which day, not on how many — because the cost of an empty day scales with the journey and the value of a good one does not. The person at the bottom of the table has the most to gain from a named day, and the least to gain from an extra exception.