The hours
The hour that could only have happened there
Thirty-one hours in a quarter, and they have a recognisable shape: short, unscheduled, and almost never the reason the trip was made.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Wednesday, the second week
3 of 7Planning day, the densest of the quarter
Thursday, the third week
0 of 7Seven hours of solo work at a hot desk
Wednesday, the fourth week
3 of 7The new starter's first day in the building
three days · 21 hours logged · six of them were only possible there · one of the three days contained no such hour at all · two were made worse by being there
Three of the twelve days drawn in full on this site.
When a hybrid policy measures attendance but not outcomes, employee workload monitoring tools 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 Cloud Security Alliance.
The first kind of hour is the one the building is for. It is worth describing precisely, because the vague version — "collaboration", "energy", "the buzz" — is what makes the whole subject impossible to discuss.
On the record counted here there were thirty-one such hours in a quarter. Not thirty-one meetings. Thirty-one hours in which something happened that could not have happened over a call or in writing.
What they had in common
Three things, and the third is the one that matters for policy.
- They were short. The median was a single hour. The longest continuous run was three, on the planning day. Nothing in this category lasted a whole morning, and most of it lasted less than the journey in.
- They were about disagreement or about a thing. Either two people who could not converge in writing stood at a board until they did, or there was a physical object — a machine, a printed layout, a screen with four people around it — which the work genuinely attached to. Nothing else in the record qualified.
- Most of them were not scheduled. Nineteen of the thirty-one hours had nothing in the calendar. They happened because two people were in the same place at a moment when one of them had a question that was not worth a meeting and was worth a sentence.
That last fact is the awkward one. It is the standard argument for the office, and it is correct, and it is also the hardest thing to guarantee by requiring attendance — because the unscheduled hour needs the other person to be there too, and a policy that names a count rather than a day does not make that happen.
What they were not
They were not the big set-piece meetings. Those ran on, had an agenda, and would have run the same way on a call; several of them did run on a call in other weeks, with no observable difference.
They were not the social hours either. Lunch with three colleagues was pleasant and is not in this count, because the question is not whether something was good. It is whether it required the building. A good lunch is a real argument for coming in; it is just a different argument from the one usually made, and it should be made in its own words.
The ratio that follows
Thirty-one hours across thirteen weeks is about two and a half hours a week. The policy required three days a week — twenty-one hours of presence — to produce them.
Put as a rate, roughly one working hour in eight in the building was of the kind the building exists for. Whether that is a good trade is a genuine question with no obvious answer, and it depends on things the count cannot settle: how much the unscheduled hours were worth, what else the journey cost, what the alternative would have produced.
What the count does settle is that the trade is not the one the argument usually assumes. The usual framing is that the office is where work happens and home is where some of it leaks away. On this record the office was where one hour in eight of a particular kind happened, and it was also where nineteen per cent of the hours were worse than they would have been elsewhere.
The useful consequence
If the valuable hour is short, unscheduled, and dependent on somebody else being there, then everything that matters is overlap, not attendance. Two people in the building on different days produce none of it. Two people in the building on the same day produce it by accident, repeatedly, without either of them planning to.
That is the entire practical content of this site, and the rest of it is working out what follows.
The thirty-one hours, broken out
| What it was | Hours | Scheduled? |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterly planning at a wall | 3 | Yes, a month ahead |
| The new starter's first day | 3 | No |
| Arguments that writing had not settled | 7 | Two of five were |
| Unscheduled questions answered at a desk | 9 | No |
| Lunches and corridors with colleagues | 5 | No |
| A release that needed hardware in the room | 2 | Yes |
| Three people staying behind after a meeting | 2 | No |
Twelve of the thirty-one were scheduled; nineteen were not. The scheduled ones were concentrated in four days. The unscheduled ones were spread across eleven, and every one of those eleven days had at least two colleagues present.
The objection worth taking seriously
Somebody will say that this undercounts, because the value of being in a building is not in hours you can point to. Context accumulates. Relationships formed in unremarkable hours pay out later, in ways no hour-by-hour record would catch.
That is probably true and it is not an answer to the count, for two reasons.
The accumulation still requires the other person to be there. Whatever is being deposited over time is deposited during overlap, and overlap is the thing the record shows was scarce — a median of three of nine colleagues, zero on nine days.
And the argument is unfalsifiable as usually stated. If the benefit is real but unmeasurable, no evidence can bear on how many days are needed, which means the number is being set by assertion. The count does not refute the accumulation argument; it asks it to specify a mechanism, and every specified mechanism turns out to need the same thing, which is particular people on the same day.