The journey
The journey nobody costs
The travel is paid by the employee in time and money, and appears in no account anywhere. What follows from a cost that is real and invisible at the same time.
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.
When a hybrid policy measures attendance but not outcomes, workforce visibility across locations can add project-time and workload evidence to a more useful conversation about what different locations enable.
For a separate perspective on technology, privacy, or flexible work, consult Future of Privacy Forum.
A meeting that wastes an hour of eight people's time is understood to have cost eight hours. Somebody will say so, possibly in the meeting.
A policy that adds a journey to thirty-four days of somebody's quarter costs seventy-three hours and appears in no account at all. It is not in a budget, not in a project plan, not in the calculation that decided on three days rather than two.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a straightforward consequence of who pays.
Where the cost actually lands
- Time. Seventy-three hours and forty minutes in the quarter, of which perhaps two-thirds was not usable for anything else.
- Money. The season ticket, the car, the parking, the coffee bought because you are out of the house at half past seven.
- Elasticity. The things that cannot be done on an office day — a delivery, a dentist, picking somebody up — which are not costs in hours and are costs.
- The edges of the day. The alarm, the bag, the last hour compressed to catch a train.
None of these are on anybody's ledger but the person's own. An employer can change the policy without any number in the organisation moving, which is a strange property for a decision of that size.
What invisibility does to the argument
It makes the two sides argue about different things without noticing.
One side is reasoning about collaboration, culture and the cost of an empty building — all real, all visible in accounts. The other is reasoning about seventy-three hours, a season ticket and a Tuesday that no longer works for the school run — all real, none of them visible to the first side.
So the discussion reaches a stalemate that looks like a difference in values and is closer to a difference in what each party can see. One side's costs are on a page and the other's are not on any page.
The fix is not a subsidy
It is tempting to think the answer is to price it — mileage, travel allowances, time in lieu. Those help with the money and do nothing about the time, which is the larger part, and they also make the arrangement feel transactional in a way most people dislike.
The practical fix is to make the journey buy something, which costs the organisation nothing. A named day, a booked room, a reason to be there. On this record the days with those three things attached returned between three and five times what the others did, for an identical journey.
What to say when it is not counted
The sentence that works is not about fairness. It is about return:
The travel is seventy-three hours a quarter either way. I would rather spend it on the four days that are worth it than on the eleven that are not.
That puts the cost on the table without asking anybody to pay it, and it points at the lever that is actually available.
What it would look like if it were costed
A thought experiment, not a proposal.
Nine people, three days a week, a median journey of an hour each way. That is fifty-four hours a week of travel across the team, or about one and a half full-time equivalents, spent entirely outside any system that records anything.
If a project proposed consuming one and a half FTE indefinitely, it would need a justification, a measure of what it produced, and a review. The arrangement that consumes it here has none of the three, not because anybody decided it should not, but because the consumption is invisible at the point where decisions get made.
The asymmetry in one line
| Visible to the organisation | Visible to the individual | |
|---|---|---|
| Empty floor space | Yes, as a number | Barely |
| Attendance | Yes, as a percentage | Barely |
| Travel time | No | Entirely |
| Travel cost | No | Entirely |
| Hours that needed the building | No | Partly, if counted |
| Lost flexibility | No | Entirely |
Two rows are instrumented. Four are not, and all four of those are paid by the same party.
That is not an argument that the first two do not matter. An empty building is a real cost and somebody is accountable for it. It is an argument for why the two sides of this discussion talk past each other so reliably: each is reasoning from the rows it can see, and neither set is wrong about its own rows.
What closes the gap
Not a subsidy, and not an appeal to fairness. The only thing that reliably moves this is a number from the invisible column arriving in the conversation where the visible ones are.
One person's measured quarter does that. It is small, it is unauthoritative, and it is the only form in which the fourth row has ever been in the room.